Tools of the trade.
This week, a number of writers published essays about where their money comes from. This is a really important dialogue. I’ve attended many literary conferences where successful authors sat on one side of the table and us unwashed masses sat on the other, gripping ballpoint pens and dog-eared manuscripts, desperate to know how these famous novelists transmute prose into cash. It’s a task that can seem as impossible as spinning straw into gold.
“Well, I ate a lot of ramen noodles,” one author said, recounting his days slumming it in Manhattan shortly after graduating with a Princeton degree.
OK. Obviously something is missing here.
I think it’s important to talk about class, wealth and income and how these things influence creative output. So in the spirit of continuing the conversation, I’m answering the question of Where My Money Comes From. Here we go…
Ages 18-19: I attend Tulane University majoring in English. A third of my $30,000 tuition is covered by a need-based scholarship. A third is paid by my parents. I pay the last third with student loans and work as a creepy body piercer’s assistant/apprentice during the semester and a country club waitress in the summers before and after that year.
Ages 19-21: My parents can’t afford their third of the Tulane tuition. I transfer to LSU. My parents pay my in-state tuition and living expenses. I live with my grandmother for the bulk of the time, in dorms for one semester and an apartment for another, all funded by my parents. I work full- or part-time for the Marriott hotel, The Civil War Book Review, a rave promoter and a professor.
Age 22-25: I’m off the parental gravy train. I enroll at the University of New Orleans to get an MFA in creative writing. My tuition is waived and I receive a $6,000 yearly stipend in exchange for teaching. I live with my grandmother in Lakeview for most of the time; the rest of the time I live in a tiny Gentilly studio apartment where rent is $390 a month and includes utilities. I work part-time jobs, including at the Times-Picayune‘s packaging center and Pizza Hut. I inherit about $20,000 from my grandmother. I pay off my student loans, buy a Clavinova keyboard and put the rest into a mutual fund, where it grows into a down payment for my house.
Age 25-28: I’m accepted into LSU’s Comparative Literature PhD program. I don’t have funding my first year, so my parents pay my tuition and I teach two sections at Baton Rouge Community College, where I’m paid $1,800 a class. My rent is only $200, again, thanks to my parents, who give me discounted rent in an apartment they’ve procured for my sister. My parents pay for my health insurance. For my second and third year, I get a teaching assistantship that pays $11,000 per year, and I move into graduate student housing, where my rent is $250 a month and includes utilities. I work part-time at a coffee shop.
Ages 28-29: I drop out of the PhD program and move into a Marigny house with four roommates. My rent is $375. I work a ton of odd jobs, intern at Gambit, then get freelance assignments from Gambit (15 cents per word), teach two sections at Delgado Community College ($1,800 each) in the fall, and win the lottery by scoring a full-time editor position at Gambit.
Ages 29-present: I’m employed full-time at Gambit and write my debut novel during downtime. After five years as an editor, my salary is $40,518. I also earn about $8,000 annually from freelance gigs. And I made $6,000 last year by AirBnbing my house.
Looking over my history, I see my many advantages. The greatest advantage was a family who paid for me to get a college degree from a public university. I was also lucky to get funding from universities for my graduate degree. I won the intern lottery when I got this full-time position at Gambit. I’m sure not smarter or more talented than anyone else who interns here. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I am able-bodied, white, heterosexual and cisgender, with all the privileges these statuses confer. I am unmarried and have no children. Not having a family to support made it easy for me to prioritize my education and choose low-paying, flexible jobs (before I came to Gambit, the most I made was $16,000 a year) for most of my twenties. I was able to trade money for time, during which I refined my craft. I am grateful now to make a good living as a writer. Developing the skill set to do that took more than a decade of family support, trade-offs and dumb luck.
To quote the Salon piece: “OK, there’s mine. Now show me yours.”
Ready to show you mine!
2003-2005: Family is dead (they died in 2002), so I’m able to get enough funding through grants and loans to pay for college and housing at Dillard University. Since I have no family and no car, working is a struggle. I learn how to get loans so I can get refund checks so I can afford to wash clothes and such.
August 29, 2005-Dec 2005: Katrina. Borderline depression. I enroll at Southern in Baton Rouge but drop all my classes. I just need a place to live. Again, not having a car or family is a problem.
Jan. 2006-Jan. 2007: At Dillard again! YAY! During the semester we are at the Hilton, I work as a waitress at Kabby’s. But the house my family left to me is all Katrina-ed, and old people I know keep saying that Ray Nagin will come and knock it down. So I quit school to get a job at the GAP and take care of the house.
2007-2009: I fix the house (FEMA, Road Home) and work odd jobs (GAP, Chef Austin’s Creole Kitchen, Build-a-Bear) but can never really make ends meet. I steal electricity, and one day it gets cut off. I live with a friend in her free apartment. I apply for different programs to help, but I don’t have kids so I can never get help. I go back to school, but drop out again after the electricity gets cut off.
2010: I realize I need to get into magazine writing because I spend ALL my money on magazines and can totally write for them. I see “Julie & Julia” and start a blog. I find a crackhead I know to rig up my stolen electricity again. Cinco de Mayo, I start dating a friend from high school, Grant. We start going steady soon after.
2011: I work at Lush, then at Grant’s dad’s office. Want to apply for the CUE internship. Go out and take pictures and make myself a portfolio of articles using GIMP and Scribd. (No one hires folks with no experience AND no degree, so I gotta do it myself.) I go to apply, but the ad is gone! I call, and yep. She’s filling out paperwork. I cry. That was my LAST HOPE. They NEVER hire.
Get my gallbladder removed, get engaged, try going back to school (UNO for general studies) but fail. See CUE’s hiring. Yay! I already have everything ready from last time, so BAM! I apply via email and get a response quickly! This Missy Wilkinson person seems nice! She wants me to send an actual prose-y writing sample, so I do and she likes it! Eventually, I’m hired as her CUEtie and we become friends! Thank God for Grant being able to make enough money for me to have an unpaid internship.
2012: WHOA! Do a great job at Gambit/CUE, get ALL the freelance. Learn sooooo much. Start Public Transit Tuesdays, get poached by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Get married. Make a LOT of money. Spend most of it on booze and food. Haha.
2013: Leave NOLA.com, get a call that a Gambit position is open. Not a position I want, but INSURANCE and an OFFICE. Do good work. Get pregnant.
2014: Leave Gambit, have a baby, write and crowd fund a kid’s book. Get a deal to write another book with a university press. Decide to stay home with the baby because it makes sense financially.
You fucking amaze me, Megan.
And OMG OMG that picture is fab. You should try to sell it on a stock site!
Awesome! I didn’t know you could do that!
Too funny you should post this today – I haven’t heard about all of the income transparency posts among writers (mainly because that’s not a community I follow closely) but I’ve actually been working on a new blog post the last day or two on a monthly online income report. I’ve followed a lot of these income reports posted by various bloggers / affiliate marketers, etc, over the years but I have always been too lazy / nervous to post my own. I will asap though!
I think its good to be transparent about this sort of stuff because it can be so hard to figure out how A connects to B connects to C otherwise.
Totally agree. I’m following your blog postings about your affiliate links with a great deal of interest. I love when bloggers track their income and are very specific about how they monetize blogs, etc. I think it’s important to talk about money candidly now, when wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few. Hopefully, we can learn from each other and redistribute the wealth using our combined knowledge.
YESSS – I love that idea about collectively redistributing wealth through co-education!!
This post took FOREVER, but it’s up now:
http://www.missmalaprop.com/2015/01/monthly-online-income-report-december-2014/
Let me know if you think there’s anything I missed / could have explained better / want to know!
I’m terribly surprised by how many friends I have (IRL) who are NOT paying back college loans. They don’t seem to realize that their lives are not normal. Because these people are often work friends, I have an idea of how much money they make. So when I say things like, “Hey, how about we NOT go to a restaurant that’s $25 a plate,” I feel like a cheap jerk-ass. It makes me a jealous, angry human. I’ll be paying back my loans until I’m 50. Of course, the immediate response is that I didn’t have to take out loans/go to school, but then what is a person to do? There were no apprenticeships or post-high school jobs that I could live on. I’m proud of you, Missy, for acknowledging the way your parents helped with tuition, your scholarships, and even your inheritance. I’m proud that we’re discussing money right now. It’s taboo for reasons that seem deleterious.
Dude, beyond deleterious to plain-old fucked up! Yeah, I have kick-ass parents who gave me a college education! And I have friends with parents who gave them Ivy League educations! And friends whose parents didn’t give them shit or, like Megan’s, are dead or otherwise not in the picture. Why is it not OK to talk about class and money? The breaks that we got that we DID NOT EARN? I too am shocked by the # of people who think it’s not a huge deal to carry $75k, $100K and more of student loan debt. I am like, GET THIS MONKEY OFF MY BACK NOW!!!! with any kind of debt.
also, thank you! It makes me feel good to hear that you’re proud of me. That sounds kind of silly, but I really mean it.