Hard Truths for Poor Artists, Part 4: We Are The Spark

The magic of affinity in arts careers and pitfalls of the MFA for poor artists

Hello again, subscribers. A warm welcome to anyone just dropping in for this post.

We’ve arrived at Part 4 of my Hard Truths for Poor Artists series. To recap: In last summer’s online response to novelist Molly McGhee’s poverty tweets, I saw some questionable cultural assumptions about money for poor artists. I was inspired to write on the topic. Parts 1, 2, and 3 are foundational, including my working definition of poor, a discussion of generational wealth, the realities of student loans, and much more. Sharing my experiences with money and class in the arts may be helpful to some younger artists.

Again, I don’t call myself an artist in real life. I call myself a writer. I use artist here to give the series broader relevance.

Narrowing opportunities in the arts are turning more of us into poor artists. It’s good humanity to stay empathetic for friends and colleagues who’ve lost work and to register the profound cultural loss of shuttered publications, institutions, and chances. It’s good practice to stay optimistic about our prospects, grateful for any opportunities, and mindful of reasons to keep working beyond remuneration. I try to sustain a balance. Every day.

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We are the spark: How a lower socioeconomic status can help us in the arts—yes, help

On Christmas Day 1998, I took a visiting friend out to hear trombonist Ray Anderson’s group at Sweet Basil. Between sets, we talked with Ray and the band about their music and lives.

“You’re in your element here,” my friend said. “And you write well. Can you be someone who writes about music for a profession? Is that something people do?”

I heard a Tibetan gong. The sound of fate. This:

Seriously though, the only other time I heard this sound was when I saw my husband for the first time.

I was on what was supposed to be a year’s leave from my Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies PhD program, where I’d been on fellowship and had a teaching assistantship. In New York, I was working for a literary arts nonprofit as dissertation research. My other research interest, jazz elements in fiction, combined my true passions. I felt most like myself when I was reading or listening to live improvised music.

The morning after the Sweet Basil epiphany, I searched the web for “jazz” and “writing,” which turned up the Jazz Journalists Association website and a contact for its president, Howard Mandel. I emailed Howard. He told me to come on over to his office with some music writing. Howard is a mensch who got me my first assignment in Rhythm magazine in exchange for organizing CDs in his messy office.

Thus began the magical mystery tour of my writing career. It was a good time to start a career. All writers found more paying work back then. I had critical and literary skills from college and grad school. I worked long hours as a writer. But I’ll risk coming off as frivolous here to talk about the magical power of pursuing interests by affinity and inspiration. A lack of connections and acculturation to artistic milieux can give artists from lower socioeconomic backgrounds a freedom of necessity, heightening the power of affinity for us. We improvise our careers on inspiration because we have to.

Even a brief Regulars column was fun to write for the Voice community. I only wrote it because I felt a true affinity for choro music.

I loved reading the Village Voice. Many writers assumed they’d have to be first in the line of columnist succession to get into the Voice. Since I didn’t have any connections, I snail-mailed physical clips to a Voice editor with a cover letter suggesting what I could contribute to the alt-weekly. It worked.

Operating on affinity applied to day gigs, too. In the internet gold rush of the late 90s, I met some startup folks at a short story reading. They invited me to write website copy, but since I wasn’t bad at math, I did web programming for better money while I established myself as a writer.

Affinity guided me to most writing projects. For example, when I joined a choir whose membership included many former Bell Labs scientists, talking with them about the labs’ working culture inspired me to do a piece on creativity in science. Even just sharing a new enthusiasm with someone I met at a record release party could lead to an overseas assignment.

For me, building a career on genuine interests meant avoiding any purely careerist moves. When NPR’s Felix Contreras called with an invitation to contribute to his new program, I told him no thank you, I wasn’t a radio person. Because I wasn’t. Felix was warm, funny, and persistent. I gave it a try. Writing on-air pieces required a strong voice and storytelling, which I loved. I wouldn’t have done NPR for vanity alone. But once I discovered an affinity for it, I was all in.

I’m not offering a blueprint for building magic in a career. I’m only telling you what once worked for me and has worked for other poor artists.

When I started working on my first book, colleagues told me I’d probably attract only small press interest. That sounded great to me, but I was curious: What did it take to get one of the major publishers interested in a book? I took months to read books and surmised that a narrative nonfiction approach could make all the difference. So I wrote my first book proposal as a character-driven story with scene-setting, conflicts, deeper themes, and a broad narrative arc. Literary nonfiction worked.

I started teaching when someone in a diner overheard me talking about what I’d learned from writing my first book and suggested that I could work at their university. After teaching a couple of nonfiction classes for a month or two, I asked my department head why I couldn’t also advise the student newspaper and become full-time with benefits. He couldn’t see why not.

Photo: Bryan Thomas

Not knowing procedures or etiquette can facilitate career breakthroughs. Sometimes we do better when we don’t know better. Youth and inexperience matter to this formula, of course. But with no access or guidance, poor artists of any age are less likely to get hung up in the traffic jams of convention or permission. Putting energy and effort toward genuine interests can move our careers through an open field of possibility and validate our work at nearly every turn. Sometimes there’s no distinction between the magical and practical value of affinity.

It wasn’t all magic, of course. I made more mistakes than I can remember. I have stories of stolen pitches and opportunities. I never got the book deadline extensions that other writers are often granted, so I have never had the time to fulfill my creative vision for a book. Still, for the first dozen years of my career, I had too much momentum to feel discouraged by any disappointments or setbacks. Enthusiasm for one completed project carried into the next.

This wasn’t social climbing. This was following a law of affinity. I went to the monthly reading series at Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook because I loved the watery afternoon light, the free coffee and Italian pastries from Court Street, and hearing words read aloud in that transporting space. At Sunny’s, I’d converse with a stranger about everything from the sublime to the ridiculous only to later see an author photo and realize I’d been talking to some literary luminary.

“Remember, we are the music,” a famous and probably drunk writer once said to me at the close of one such conversation. “We are the spark!”

It was too much, this remark. It also happens to be true.

Master of Your Arts Domain

Have I ever known an MFA grad who wasn’t a little ambivalent about their program experience? When you pack striving artists into the pressure chamber of a workshop setting for craft development, professionalization, and aesthetic debate, mixed results and feelings are almost guaranteed.

Many commenters lambasted Molly McGhee for getting an expensive MFA. The pitfalls of MFA programs have been widely discussed. Still, the MFA for poor artists deserves special attention. Not only because of the student loan debt that can straiten an artists’ circumstances for the rest of their lives. Even when an MFA is funded, a program’s luxury beliefs may not make it the best choice for poor artists.

First, why did I get an MFA when I was already publishing books and had a full-time college teaching job? Partly because I assumed I’d get a better teaching job with an MFA. Mostly because I wanted the experience of working closely with the best writers around. My favorite nonfiction writers taught at Bennington, that storied Vermont college known for educating free-spirited artists, usually of some privilege. The Bennington MFA’s low-residency format helped. We had two 10-day residencies a year and otherwise exchanged writing packets with professors remotely, which allowed me to travel and report a contracted nonfiction book while I was in the program.

Bennington gave me experiences I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. Some artists are afraid an MFA program will somehow destroy the secret and defiant impulses that led them to art in the first place. Bennington not only affirmed those impulses but connected me with other people who had them, too. Our residencies were worlds apart where it was customary to take writing as seriously as our lives.

Before I discuss MFA programs for poor artists, let me address some common MFA complaints.

Yes, my MFA program had some vicious workshops. Student-on-student assaults were sometimes perpetrated with the complicity of a professor under some faulty notion of rigor. Cruelty loses perspective so it doesn’t offer true rigor. Having taught college writing myself, I was surprised that MFA students were allowed and even encouraged to target, denounce, and berate classmates. Still, these bad actors at Bennington were few, overwhelmed by students and professors who offered constructive criticism in a positive spirit.

Yes, my MFA program had a culture of professors sleeping with students. For me, the power dynamics of professor-student relationships made these romances not only wrong but unappealing. MFA programs do, however, enroll older students, some of whom may be the same age as professors, mature enough to be philosophical about the risks of romance and decide for themselves. In some cases, a professor did advance the career of a student hookup, so the arrangement was transactional, at least. These entanglements also did real damage to some students.

Yes, my MFA program had nepotism. I only minded one of nepotism’s side effects: fear and loathing of people without connections. One child-of-a-famous-writer professor, who was highly accomplished in her own right, often harassed students from working-class backgrounds. Those anxieties around being self-made that I discussed in Hard Truths Part 1? So real. Her needling personality and extraliterary agendas in workshop made me grateful that I wasn’t hounded by the legacy of a famous parent myself. The trouble was, as a poor artist, I had no skills for dealing with her. “She hates you!” a Bennington friend once told me. “Probably her iconic parent and your self-made thing, right? I had an aunt like her so I knew to flatter and otherwise steer clear.” None of my aunts in rural Kansas had been anything like this professor. Knowing how to handle difficult artist personalities can be a benefit of a middle-to-upper-class background.

Still, this professor’s animosity was no match for the goodwill of the program’s other professors, who generally were smart, witty, devoted, and fair. In most workshops, we simply got down to the business of writing. If I flip through my emotional snapshots of Bennington, I see hilarity, true love of writing, and pride in watching friends become better writers. I thrived on the writing work there.

What got to me at Bennington was something else.

MFA programs and luxury beliefs

At my first residency, I mentioned writing income to a professor.

“We try not to think about that here,” he said, as if the word money were too vulgar or holy to be spoken. As much as I loved the program’s focus on art for art’s sake, this professor’s prohibition on not only money talk but also money thoughts was telling. Literary outcomes only, you crass income-oriented commoner.

I see Rob Henderson’s idea of “luxury beliefs” in many MFA programs. A luxury belief, as Henderson defines it, confers status on people of privilege while inflicting costs on the lower classes. One MFA writing program luxury belief is that it’s more respectable to publish once a year in a literary journal—say, the Virginia Quarterly Review—than to contribute regularly to, say, NPR. This luxury belief confers status on writers who don’t need to earn money from their writing while penalizing those of us who do.

Many luxury beliefs drive book publishing, which features an elaborately coded system of rank. “It’s not just about being published but being published well,” a visiting literary agent once told a Bennington friend, referring, presumably, to landing at FSG instead of a déclassé imprint or being invited to a literary debutante ball instead of hustling to host one’s own book party.

I didn’t embrace my MFA program’s luxury beliefs. I did, however, cope with them by apologizing for my book deals, indulging the notion that I was tainted as a commercial writer (this was ironic since literary nonfiction craft got me a book deal in the first place, and because getting any book deal at all was the primary goal of many MFA students). At Bennington, I grew some shame around my ability to navigate the marketplace, a skill that had been born of necessity. I was caught in the fundamental incompatibility between the esoteric publication celebrated by MFA culture and the general audience publication that paid me a living wage (Bennington’s MFA program seems to be less dismissive toward mainstream publication these days).

Any MFA program reorganizes the artistic mind, shifting aesthetics and priorities. This can be as innocuous as a student painting, writing, or playing music in the style of a favorite professor for a few months before realizing the style doesn’t suit them. If an artist is already working, teaching, and otherwise moving ahead with some success, an MFA may only interrupt their momentum. It can do much worse. Poor artists who earn part or all of our living with art can’t afford to entertain values that alienate us from the marketplace. My MFA program didn’t reorient me beyond all hope, but the conviction with which I’d written and pursued a career before Bennington would never quite return. Disillusionment comes for many MFA students. For poor artists, though, losing inspiration or drive can threaten our economic well-being. That’s a serious thing.

All Good Things

Still, I finished my MFA in 2010 with some fantastic experiences and friends. I still felt positive about my career.

Please forgive me, but for the hard luck story or cautionary tale coming in Part 5, it’s important to list some career milestones. At 37, I’d published books both in my name and as a ghostwriter with the major New York houses, had a solid history of writing for magazines and newspapers, had a strong working relationship with NPR, had flourished in a full-time job teaching college writing, had earned an MFA from a top nonfiction program, and had gotten recommendations from some of the veritable godparents of nonfiction. I had an invitation to teach at a Manhattan university.

Instead, I left the New York area for good, settling down with my now-husband in Colorado. He’d been there since the mid-90s when he moved from DC for a symphony position. It wasn’t that I believed if I’d made it in New York, I could make it anywhere. I thought I could make it in Colorado because I’d grown up in Kansas, just the next state over. I wasn’t some East Coast snob but an around-the-way girl.

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Up next in Part 5: A discussion of poor artists moving to smaller, more affordable non-coastal cities.

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