How Maggie Nelson Made It Work

Speaking of keeping your day job, The Rumpus has a new podcast called Make/Work, hosted by Scott Pinkmountain (now THAT is a good last name):

Every creative laborer has a different story to tell about how they negotiate their relationship between their creative work and their paycheck and how they balance their lives to sustain their creative practice. In Make/Work, Scott will speak with emerging and established artists working in a wide range of creative mediums about how they survive, how they make a living, and how they maintain their work over the long term.

Episode One is up now, and I am listening to it in the next tab over. The guest is Maggie Nelson, a writer who gives me hearts in the eyes (read Bluets!). They podcasted it in her Tuff Shed, the place she hides in to write. She is currently answering a question that was something like, “When you realized you were trying to do something [poetry] that there was no market for, what was your plan?” (She had a job at a French bakery for $6.25/hour, and her Manhattan rent — on Orchard St. — was $370/month, and she took a writing workshop out of Eileen Myles’ apartment for $10/class.)

Photo: CarbonNYC

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