magic and money
Last night, we got out to see Little Women, a production from Northlight Theater, which blended the subject matter of the novel expertly with details from Alcott's own life from which it was inspired. While I had warned J that the material is sad, I was laughing all the way home remembering the meme that goes around ever so often about that the saddest part of the novel is LMA getiing paid $100 for a story, which would have been a fortune at the time, but a pay rate far more generous than what writers get today in most cases (or at least poets.) That she would have been able to support herself and sisters for quite a while on that single check. The play mixed Alcott's actual sisters and their fictional counterparts rather excellently, with parts of the novel's passages incorporating seamlessly into the dialogue and an absence of the fourth wall from the very beginning.
Sometimes I feel like being a writer makes you a little jaded. That wonder and magic Jo March/LMA felt about using her creativity to make a living--especially as a woman who was expected to marry well and shut the hell up. It seems like something that would be more possible in the modern age, more accessible, but always feels far less so when most writers, even doing their best work, are not able to sipport themselves on it or with it. Or at least not creative writing, though you can, thankfully, translate those skills to other kinds of writing. I forget to remember how fortunate those circumstances are, at least for me now. Even though I get mired in research and drafting and word counts, I still get to use words to pay the rent, after so long--decades--of that not being the case. When checks for poetry (and there are not really many of those given that most of my journal publications these days are of the smaller indie zine variety that have no/limited budgets.) I do make some money selling copies of my books and physical zines--more than ever did with traditional royalties as a self-publisher--but in the grand scheme of things, its still pretty small an income string. (and I make far more selling journals and paper goods than poetry collections overall over the years.)
Still, being a writer, especially a writer who makes little money from creative output, seems like it may be one of the only ways to live as a writer---unless, of course, your fortunate to have been one of the very few exceptions to the rule. I see a little more success among writers I follow on YT and social media who write genre fiction that has a built in audience who buy books as soon as they are out, but for the rest of us, that's not the reality. Especially for poets, which may lead one, or at least occasionally leads me to question, Why set your sights on a path that offers so little in terms of rewards? Why beg and grovel for crumbs in a world in which the stakes are so very low and the great majority of people rarely read at all--let alone read poetry? I don't have an answer, only a compulsion it seems to keep doing it.
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