Writers and debt

A reader (my faithful reader) sent me a link to this post on The Atlantic's website. I copied the salient points here.

Debt: A Writer's Life
15 May 2009 11:04 am

This is the bravest thing I've read for a long, long time. For a reporter--an economic reporter--to admit that he's been in the hell of excess debt and unpaid bills that he reports on is a major statement in middle class America. There was a time when America tolerated a certain amount of this in its writers--one reads nearly approvingly of the repeated flirtations with bankruptcy undertaken by the likes of Dorothy Parker or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But these days, their profligacy, like their alcoholism, is no longer admired, or even tolerated, in the editorial world.

Yet writers are, as a class, extraordinarily at risk. They spend their twenties, and often their thirties, living paycheck to paycheck. They are extremely well educated, and all that education is not only expensive, but builds expensive habits. You end up with a lot of friends who make much more money than you--who don't even realize that a dinner with $10 entrees and a bottle of wine is an expensive treat, not a cheap outing to catch up on old times. Our business is in crisis, and we lose jobs often. When we do, it's catastrophic ...

And so the debts creep up, one happy hour or Colorado backpacking adventure at a time. They are confessed in moments of panic: the 420 credit score that requires a cosigner on a new lease, the $10,000 in credit card debt, the car loan that can't be paid off nor recouped in a sale of the sadly depreciated vehicle, the deliberately bounced checks and collection calls ...

Until we're comfortable with talking publicly about the fact that we don't make much money and likely never will, that our lives are risky, and that this has obvious impacts on our ability to consume on the level of our educational peers, writers will keep getting into trouble. Bravo to Andrews for leaning into the strike zone and taking one for the team.

I don't think I lead the life of a profligate - I rarely drink alcohol, I don't take drugs - but I do shop at Tendercrop Farm! I used to go to England every year and Barbados every so often.

Right now I can't imagine either of those trips happening again, ever.

I have been back and forth for a week with one of the "clients" for which I write over invoices submitted four weeks ago and which remain unpaid.

Anyway ... earlier I was talking to my friend Elizabeth, as we went to buy replacement lettuce plants for our garden plot, and we were wondering why writers are so undervalued.

So are teachers, but today we weren't talking about teachers.

There would be hardly a drop of knowledge about anything if not for writers. There wouldn't even be a Bible without some one or some people who wrote it all down.

So I just don't get it.