Here we are again...

A few notes on my career, this industry, survival

I started this newsletter back when the headlines were about how writers were turning to newsletters as a way to survive in an industry that, everyday, seemed to be drying up. Fewer and fewer staff writing jobs available, smaller and smaller freelance budgets, and what was on offer was always labor intensive and low-paying—a combination that breeds exhaustion and desperation.

Things haven’t changed much; if anything they’ve gotten worse, as the AI “revolution” threatens to make the work of writers even less profitable—we will never go away, but if we cost more than what an AI engine can produce, the writing is on the wall (truly, the only space we will have left for writing is on the walls). And I guess that’s why I’m back here, with things getting worse. One reason at least. I tired out the first go around, finding it hard to do all that needed to be done to maintain something like this, to build an audience, to build a paying audience, to produce enough “content” to satisfy that paying audience and make them feel like they’re getting their money’s worth every month, while also doing all the promotion, not just of the writing but of myself; we live in the personal brand era, it’s not something any of us can escape.

And so, like many, many others who jumped on this trend when we thought there was a possibility it could end up being lucrative (or at the very least financially sustainable), I let it fade, with vague ideas that I would one day return, secretly hoping that I wouldn’t have to.

Only now, my primary source of income is coming to an end. For the past five years I’ve taught at Hunter College in the Creative Nonfiction MFA program. They’ve chosen not to renew my contract for the fall. I’m told it isn’t about me, per se, that it has to do with a restructuring of the program and they way its funded and something something something. What I know is that I won’t have that income any longer. I’m back to feeling exhausted and desperate.

Four years or so ago, that led me here, with the idea that I would create a space that would indulge my interests—literature and cigars, whiskey and film, style and food and art and and and… I wanted to feel free from the constraints I’d started to feel in my career. I built a name, a personal brand era if you’ll allow, around writing about racism and the attendant forms of oppression that circle it. I was burned out on that, but not just the work of it, the perception that had become of me that that was all I could do, all I was worth. That the extent my intellectual and literary capabilities was saying, over and over, “racism is bad.”

The thing is: had I carried that over to this newsletter, I might have found a more ready, willing, accepting audience. People may have signed up in greater numbers on the promise that I would deliver to them the things they had become accustomed, expecting, of me. And I would have died a little inside every day.

Here I am again—I’m going to give this another try, but in another way. I’m not giving myself completely over to the chronicling of how racism in America is bad. Honestly, if you need me, or anyone else, to tell you that at this point, you’re never going to get it. I’m going to indulge my interests, and I’m going to talk about things that are in the news; I’m going to write longer essays, but also share shorter thoughts; I’m going to write personal things, and I’ll write things that I observe; in short, I’m going to make this representative of the fullness of who I am, in hopes there is enough of an audience that I can keep it going.

Which is to say: I hope you’ll choose to support it financially. Yeah, I’m in a place where I need it, so it may sound as if I’m begging. Ain’t too proud, and all that. My career hasn’t ended up where I thought it would at different points, but what this period has taught me is great humility. I need your help. I will say it without reservation.

But I promise to do my best to make it worth your while. Let’s spend some time together.