day jobs
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Art Doesn’t Pay
The arts don’t pay very well, and working as a professional in a creative field like writing, music, or film has grown more precarious. High student debt doesn’t help, but it might explain why almost a quarter of arts graduates…
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From Applebee’s to Published Author
Scott Cheshire explains that he started flirting with the woman who became his wife by telling her he had a novel coming out. Twelve years later, it did. Today, he is a published novelist with a graduate degree, but back…
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A Hard Job to Imagine
It’s sometimes hard to imagine the life of the road-tarer or the elephant waste remover. Here’s to an unsung hero the world wouldn’t be the same without. Point is, no matter how long I been doing this or how I…
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The House Sitter
If a novel depicted house sitters’ lives, its scenes would depict the complex relationship between the homeowner and sitter, the way trust is built between strangers in such an intimate setting as a home: how house keys are swapped, free food…
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Feel Validated, Artists
The biggest myth we are fed as artists is that we need to sustain ourselves solely on our art. This is ridiculous. Every artist has at some point in time had some other job. Some of them kept these jobs…
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Money Problems
Reading, writing and thinking are all tasks that are nearly impossible to cultivate while performing manual labor. As Plato first noted, when discussing education, “sleep and exercise are unpropitious to learning,” and therefore students should avoid intense exercise as they…
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Writing When Your Day Job Is Also Writing
The Believer‘s blog has a really splendid interview with writer, editor, and UN employee Summer Brennan. Brennan talks to Nicolle Elizabeth about what it’s like to write non-creatively for a living, and then come home to write some more but on…
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Make/Work Episode 4: Jacopo Andreini
In Episode 4 of Make/Work, host Scott Pinkmountain talks with Italian musician Jacopo Andreini.
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Do You Really Want to “Do What You Love”?
Superficially, [“do what you love”] is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who…
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The Rumpus Interview with Julian McDonnell
Julian McDonnell discusses selling baby kites, and how he parlayed it into a documentary chronicling the legal tribulations of roving peddlers like himself.
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Writing, Getting Fired and Resume-Building
“I would be lying of course if I didn’t admit I fell harder than I initially may have thought. The days and weeks following my firing were the first time I admitted to myself that instead of building a Blakeian…