This Week in Essays
Men will not protect you anymore. At Jezebel, Madeleine Davies advises that “now is a time for fury and force.” Mark Binelli looks into life on the border town of…
Posts by tag
The Billfold
14 posts
Publishing When Life Comes at You Fast
Meryl Williams was going to publish her roller derby memoir in 2016. Then she moved. Then she decided to move again. Some other things happened too. In a new essay for…
What It Means to Write at a Coffee Shop
When you’re a freelance writer — or any type of freelancer — you make yourself a lot of promises, mostly about getting out of the house and about wearing real, non-pajama clothing. But with…
Writing = Work = Job
Settling the debate about whether “writer” is job that arose with Merritt Tierce’s Marie Claire essay about going broke post-debut novel, and a response piece by Ester Bloom at The Billfold calling…
The Write Life
At The Billfold, Christine Sneed gets real about the long, hard path to finding success writing books—even after being published—and why she wouldn’t have chosen a different career path regardless:…
Paying for a Book Tour
Katey Schultz published her debut collection of stories, Flashes of War, through a university press. Lacking the support of a major publishing house meant Schultz ended up self-financing her book tour.…
Jane Austen Would Be Eating Top Ramen Too
With writers, it’s usually neither rags to riches nor riches to rags. Marx had Engels, Austen had her family. Read this and rest assured: some cool people lived with their…
Fate, Chance, and Student Loans
Does everything happen for a reason? That’s the question writer Laura Leigh Abby had to ask herself after a car accident allowed her to graduate with an MFA degree loan-free: For…
Pitching from A to Z
The second installment of Nicole Dieker’s series on life as a full-time freelance writer is up at The Billfold, and this time she’s talking about pitching essays (and getting paid for…
What’s the Point of a Ph.D.?
For those of us who have our hearts set on becoming professors, a Ph.D. is a necessary step toward landing a coveted tenure-track position. But if we aren’t planning to spend…
Dispatches from a Real-Life, Full-Time Freelance Writer
Over at The Billfold, writer Nicole Dieker kicks off a new series on all aspects of life as a full-time freelancer. In her first installment, she covers the four different…