The Billfold
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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 Nogales for Guernica. Here at The Rumpus, Matthew Clair writes…
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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 The Billfold, Williams walks us through her one step forward, two…
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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 no one to hold you accountable, these promises often go…
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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 writing a hobby, Lincoln Michel finds a middle ground between…
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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: I can’t imagine not being a writer. Maybe this seems…
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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. To get started, she spent $12,000 on a publicist, tour…
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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 parents. Austen didn’t start out rich and she never got…
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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 most of my life I’ve been doing things without worrying…
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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 them). The post includes useful tips on how to pitch,…
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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 our lives at the blackboard, is a doctoral degree worth…
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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 types of paid assignments and how her personal writing projects…