This is a thought-provoking article about the role of class in the writing and publishing world.

I come from a family which was working class further back (my father’s father drove a train; my mother’s father ran a bus company, but came from a long line of tradesmen). My parents, though, were both schoolteachers, and by the time I was born had achieved some degree of middle-class economic stability, in part because my father, as an ex-serviceman, had received subsidised university education and a cheap house loan. He also wrote (nonfiction) books in his spare time, and by my mid-teens was making good money from them.

My parents supported me through university, and when I got an in-house job with a publisher, it was with the publisher who put out my father’s books (I’d previously been freelance, which I could sustain because I was still living with my parents). One of my earlier freelance jobs I got in part because the editor concerned was married to one of my former professors. Personal connection plays a big role in the publishing industry, and if I’d been, say, a Samoan kid from South Auckland whose parents worked in a factory, my opportunities would have been a lot less. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done (though I never saw it done, so maybe it couldn’t); it would, at the least, have been a lot harder.

Even today, I’m able to take one day off every two weeks to write, sacrificing 10% of my income, because I’m in a job that pays enough for me to do that (and where my employer allows me to do it). If I was struggling to put food on the table, and having to write late at night or on the weekends while exhausted from a tough week of work, I wouldn’t be anything like as productive as I am.

Originally shared by Rick Wayne (Author)

Lisa Cohen Mike Reeves-McMillan you guys might find this opinion piece interesting re: the article you shared earlier. An excerpt:

“Last year, I went to a writing conference in Boston. One of the first panel discussions was about how a writer claims authority, how it is that a writer asserts that he or she possesses the expertise to write about a topic, and how concomitantly the editor reading through the submission slush pile can determine whether the writer is someone who can claim authority as a writer.

One of the panelists, an editor, offered that the first thing he looked for when skimming through the cover letter was whether the writer possessed an MFA. He did this, he hastened to qualify, not because it guaranteed that the submitter would be a better writer, but because taking a year or two off out of one’s life to dedicate oneself to writing proved that one was serious as a writer. I came off my chair in anger—how could he assert such a thing? My friend pulled me back down, but I continued to fume. Who has more dedication: the person who has the financial wherewithal to spend time in a writing program, or the writer who writes despite having to work full-time, early in the morning, with absolutely no one but themselves for motivation? As another panel member offered their method for detecting “dedication,” I flashed back to sitting with Fred Busch as he recounted stories from his early days of working all day and spending time with his wife and son in the early evening and then taking the typewriter into the bathroom, so as not to wake his sleeping family, and writing as much as he could before fatigue demanded he go to bed. How much more dedication did one need to prove beyond that? But that’s not exactly something you can put on a resume. That panelist’s misguided assumption, that an MFA necessarily connotes greater dedication to writing, reveals an all too common blindness to the easy privilege of those with financial security.”