I was reading a personal essay by a writer with her debut about to drop. She’d always dreamed of a purely literary life as a college professor, perhaps, who wrote in the evenings and weekends, during the breaks between terms. It was the lifestyle she thought she wanted. Instead, she had worked during recent years in a grocery store. She didn’t mind the work and interacted daily with dozens of other people. When she clocked out of work, she moved straight on to the writing and finished her memoir.

She still envied friends and fellow MFA graduates with work teaching at universities and colleges. Then she noted that they were badly paid, poorly treated, worked for hours past their “workday” and often between jobs. They struggled to find time and energy to write.

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