ACADEMIAHow to Get Paid
Writer
THE PRACTICAL111 POETS & WRITERS^I
N THE mid-1990s, poet A. Van Jordan was pushing
thirty and earning a solid, if not always scintillating,
living by covering environmental issues for the Bu-
reau of Nat iona l A f f a i r s (BNA) in Washington, D.C.
In his five years there, Jordan mostly wrote about industrial
companies and their compliance with the 1990 Clean Air
Act Amendments, but because so few companies actually
complied, the stories he wrote rarely varied.
“It felt like Groundhog Day because I wrote the same
story over and over again, simply changing the name of
the company,” he says.
Hungry for a change, Jordan entered the low-residency
MFA program at Warren Wilson College. A year later,
still in the program, he left the news agency and eked out
a living in a variety of freelance jobs as he wrote the poems
that would make up his first collection, Rise.
After he received his MFA in 1998, Jordan taught com-
position at a community college in suburban Maryland,
where he carried a crushing five-course teaching load. His
book, published in 2001 by Tia Chucha Press, helped win
him his first full-time job teaching creative writing at the
University of North Carolina in Greensboro. A few years
after that, he moved to the MFA program at the University
of Texas in Austin, where he received tenure—and for the
fi rst t i me ea r ned as much f rom teach i ng as he’d been ma k-
ing at BNA ten years earlier.
Ditching the day job to roll the dice on a literary career
clearly worked out for Jordan, who now directs the MFA
program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
But he ack nowledges the decision didn’t always look like
such a wise move. “This isn’t like you’re going to medi-
cal school or law school,” he says. “If you get an MBA or
something and you have a few years of struggle, everyone
is cheering you on because they understand it and they
realize, ‘Oh, he’s going to be just fine in a few years.’ But
you tell people you’re a poet, they just put their face in
their hands.”
In truth those friends and relatives with their faces
in their hands may be onto something. Jordan’s long
journey from restless cubicle worker to overworked
ev community college instructor to tenured MFA program
a^ b
us
za
MICHAEL BOURNE is a
contributing editor of Poets &
Writers Magazine.