the practical writer HOW TO GET PAID113 POETS & WRITERSArrangements vary, but adjunct
instructors typically have little or
no health benefits and are hired one
semester at a time, with no guaran-
tee their contracts will be renewed.
According to a recent report by the
American Association of University
Professors, earnings for adjuncts
range from about $31,000 a year at top
doctorate-granting universities to just
$16,000 a year at community colleges.
Even this can work for some writ-
ers, especially those with partners
who hold salaried jobs with health
benefits. But without another steady
source of income, writers can find
themselves juggling four or even five
or six courses per semester, often at
several different schools, leaving them
no time to write the novel or poetry
collection that led them to seek an
MFA in the first place.
This was the prospect that faced
Blake Kimzey, a fiction writer who
graduated from UC Irvine’s MFA
program the same year Lewin did.
Kimzey had assumed he would teach
on the adjunct circuit in Southern
California after he finished at Irvine,
but then he and his wife had a sec-
ond child. They moved back to his
home state of Texas, where he took a
proposal-writing job at an engineer-
ing firm and taught creative writing
courses in the evening at the Univer-
sity of Texas in Dallas.
Holding down two jobs while strug-
gling to write the novel he hoped
would earn him a place teaching at a
MFA program proved to be grueling,
and when students began asking if they
could audit his evening classes, Kimzey
had an idea: What if he started his own
writing program? Setting out on a path
blazed a few years earlier by novelist
Julia Fierro, who founded the Sackett
Street Writers’ Workshop in Brook-
lyn, New York, in 2002, and novelist
Edan Lepucki, who founded Writ-
ing Workshops Los Angeles in 2006,
Kimzey launched Writing Workshops
Dallas in 2017.Kimzey offered the writers he
hired for his fledgling workshop a
simple deal. When he taught at UT
Dallas, he was paid $3,500 to teach
twenty-one students for a sixteen-
week semester. At his school, Kimzey
would pay instructors close to $2,000
per course to teach eight students
for eight weeks. “The pitch I made
to these really talented writers was,
at Writing Workshops Dallas we’re
going to cap the student enrollment
at eight students per class, the class
will be eight weeks long, and you’ll
get paid more per student over eight
weeks than you would over sixteen
weeks at the university,” he says.
After two years of running Writing
Workshops Dallas out of his home and
teaching many of the classes himself,
Kimzey quit his job at the engineering
firm. He now makes about $45,000 a
year after paying his instructors and
renting classrooms at Dallas-area
co-working spaces. The business has
been so successful that Kimzey has