Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

seventy-three now, was able to retire
from teaching because he no longer
had to help me pay my student loans,”
she says. “It gave me the freedom to
start my life and to afford being an
adult who is not thinking, ‘What do
I have to sell in order to get health
insurance?’”
But even if they navigate the long
apprenticeship period and beat the stiff
competition for jobs, writers working
in publishing still have to find time to
write. Agents and editors spend most of
their workday hammering out contracts
or taking meetings and phone calls,
leaving much of the labor of reading
submissions and editing manuscripts
to nights and weekends. The same
goes for publicists, who are expected
to work long hours designing publicity
campaigns and drumming up interest
in their authors’ work. Asked how many
hours a week she typically worked, best-
selling essayist Sloane Crosley, who
held positions in publicity at Vintage
Books and HarperCollins for ten years,

laughs and says: “All of them?”

For Crosley, the author of three

essay collections and a novel, The

Clasp (FSG, 2015), maintaining a writ-

ing career while working in publishing

meant writing before and after office

hours and using vacations to go on

book tour, and ultimately she left her

job as assistant director of publicity at

Vintage in 2012 to become a full-time

writer. “People write novels and have

day jobs all the time,” she says. “I just

found it very difficult to do that.”

This is a common theme in con-

versations with writers who work in

publishing. Some say they wake up

early and write for an hour or two be-

fore work, and others talk of opening

Google Docs on their laptops for a

few harried minutes of revisions on

the subway. Others, like Zancan, the

Henry Holt editor, find they’re able to

write in concentrated bursts as their

workload ebbs and flows.

Early in her career, when Zancan

was an editorial assistant at Knopf,

the work was so all-consuming that

she essentially put her writing on hold

for three years. After she returned to

fiction, Zancan earned a low-residency

M FA from the Bennington Writing

Seminars and wrote her debut novel in

two years. A year after that book came

out (and a week before she gave birth

to her first child), she finished the first

draft of her second novel, We Wish You

Luck, due out from Riverhead in 2020.

“You can do it all, but not all at one

time, if that makes sense,” she says.

Although Zancan and others in the

industry caution against viewing a

career in publishing as a shortcut to

winning a book contract, the contacts

and insider knowledge that come with

working at a respected publishing

house or literary agency can boost a

literary career. After all, Cusick found

his first agent by working for him,

and today he is represented by Melissa

Sarver White, a friend and colleague

whose office is literally across the hall

from his at Folio Literary.

the practical writer HOW TO GET PAID

JULY AUGUST 2019 74

Alumni Authors

Include:

Richard Hugo

Carolyn Kizer

James Wright

David Guterson

Frances McCue

Kathryn Trueblood

Carol Light

Jason Whitmarsh

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Whitney Sharer

Anca Szilagyi

Kara Weiss

University of Washington

MFA in Creative Writing

All accepted students receive Teaching Assistantships

and/or Fellowships. Addi�onal opportuni�es to teach

Introductory Crea�ve Wri�ng

Live and study in the heart of beau�ful Sea�le,

Washington, in the shadow of Mount Rainier

Excellent student/faculty ra�o of 3:1

Applica�on Deadline January 2nd

Program Director: David Crouse

Program Coordinator: Judy LeRoux

Email: cwri�[email protected]

Phone: 206 543-9865

The only MFA Program to include

three MacArthur “genius award”

winners among its faculty

Poetry:

Linda Bierds, Andrew Feld

Richard Kenney, Pimone Triple�

Prose:

David Bosworth, David Crouse

Rae Paris, David Shields

Maya Sonenberg

Former Faculty Include:

Theodore Roethke

Stanley Kunitz

Elizabeth Bishop

David Wagoner

Charles Johnson

Colleen McElroy

Heather McHugh

Founded in 1947 by Theodore Roethke.

The preeminent MFA Program in the

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“There is no end to

what should be known

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—Theodore Roethke