The many concerns you've expressed about making money and writing prompted me to set my thoughts to paper. It isn't so curious that you would speak of writing and making money in the same breath. You are, after all, in a graduate program pursuing an M.A. degree, the point of which for most of you is, after graduating, to secure employment. And we live in a society that celebrates the reputation and fortune of some writers above and beyond the 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol promised. As horrible as that felt, it was preferable to a notion that had begun to take form on the outermost edges of my awareness.
Writers are stars.
Stars are made with 6-figure book deals. This truth would've been easy to believe. Certainly our culture reinforces it. But that inchoate half-formed unnamable on the periphery of my awareness had begun to shape itself into something recognizable. And not at all welcome.