The Profession That Does Not Exist | Baffler Symposium

In the fall of 1971, Wallace Stegner, who was running his eponymous fellowship at Stanford, offered the writers in his program some financial advice. The Stegner Fellowship, which included a $3,500 annual stipend—the equivalent today of about $28,000—was one of the most prestigious an early-career writer could receive. Past participants included Larry McMurtry, who had written his debut novel, Horseman, Pass By, while in the program, and Ken Kesey, who had done the same with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Now, the fellows—looking forward to completing the program, publishing their novels, and maybe even earning a bit more money—asked Stegner what to expect. In the twenty years the program had been operating, one fellow asked, how many were now making a living as writers? “Young man,” Stegner replied, “you don’t understand. You’ve chosen a profession that doesn’t exist.”Fifty years later, being a writer is still unreal. According to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey, which queried 5,699 book authors in 2023, the median book-related income for traditionally published trade authors was between $15,000 and $18,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total climbed to a measly $23,329. Fifty-six percent of the respondents relied on side jobs to survive.Today, by some estimates, the average freelance journalist is paid around $0.25 to $0.50 per word, and at the highest-paying glossies, rates have hovered around $2 per word for more than a decade, even as inflation has diminished the purchasing power of that seemingly handsome fee. Trump’s slashing of hundreds of National Endowment for the Arts grants in May 2025 may have been unique as an expression of political malice toward the arts, but otherwise it was on trend with years of cuts to fellowships of all types. Even the Stegner Fellowship has suffered from tightened budgets: in August of last year, Stanford’s Creative Writing Program, which Stegner founded, gathered twenty-three of the program’s lecturers and announced that their current contracts were being terminated.

Writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it.People at all levels of the publishing industry, meanwhile, are mostly mum on money matters, perhaps even more so in private than public. At so many parties or book launches, a quick way to earn the scorn of attendees is to ask: “How do you really make a living as a writer?” How did the twenty-seven-year-old freelancer who wrote all of three New Yorker features a year buy her Brooklyn Heights two-bedroom? By what magical means did the short story author for all the hot lit mags convert pennies and prestige into health insurance? Could book reviews, even brilliant ones, pay for bicoastal lives in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, or even bohemian ones in Lisbon and Berlin?Worse than being curious is appearing confused when no (credible) answers are given. This silence, of course, conceals the way in which cultural capital is underwritten by capital capital; the ways in which literary legitimacy is made possible because someone subsidized it. It’s ironic that we call this supposedly tactful silence “class” when one’s class status is precisely what it conceals.Answering this question candidly, on the other hand, is risky, especially in the wrong company, and even more so if survival has included taking on work that isn’t teaching or more mercenary forms of writing and editing. A side hustle can be treated as evidence that one has not been “successful enough” with her creative work to survive on it as her sole source of income. In this way, silence conceals from a collective narrative not only the privilege of wealthy writers but also the side hustles that underwrite the creative work of writers who aren’t wealthy, those dubious gigs so many of us have had to do at one point to pay the rent and buy groceries while trying to survive the MFA program, waiting on the late magazine fee, burning through the book advance.A skeptic might say there’s no need to compare oneself to others. But when you are attempting to figure out a career in a profession that doesn’t exist, comparisons are useful, even necessary, because they clue you in to the fact that your struggles might be real rather than imagined—that is, they might be as much the result of structural obstacles as purely personal stumbles.

I myself arrived in New York in 2011, a bumpkin from the rural provinces and the son of a waiter and an ex-con, to take an unpaid internship at my favorite magazine; growing up, I hardly knew an adult who had a white-collar job, and I had certainly never met a professional “writer.” In the city I worked as a lifeguard and dogsat to pay for sardine dinners and cell phone service, and I drove myself mad trying to figure out how my peers paid for cocktails and brownstones, until I figured out my primary side hustle, one common among writers: editing. Navigating the fifteen years that have passed since then would have been much easier if people had been more candid about the realities of survival. Not every writer floated on family money—unbeknownst to me, heaps of my peers were also patching together piecemeal existences—but because of the taboo on discussing the survival math of the writing life, I too often assumed every writer had a sugar daddy somewhere. This made the already solitary nature of the nonexistent profession even lonelier, even more alienating.I wish more people had the courage to be as honest with me then as the contributors to the forum are now in relaying their own side hustles. The writers here and in the accompanying online material include a celebrated novelist with a major publisher who has worked in New Jersey factories for twenty years; a current MFA student at Columbia (in fact, one of my students whom I met in the course of one of my other side hustles) who is paid to cuddle strangers; and a Pulitzer Prize winner who wound up waiting tables in New Orleans’s French Quarter before becoming homeless.The accounts here describe the financial compromises, the emotional costs, the physical exhaustion, the moral injury, and the drain on the imaginative reserves that are the costs of a side gig. They describe the way that writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it. They also detail the satisfactions of service work and manual toil, employment outside the cosmopolis, and mastering skill sets more material than putting words to paper.

The forum, I hope, serves as a partial history of the hidden labor that makes possible the poems, stories, essays, books, and periodicals you read—including the magazine you currently hold in your hands.—Wes Enzinna© Tyler Comrie Up in Smoke Philip Connors In the summer of 2002, I was well into my fourth year of work at the Wall Street Journal, first as a news assistant, then as a copy editor on the Leisure & Arts page. I thought I had a pretty cushy gig, rearranging commas and repairing split infinitives in pieces about wine and art and theater, sports and books and opera. And it was pretty cushy, until the moment I was told my duties would soon expand to include copyediting the editorial page of the European edition of the paper.I balked. I didn’t want to work any harder than I already did, nor did I wish to dirty my hands with right-wing editorials, and I said so. That got me nowhere. I was told that I would dirty my hands with right-wing editorials and I would like it.I took a vacation to visit a friend at the fire tower where she worked in the wilderness of New Mexico, thinking I would use the time away to assess my options. The best option was staring me right in the eyeballs: this job my friend had, getting paid to look out the window all day. Sensing my desperation for a way out of cubicle life, my friend kindly offered to grease the skids for me to take over for her. “My boss has the hots for me,” she said. “I can probably get him to do anything I want.” She was correct. I flew back to New York, gave my notice at the Journal, and signed on with the United States Forest Service, trading one tower (World Financial Center, Building One) for another (a lookout in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness).If you want to make your name, your first book should be the one only you can write.I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I had been working on a book about my life in the shadow of my brother’s suicide, writing for an hour or so every morning before I boarded the subway for the long commute from Queens to Lower Manhattan, and at the pace I was going—I am a very slow writer—I would require a decade or more to finish the book.

I could sense that I needed all the mental elbow room I could gather around myself to go deep on the saddest story I would ever tell. And here was a job that felt like a paid writing retreat with good views and ample solitude, the kind of situation a writer dreams of. If I couldn’t make it as a writer with this sort of setup, I couldn’t make it as a writer. As side hustles went, being a fire lookout seemed to be about as good as it got.I quickly found that the work offered something more interesting than a writer’s retreat. The view out my window encompassed the first place on earth designated as a wilderness in our culture’s sense of the word: a landscape off-limits to roadbuilding and anything motorized or mechanized. It was also the place where the Forest Service first experimented with letting fires burn on their own terms after almost a century of fanatical suppression. The beauty of a place unmarred by roads and industrial tools, plus the rejuvenating landscape-scale drama of wildfire, combined to give me a sense of having accidentally blundered into a whole other story worth telling. I not only had a job that offered me time to write; I had a job that offered me subject matter for the writing. The symbiosis felt practically orgasmic.The only problem was it didn’t pay the bills. Back then, I earned a little more than $10,000 from my temporary term on the payroll, as fire season only lasted from April until August. I supplemented my income with an offseason gig as a bartender. In a good year I might make $20,000 all told. But what I lacked in money I papered over with a naive faith that someday soon I would have a community of readers and a self-sustaining career as a writer.This faith felt sustainable because I had already done the hard part: I had found a lifestyle conducive to getting words down on the page. During those few months each year at the fire tower, I set myself up with a manual typewriter on a waist-high shelf, so I could write and look out at the same time, my first and only success at multitasking. I was a lookout, I was a writer, and I could be both simultaneously.