A new collection of works examines writing biz
Brooklyn BookBeat
Seven of the authors featured in “Scratch: Writers, Money and the Art of Making a Living” have called Brooklyn home at one time or another. The recent Pulitzer recipients, including Brooklyn playwright Lynn Nottage and novelist Colson Whitehead, only confirm the heavy concentration of writers in the borough — but how do accredited and aspiring writers fair? The collection, edited by Manjula Martin, founder of Scratch magazine, is something of a practical guide to what is the modern minefield of writing professionally. In addition to essays, “Scratch” includes interviews with authors on how they are getting by and usually it is not a simple answer.
Many of us read is to escape the kind of workday reality depicted in this book: deflated egos, money problems and networking. These are not Allen Ginsburg’s journals or Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”; these are people fighting with their agents and themselves. Of course, the trope of the starving artist is an enduring one and literary history is riddled with family disputes over money (Walter Benjamin), complicated relationships to benefactors (Zora Neale Hurston) and downright criminality (Jean Genet). And then there’s the denial of any kind of origin at all, by writers in hiding like Thomas Pynchon and until recently, Elena Ferrante. But this book aims to drift away from the romantic, a hard task for the writerly kind and toward the practical.
In Leslie Jamison’s (author of “The Empathy Exams”) contribution “Against ‘Vs.’” she discusses a lecture she delivered at the Guggenheim honoring sculptor, Doris Salcedo: