We’re Not Supposed to Talk About It

But I need to talk about it

The planner I use has a weekly habit tracker, with blank spaces for habits to record and check off. I’ve alternated what I write in these spaces, from getting outside to completing a dreaded task. Last week I added a new habit.

Money making idea.

Every day I’m trying to make some progress in generating more income. Welcome to America in 2025 where I have a steady job and write books, and I’m still struggling and scared.

My ideas include getting back into writing and publishing shorter fiction, creative nonfiction essays, and poems in magazines—something I’ve neglected as I focused on books. I’m going to sell some of the antiques around my house. And, as you may have noticed, some newsletter will be behind a paywall. Updates that are more personal, more insider, more about the business of writing and publishing or the business of me, will be available to subscribers only. I’m doing this so that I can continue to do this: to write, to live.

We’re not supposed to talk about money.

But it’s how we stay safe, how we eat, how we leave something for our children and make their lives easier. I hate that this is true.

A few weeks ago I sat around a restaurant with multiple writers discussing our lives and struggles, and one stopped the conversation cold by saying You get a bunch of poets together and all they talk about is money. I don’t describe myself as a poet anymore, but my larger issue with this statement is this: most of us were younger and less financially stable than he is. And we were trading tactics to survive.

It’s hard to talk about money-making work with my child, who views jobs in a similar light as school, even more resigned. I tell him to do something he’s passionate about. At the same time, I wish I had understood and been able to do internships in college. I wish I was better at networking.

In my early 20s, I was recruited by an investment firm. I think they liked that I was doing a fellowship at Stanford, without knowing much about me (including that I was there for poetry). I stopped responding to them. Back then I thought that I was going to be a professor. Back then that seemed like a good and steady job.

I could not get that job—and I’m glad about it now, though every time I do a guest lecture and students ask me: Where do I teach? Where can they take a class with me? I watch their faces fall. My once vision for my life falls again too, every time like a castle.

Maybe I could have made a better future if not for my own family then for some other young people if I had been their professor. But that’s over now. This is what I have.

Photo by Tatiana Byzova on Unsplash

I tell my child we do this—jobs—so we can live in a warm place and eat good food, and buy art supplies and movie and theater tickets and travel sometimes. At the same time, the planet burns and my family understands the planet is burning but the ones in charge decide not to.

I’ve started buying extra when I get groceries. There are build-in shelves on the stairway wall down to our basement and I realize, as I’m filling them slowly, they’re for canned goods.

Life imitates art, and though I’m not about to fall into the prepping hole of the father in my last book, I have 32 eggs and I know that is a kind of wealth now.

Money is also one of the ways we help other people. It’s the easiest way to give but it’s also the hardest. You don’t see its impact but you have to let it go. You have to do what you can: tape $5 bills to energy bars and keep them in your car. Slip a VISA gift card in a book you leave in a Little Free Library—make it a banned book.

Get it and give it. That’s the only way we’re going to make it as humans.

A Spell for Being Lucky

One of my dreaded tasks was taxes. As a writer who is the head of household, mine are more complicated than some. I was missing one form about buying my first home last year, and the financial institution—which I will not name but which I hate with a fiery passion—was being horrible about it. I’d been passed around to person after person, phone number after office. Even though it was a common request, I was on my fourth attempt to reach someone. Before I dialed the last call, I made myself say aloud: I’m a lucky person. Everything always works out for me.

That’s definitely not true. Still, this one time I said it—and this one time, it worked.