I was interviewed along with my Scratch business partner, Manjula Martin. Agent: Kate McKean, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. Julia Fierro With compliments / Nina MacLaughlin Faith, hope, and credit / Cheryl Strayed in conversation with Manjula Martin On staying hungry / Rachael. The Summer 2014 issue of Scratch (my magazine for writers) is now available.

Martin’s collection removes the romantic veil surrounding the production of the written word and provides some solid counseling for aspirants on what it means to offer the labors of their heart for sale in the marketplace. The shared conclusion among the diverse, entertaining, often humorous, sometimes plaintive voices is that writing should be as remunerative as any other useful skill, but the work must be its own reward. The collection pokes holes in cherished cultural myths about the writing life and examines, from various angles, the transformation when writing goes from being a dream to a job. They are not even different”), and a few harrowing tales of poverty, discrimination, and despair. Robert Lennon: “Art and commerce are not separate. Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living Manjula Martin 3.80 1,104 ratings259 reviews In the literary world, the debate around writing and commerce often begs us to take sides: either writers should be paid for everything they do or writers should just pay their dues and count themselves lucky to be published. It’s an endless, confusing, and often controversial conversation that, despite our bare-it-all culture, still remains taboo. The writers, including Alexander Chee, Jonathan Franzen, Roxane Gay, and Jennifer Weiner, recount an assortment of amusing anecdotes, hard-headed pragmatism (Nick Hornby: “I do understand I’m working in a marketplace”), some tongue-in-cheek ribbing (J. Martin collects interviews from her online magazine, Scratch, and pairs them with new and reprinted essays to demonstrate that the mysterious economics of literature create wildly different versions of writerly success.

Scratch by Manjula Martin