I’m in the Guardian today, along with some other writers, talking about day jobs, which in my case is writing, though I no longer want it to be. I mention that I’ve been a full-time writer for six years, but the first three of those years I did not have a home, except for a six month stint in a dirt cheap sharehouse; in that same period, I was accepted into a three-month residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and got a grant to support that trip. Before, and after that trip, I was living with my aunty in Lurnea, where I grew up—I am once again thinking about this discrepancy, and how being feted as a “success” on the one hand, receiving “prestigious” prizes or opportunities, and then having no security, be it housing or financial, is so unsettling to experience. I wrote about this in my first post here:
“In art, as with sport, we do not want to see the sweat of labour… The cognitive dissonance and social unease, then, stems from this excellence and success being paired with financial precarity. People don't know what to do with this paradox; they want to back the success but are confused by the poverty, the struggle, the sweat on my brow. Nor is it an individual problem. It is the norm for artists on below-average wages to be placed in settings with multi-millionaires and billionaires who are the patrons and benefactors of the arts; it is the norm for writers festivals to put authors in 5 star hotel rooms that cost more than the author is being paid for being there.”