The second semester of my senior year of college, I had two internships. One was for a literary agent who worked out of her apartment with her white, prone-to-histrionics poodle, Princess, and the other was for Tor/Forge, an imprint of MacMillan Publishing. Tor/Forge mainly dealt in science fiction and fantasy, and most of my job there was to read the unsolicited manuscripts that came in. An unsolicited manuscript is a manuscript that someone sent in NOT through an agent, so they’re typically pretty awful. It was this way that I discovered such gems as “Squirrel Wars,” which was basically Watership Down with squirrels. (I hated Watership Down.) All the squirrel-characters were named after trees (Spruce, Elm, Oak, etc.) and the manuscript was full of highly euphemistic, very un-erotic squirrel-sex (“He pressed his commitment to her”).
Anyway, that’s not the point of this story (but I could go on about the manuscripts). The point is that in the spring, an entry-level job opened up, which I applied for. I had slightly mixed feelings about working in publishing: it was the field I had the most experience in, even though I wasn’t totally sure it was what I ultimately wanted to do with my life. Still, I thought it would be AMAZING to graduate college and go seamlessly into a $28,000/year job. Alas, I didn’t get the job.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I HAD gotten that job. I’d have graduated college, moved into an apartment in the city, and never learned how to knit. I’d be living a “normal” life. I’d be going out on weekends with friends from my job, maybe I’d have a boyfriend, I’d be trying (and probably failing) to write a novel in my spare time.
Instead, I moved back home after college, took a job in a cafe, learned how to knit and, ultimately, started this business. I am living a decidedly un-normal life, whatever that means. Atypical. But I guess, looking back, there was never any way I could have made that work. The one summer I worked in an office was the worst summer of my entire life. I had a permanent headache, cried all the time, and was always sneaking down to the parking garage to take half-hour naps in the backseat of my car because I was so fucking exhausted.
I know people who live in the city and who have taken the path I might have taken, and it doesn’t seem all that appealing. New York is not an easy place to live. Most of your paycheck goes to the rent, and you’re lucky to have a little left over for food and going-out. Your apartment is tiny and entertaining is impossible, so socializing always involves eating and/or drinking, another vacuum that sucks money out of your bank account. You’re always broke, but at least you have health insurance (I have to say, that’s looking pretty good to me right now).
New York is full of young people, but it seems like such a toxic environment for them. The whole culture, not confined to just young people, is about trying to prove yourself. People move to New York for just that reason: “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” I find the whole thing really tiresome. I’ve never been an especially competitive person and the system is just not one I have any interest in buying into.
When my dad was my age, he lived in Brooklyn. He’d gone to Pratt Institute, and when he graduated he was able to make a living by doing freelance photography work for magazines and shooting weddings. If he shot one wedding a month, he was able to pay the rent. Thus, he was able to do art. He didn’t have to work himself into a stupor just to pay the rent, rendering himself too exhausted to make art in his spare time.
This is what scares me about the future of art. In order to be an artist (or any independently creative professional, knitwear designers included), you have to be independently wealthy, marry someone independently wealthy, live with your parents, or sacrifice sleep (I chose option C).
