Bodies, Forgiveness, and Tiny Beautiful Things: A Conversation with Cheryl Strayed

People need to eat and pay the rent. “An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint,” said artist Ben Shahn. “A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.” Whether an artist makes money off his work or not, money has to come from somewhere, be it a day job, a wealthy spouse, a trust f

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You’re paying for our creativity, for our ability to create order from chaos, to communicate your message, not for the time we need to solve your specific problem. The time it takes is our burden, not yours (so long as we meet deadlines). Is a brilliant logo worth less because we had the idea during our initial meeting? Is it worth more because we

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“I think writers have always realized their own value; there just weren't a lot of options in the post-2008 recession for how to make good on it,” says Anne Helen Peterson, who writes the newsletter Culture Study. “But all of this feels very cyclical to me. The economy tanks, writers get laid off from their publications, writers go freelance, write... See more