Interview #210: How Debra Spark Makes Money Writing

Debra Spark is a literary veteran with a career spanning 40 years, five novels (including the recent Discipline), two short story collections, and two books on the craft of writing. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College, Debra has also written for the New York Times, Esquire, and Yankee, and spent a decade as a design journalist for shelter magazines.

In this interview, Debra is honest about the current state of her freelance income, revealing that despite her long tenure, she is projecting her “worst year ever” financially. She breaks down the “downward mobility” of moving from big New York publishing houses to small presses, explains why she advises students never to go into debt for an MFA, and details how writing 180 articles for design magazines was once her most lucrative gig. If you want to know the reality of sustaining a writing life when the industry shifts beneath your feet, this one’s for you.

• What you do: Teach at Colby College, Warren Wilson College MFA, freelance writer, writer of fiction and creative nonfiction.

• Years writing professionally: 40 years.

• Earnings range: It’s just all over the place. If we are talking money just from freelance writing (as opposed to my income from teaching and book royalties, which are hard for me to judge, because that comes through over years), maybe $15,000–$35,000, with the higher amount when I was a senior writer for two different magazines in Maine, so I had monthly assignments. But next year, my “just” writing income may be $10,000 if I don’t get some more work.

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My situation is very atypical. Though I am a named chair at my college, I don’t have tenure, and I am 3/5ths time, so for most of my professional life, I combined my primary salary (and benefits) from Colby with teaching at Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writing, and freelance writing. I absolutely needed all that work to handle my expenses.

The fourth piece is the writing I don’t do for hire, which includes royalties. The freelance income and royalties vary wildly, and I am about to have, alas, my worst year ever, just because so many of the places where I used to write can’t hire people anymore. Some of this is quite literally due to Trump, and actions he has taken. Others are just where the economy is.