I was raised never to talk about money, and when I grew up and became a poet it was soon clear that there would be very little to tempt me to break this rule. I was also raised never to call myself a poet—that was a title the world would bestow upon me—so I found myself, at 24, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, untitled and unpaid and quite depressed.

I was living with my husband in an apartment so narrow I had to press myself up against the wall if he needed to get from the kitchen to the bedroom. On the day I discovered I was pregnant (as anyone might be after living for years in an apartment nicknamed "The Airplane"), I received a check for $200. I had won an "editor's choice" prize from a small literary magazine. The note from the editor commended not my poetry's brilliance or metaphorical imagination but its "weirdness." (This seems a patterned response to my work. At a writer's colony on Montauk where I spent one long August, I was introduced to the head of the foundation, who said, "Oh, yes, Celia Bland. Your poems are so . . . weird." And he looked me up and down, struck no doubt, by the blandness of my appearance.) But this check couldn't have come at a better time, as I was getting bigger by the minute, like some Brooklynite Alice in my tiny kitchen. That check went to the security deposit for another place, on a bad street in a better neighborhood, and subsequent checks went for rent and diapers and doctors.

There's only one check that went for some memorable purchase, and that was the one I got for expurgating Heidi. You may never have read that 300-page original, but let me tell you, it's a religious tract, and Heidi is less little girl than Agent of Providence, rekindling Grandfather's faith and miraculously curing Clara, the crippled rich girl. My job was to cut the text by two-thirds, nixing the references to God's hand in favor of the fresh goat's milk and the sleigh-riding. My paycheck, a substantial one, was spent on a brand-new couch. This couch was wide and comfy and covered in a pale green jacquard silk that has since rotted away (though the couch remains, buoyed by pieces of foam and a twill slipcover), and it was magnificent. Our friends all came to see—we being the first in our circle to have both child and couch—and left, strangely disapproving. But I didn't care. Heidi-like, I had faith—this was a couch to build a family on.
—Celia Bland

Celia Bland's collection, Soft Box (CavenKerry Press), was awarded the silver prize for poetry from ForeWord magazine. She is the Dean of Studies at Bard College.



The plight of the young publishing person in New York is perilous if you don't have a trust fund. The paychecks are meager. A root canal can bankrupt you. You share an apartment with others, human and cockroach; you scrounge in the couch cushion for quarters for the subway on Monday morning. Dinner is a plate of free hot hors d'oeuvres at the Irish bar. The crumbs that fall off of the editor's desk and into your hands—screening tickets, free books, leftover booty from a fashion shoot—determine the quality of your life.

The weather gets cold in Manhattan, and the wind that whips off the Hudson can sting. The old coat is brought out, the old boots. Christmas break looms and you can always hope that Grandma will send a check. You can always hope a bonus will fall from the sky.

The holiday party is in a bar on Third Avenue, and not a good bar, either. The boss has already left on vacation. He sends a gorillagram, though, and a stack of envelopes for the help, a crisp $50 bill tucked into each. One by one, the proles and fact checkers and editorial assistants slip out and stagger back to their squalid dives, and, honestly, it's a miracle none of us were found a week later hanging from the showerhead. I spend the $50 at the tailor's, getting the shredded lining in my winter coat replaced with new, shiny sateen.

The boss at the next magazine doesn't bother with a holiday party. I walk into the office one bitter December day to find a neat cardboard box covering my chair. It's my bonus. I tear into it, thrilled, and find—a crown of thorns? A thin branch of olivewood twisted and threaded with ribbon. A wreath for a wraith.

Somewhere in there I write my first freelance magazine piece for almost as much money as I made the whole first year I worked on staff. I buy a stereo, turntable and speakers, pay off my credit card, get a $100 pair of boots. Finally, I can breathe. The piece, thank God, never runs.
—Marilyn Johnson

Marilyn Johnson is the author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, which was published by HarperCollins this March. She has been a magazine editor and freelance writer since the late '70s, when a $50 bonus was still an insult.