I’m a smart and thoughtful person with a gift for language and thus virtually no privilege — thank you for recognizing how the world works. I’d like it if we financially rewarded writers a bit more. It will sound crazy to you that someone who has seriously studied and practiced her craft for decades is grateful to be making a thousand bucks a month by working seven days a week, but I am in fact very gratified because a lot of good writers make even less. Working at newspapers is what I was born to do. This is as close as I can get to that.