On Freelancer Angst (Or, The Desk Digest, April 2024)
What was published in April, plus some transparency on freelance life.
Nothing went according to plan for me in April, which is par for the course as a freelancer. No matter how well you prepare for tax season—and I have a bookkeeper and accountant, because it’s very worthwhile for me—it will hit you like a ton of bricks. And it will hit harder when it feels like everything is going wrong: when revenue is down, when payments aren’t being made, when emails are going ignored…
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s been during this month that we’ve seen a lot of pieces and posts come out about the difficulties of being a media freelancer at the moment. Olga Koutseridi wrote about trying to “make it” in food writing. Anna Brones wrote about burning out on the work that you love. Kate Ray wrote about the recipe economy and its obvious ceiling, creatively and financially. Teresa Finney wrote about getting off of Instagram as a cottage baker and the significance of DIY publishing. Lina Abascal made a video about the pipeline from pitch to payment under the best conditions being 86 days.
This is necessary transparency. Media is falling apart and it’s thought the “creator economy” will step in to fix it. It won’t, and I know I’m saying this as someone for whom it’s going well. It’s a situation where the individual is fully responsible for the good and the bad, subject to the whims and pocketbooks of the audience. It only really works for those in the “creator middle class” when there’s stable work from outlets to balance it out, to compensate for those whims.
I personally was inspired to make a video about how this has been the worst time in my nearly decade of full-time freelancing, and how bizarre it is to be hitting such a wall when I’m seemingly doing very well to the outside world. These issues go under-discussed because they’re deemed embarrassing, uncouth—and this silence only allows a flourishing of mistreatment by corporate entities and overworked editors. I don’t, and I’d venture that many freelancers don’t, demand my work be published, but I do think that it’s courteous to respond to work contracted and submitted in a timely manner.
I have sympathy for full-time editors who are dealing with internal upheavals. What’s being done to folks at Condé Nast is absurd. At the same time, freelancers have fewer protections and no security.
Having a piece in limbo for months put a huge strain on my mental health recently. It made me feel worthless, yet I still needed to put on a happy face, write courteous emails while writing my manuscript and maintaining this newsletter—this stolen time and energy! It fills me with rage, because I don’t understand how this can be normal. It is, though. And it simply took so much out of me that I didn’t make much manuscript progress (luckily, I’m ahead of my own schedule), and I didn’t find a lot of joy or excitement in my other work. This is why I’m very, very cautious about the extra assignments I take on and who I work with—things I rarely had to consider for years, but now do again. Regardless, I’m lucky.
While digging in my digital archives to jog some memories and fact-check myself, I found a scan of my first-ever byline for a capsule book review in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of Paste. I remember picking it up at the Borders that used to be above Penn Station after a copyediting shift at New York. I expected seeing my name in print to feel life-changing. It didn’t, and I don’t think they ever paid me the maybe $50 I was owed for this ($50 seems like a lot). But I kept working, which might have been the tiny victory and burst of speed that byline was supposed to provide me, and I’m proud of 24-year-old me for that.
Well, let’s get to what we’re actually here for, which isn’t my venting! A list of what went out in April 2024:
April 1: “On Recognizing My Secular Saints”
“How do I meet the world? I have to ask myself this regularly as a writer, and in working on memoir, I have to ask myself repeatedly, over and over, digging an ever deepening well to understand myself and create art / artifice out of it. We all establish our own cultures, but maybe I turned culture—literature, art, film, food—into religion, in order to place it into a framework I understood. To make a religion that wouldn’t feel like surveillance and shame, but ecstasy and evolution.”
April 5: “From the Desk Recommends... Knowing When to Quit” (Paid)
The monthly playlist, link roundup, and book giveaway.
April 8: “Why I Don’t Write About Restaurants”
“A city deserves critics who have deep historical and cultural context; a city deserves well-paid and thoughtful critics who can tell the truth. The work must be done for the sake of making sense of food in said city, for its people. Yet how many cities have the critics they deserve? Recommendations and lists from boosters, tourism boards, and visitors are what the local and macro economic situation has allowed in their place.”
April 12: “The Monthly Menu: March Went Out Like a Lion 🦁” (Paid)
Talking about the price of olive oil, food acquisition, and the monthly roundup of my best meals, what was cooking in our kitchen, and which cookbooks I’m using these days.
April 15: “What Do You Want From a Cookbook?”
“This is why, though, there are few contemporary cookbooks that appeal to me. I hope saying this doesn’t keep publishers from continuing to send me new cookbooks: I like to look at them, but I am not the target audience for them, for the most part. As noted, I like rigorous text-based instruction and notes. I like staple recipes that have personality, not personality-driven recipes. I like ideas that serve me for occasions both special and mundane. I need grams!!!”
April 19: “The Desk Book Club: ‘Food in Cuba’ April Discussion” (Paid)
Had an excellent discussion thread and Sunday afternoon Zoom with folks who read (or didn’t read!) Food in Cuba. We really have a great space for conversation, people with so many experiences and from so many different locations. I’m so proud of this book club! And I also want to find a way to stop slipping into teacher mode on the Zooms!
April 22: “The Desk Dispatch: In Diaspora, Spice Becomes Seed”
By Ruby Saha: “For displaced peoples, there’s something almost otherworldly about being rooted to a place. Not just the idea of it conjured up in memories and old photos, but living roots buried in sun-warmed earth you can grasp with your fingers.”
Paid Subscriber Notes
On Friday, I’ll send out a schedule for our next Book Club pick: Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala. The first discussion thread will take place on May 31. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!
If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook.
Each The Desk Dispatch contributor is paid $500 thanks to subscribers. I so appreciate getting to have this ad-free space for essays and cultural criticism in food. If you’d like to make this sustainable and perhaps enable it to expand in the future, please consider upgrading your subscription to paid.
News
My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating will be out in paperback on June 25. Consider it a nice lightweight beach read!
Reading
The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony by Annabelle Tometich and the forthcoming Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food by Michelle T. King
It is a terrible time to be a freelance writer, I can confirm.
Thank you for the shout out! I've worked really hard over the past few years to build up the art part of my business, largely because I wanted to be in control over my own income and not have it dependent on freelance/commission work. I had a moment earlier this year when I realized that I had zero freelance or commission work lined up and thought to myself "oh no, it's entirely up to you!" Which was horrifying and freeing all at the same time. All to say: it's all a wild ride and I'm just glad that we are at the very least being more open and transparent about it so that everyone has a better understanding of what creative labor entails not just from a money and work perspective, but also a psychological one.