How to Get Paid

IN THE mid-1990s, poet A. Van Jordan was pushing thirty and earning a solid, if not always scintillating, living by covering environmental issues for the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) in Washington, D.C. In his five years there, Jordan mostly wrote about industrial companies and their compliance with the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, but because so few companies actually complied, the stories he wrote rarely varied.

“It felt like Groundhog Day because I wrote the same story over and over again, simply changing the name of the company,” he says.

Hungry for a change, Jordan entered the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. A year later, still in the program, he left the news agency and eked out a living in a variety of freelance jobs as he wrote the poems that would make up his first collection, Rise.

After he received his MFA in 1998, Jordan taught composition at a community college in suburban Maryland, where he carried a crushing five-course teaching load. His book, published in 2001 by Tia Chucha Press, helped win him his first full-time job teaching creative writing at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. A few years after that, he moved to the MFA program at the University of Texas in Austin, where he received tenure—and for the first time earned as much from teaching as he’d been making at BNA ten years earlier.

Ditching the day job to roll the dice on a literary career clearly worked out for Jordan, who now directs the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But he acknowledges the