"give everybody everything."

Bernadette Mayer & the financial life of an artist. (+an anti-capitalist money workshop announcement)

A few notes: I’ve sent plenty of newsletters that don’t address the most current horrific event in the news, but as a person with a close relationship to Minneapolis, I just want to say….something. We’ve all seen far too many dead bodies on our screens over the years, and this death is no more or less important than any of the others, but I know that street so intimately and so many of my people are so near there…I have nothing profound to say, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat: Fuck ICE.

The essay below is in part about a new workshop I’m running, but if you don’t have time to get to the end, click here to learn more & sign up.

The essay below is also about art, and if you want to do your art in 2026, I hope you’ll take one of the remaining four spots of the EXCAVATIONS memoir workshop.

maybe the original draft? found here.

Shortly after her death in 2022, I was listening to a podcast episode about Bernadette Mayer. It was December; I remember I was wearing a green sweater and sitting on the floor of my bedroom applying makeup in the mirror. My phone was resting on the corner of the bed, and Mayer was introducing herself in the interview, saying, “I always tried to earn a living as a poet. I know it’s stupid, I know it can’t be done, but I figured, ‘let’s do it.’” The producer, Rachel James, clearly had great reverence for the celebrated poet, but rather than focus just on her work, James wanted to talk about Mayer’s life, and specifically her financial situation. James explained that despite winning prestigious awards and regularly speaking at esteemed universities, Mayer lived in poverty nearly her entire life. In the episode, her son, Max Warsh, reflected on being raised by broke artists. He described the sort of romance of collective poet microeconomies in New York City in the 70s and 80s, but also growing up in apartments with roaches, and seeing his parents desperate for rent money.

I started crying, hand on my belly. I was pregnant and fairly sure that I was going to have to have an abortion. To my surprise, I didn’t want one. But Peter and I were, like Mayer and her husband Philip Good, on some kind of starving artist spectrum. I hadn’t had a stable paycheck in nearly two years, and the adjuncting, SW, and freelance work I was doing was never guaranteed. Peter worked part-time at a composting company (and, of course, he wrote) but we just didn’t have enough consistency. Not to raise a baby. (We didn’t end up having to decide; I miscarried shortly after.)

Warsh clearly had a lot of love for his mom, and seemed to understand her. “My mother could have stopped being a poet, but she couldn’t have stopped being a poet,” he said.

Bernadette, who had the most wonderful laugh.

As an anti-capitalist, I know it is the system itself that creates poverty, not people’s choices. I am also someone who believes in agency, a concept that is ultimately about access to choice. Some people—like my mom, single after a drunk driver hit her husband, and raising a kid alone—don’t have a lot of access to choice. She had to raise me and work multiple low-paying jobs that wrecked her health and contributed to current disabilities; there wasn’t mental or logistical space for much beyond that. For Mayer, who chose almost exclusively to write, she technically had a choice, perhaps, to get a different job early in her life, but at a certain point, choice becomes a lot more difficult. For some people in a field with dwindling employment, they might consider going back to school for something else, but that’s only an option for people with the time and resources for more education. For others, like artists—like Mayer—they do the thing they do because they have to. It’s like Nick Nolte says in New York Stories (1989): “I mean, you make art because you have to, ’cause you got no choice. It’s not about talent, it’s about no choice but to do it.”

Like me, Mayer was an anti-capitalist. She didn’t want to find a meaningless high paying job—and I would argue that most (not all) high paying jobs are meaningless¹—she wanted a world where everyone’s needs could be met. My favorite poem of hers makes this clear:

Walking Like a Robin

take 3 or 4 steps then stop

look smell taste touch & hear

is there anything to eat?

oh look, there’s some caviar

it must be my birthday, thanks

i must be very old, like seventy

i guess i’m falling apart, i’ll just

sew myself back together but will it last?

please take a piece of me back home, each piece

is anti-war and don’t pay your rent, in fact

remember: property is robbery, give everybody

everything, other birds walk this way too

from Works and Days (New Directions, 2016)

I get emotional every time I read it. Partly because I love birdwatching and she captures robins so well!, but also, of course, because of the dreamy motioning towards a better world. James explains that Mayer and other poets in her circle (like Alice Notley and Eileen Myles) had a version of this. “In the 1980s, like today, artists living on the economic margins felt like they didn’t have enough of a legal or governmental safety net to protect them from falling into poverty. So these poets had to figure out ways to survive and support each other.” This is, in so many ways, a beautiful demonstration of mutual aid; of anarchy! But, as her son notes, recounting the roaches, “It became harder for people to live that way.”

Mayer’s daughter recounts that her parents didn’t have a bank account. Mayer kept cash in a copy of Shakepeare’s Sonnets. How romantic! is a thought I had. How heartbreaking, is another.

This podcast episode came to me again a couple of weeks ago. I was wearing the sweater I wore that day applying makeup in the mirror, and I remembered the tears and fear I felt— that although in many ways it would be a dream to grow up and be like Bernadette Mayer, it would also be terrifying. Three years later, in many ways, I still feel like Mayer’s life is both aspirational and cautionary. Three years later, Peter and I are still precarious workers, but also: we own a home.²

Many of you know my story, but the TLDR for new folks: I grew up poor with a single mom, I got a PhD that I thought would help me attain financial security but without a tenure-track job have had a string of on and off non-permanent positions that pay anywhere from $12-60k a year, most of them without benefits or retirement.³ Alongside this, I was firmly rooted in punk and Lefty/anarchist/activist spaces, where I learned that capitalism was Bad (something I knew from growing up) and that having money is Bad. The former is simply true and I have never wavered in understanding that a capitalist economic system relies on the existence of an exploited class of people; this is, indeed, Bad. But as I got older it became clear to me that some people in my circles weren’t struggling as much as I was. There were many reasons for this, and I genuinely don’t have judgement about any of them—some people did get high-paying jobs, some people didn’t have any student debt, some of them got money from their parents regularly, some of them inherited money. What I did have judgement about was the lack of transparency and the performance of being above Having Money while still having money. For those of us without generational wealth or high paying jobs (and, relatedly, with student loan or other kinds of debt), we watched some of our comrades move forward while we stayed stuck (in shitty apartments, in stress, in helping support family members).

Still, when I finally abandoned hope in academia, I decided to focus on my art. A choice, kind of, but one that felt impossible not to make. I have tried to be more responsible by applying to full-time jobs, but I generally don’t get them (and when I have, they have been temporary positions). And of all my adult years since grad school, the best ones were when I didn’t have a full-time job—almost always making less money, but feeling so much less stress and so much more whole. Making art and hustling side gigs (teaching, workshops, sw, etc.) is a good life for me. But it’s unacceptable that this should necessitate a life of poverty; it’s unacceptable that artists (who contribute to keeping alive the last shreds of humanity in this world) can’t afford to raise children, but AI tech lords (who are the enemy of the last shreds of humanity in this world) have seven houses or a ticket to Mars. Fucking unacceptable.

It is thanks to the wake-up call of wishing I could afford to have a baby, and also to the lived wisdom of anti-capitalist sex workers that I got comfortable with Having Money. And to do that, I both worked a lot of jobs and also started looking into the world of personal finance—a world that previously felt extremely off limits for me, as an anarchist with morals. But the more I realized people got money from rich parents, the more I realized they too were benefiting from playing the game of capitalism and the more I refused to keep falling behind. If I had money, I could share it. I could better support my mom, I could better support myself, and I could better support my community. So I dove in: I learned about High Yield Savings Accounts and IRAs and brokerage accounts and credit card points, and I wanted to throw up in disgust but also kind of in relief. More knowledge about these systems — and the permission to engage them — has been life changing for me.

To be clear, this is not an answer to the problem of capitalism. Having a bunch of people with good hearts and values become rich⁴ and share money is just bullshit trickle down economics in even more hyper-individual form. I am not proposing this as a solution to the ills of this system. But I do want more people—especially people like me who don’t have family money and were taught by their radical communities that they shouldn’t care about money—to have the choice of perhaps a little more stability.

The real metric of not losing yourself in the game of capitalism is to determine if you are putting just as much effort into its demise. Can we have economic stability while simultaneously trying to destroy the economic system? In truth: no, not all of us can. To reiterate: capitalism requires that not all of us have access to economic stability. But I think it’s likely that if you’re reading this newsletter, you might have a shot at it. And I very much want to say that you’re not Bad if you want stability. Especially if you grew up poor, especially if you know that if you had more stability you’d do more sharing (with family and friends, with bail funds, with gofundmes…).

“Bernadette has lots of great ideas about how to solve the problems of making money. And a lot of them involve getting money for no reason, just for existing,” Mayer’s daughter says on the podcast.

“But wouldn’t that be so great?” Mayer responds. “If we had our guaranteed annual income, so we wouldn’t have to fucking worry about, you know, what to do for money!”

I agree with Mayer that people should be paid to live. Better, of course, we abolish capitalism and the money system altogether. But I do wish Mayer had had an interest-accruing bank account. And I also wish more people could learn from the way she lived with her poet friends: taking care of each other, sharing, living new worlds in the shell of the old.

When Mayer told James, “I always tried to earn a living as a poet. I know it’s stupid, I know it can’t be done, but I figured, ‘let’s do it,’” she was doing a form of magic. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” the Situationists say. The impossible dream that we ought to live anyway is to care for one another. And in that process, I want my fellow working-class femmes and queers and artists with radical hearts and wild imaginations not to worry about paying their rent.

me, at home. photo: Matthew Chasney.

I am teaching a workshop for anti-capitalists who want to learn the basics about not being broke. This is a little off-brand for me (not that I’m not always talking about class, but that I’m not in the personal finance world), but I have felt pulled to do it ever since I realized I had saved enough to make a down payment house, and I want other people who assume that economic security is impossible for them to have the knowledge of some tools. We’ll also talk about abundance outside of banks and stocks—things like sharing economies, the value of time over money if you have unstable work, and “how much money is enough?” (h/t to my wonderful friend Nic who is my absolute favorite person to think alongside in anti-capitalist money questions). This will be explicitly anti-capitalist but also a shame-free space for questions that punks and poors aren’t supposed to ask. This will be a space to talk transparently about money, and emphatically about our dreams for a better system. “Let’s do it.” <3

February 28th

1-3pm

Sliding scale $0-55

On Zoom

Register here

Anyone who thinks they would benefit from this is welcome to join. I know that not everyone who “comes from money” has access to wealth, and I imagine there are a wide variety of people who never got personal finance info or a space to talk about money and dreams beyond it. That said, the free and lower-cost tickets are for low-income folks. And if you are secure and abundant in cash, you’re welcome to send some money to sponsor the free slots.

1. see David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

2. well, the bank owns it.

3. the first time I had access to an employer-matched 401k was at the institution where I had my first VAP position. I initially didn’t think I was qualified as a temporary worker (apparently I was), but I also didn’t fully understand what it was. And what I did understand was that it had to do with stocks and stocks were Bad and for rich people. I also didn’t feel capable of reducing my paycheck since I was living alone in Boston and paying student loans (I got a second job teaching fitness classes to cover all those bills). Anyway, I regret this, and I would like to help people get free money from their employer!! Take as much money from your bosses as you can!!!

4. something I am not, to be clear, lol