Imagining Success with Daniel José Older

So now, okay, you've gotten published.

At some point, you go and get your MFA, right, during this process? I did.

It was one day.

Oh, go ahead.

No, what was the, why did you want to do that?

Basically, it was a practical decision.

I was transitioning off the ambulance.

I'd done it for 10 years, basically.

And I did a little bit in college, and then I got to New York and did it for nine.

And yeah, I was like, you know, I love this job.

I'm not going to do it my whole life.

It was always, the idea was to be kind of a springboard and to hold me down,

you know.

While I moved into the creative realm, which I still didn't know what it was for a long time.

So I got to a point where I was like, all right, I'm not going to renew my license.

I'm going to transition into writing.

I had a couple good deals on the table.

Moderate, not good deals.

They were nice for a starting out writer.

They felt nice.

But we're talking like... a couple grand here and there, like not like living money, but it felt like, okay, this is a career that is starting to take shape in front of me.

And it's one that increasingly I can't sustain while I'm working full time.

So what's that going to be? What's that going to mean? And I didn't want to just like jump off a cliff.

I wanted to have some other mechanism.

So, And I've always loved teaching.