Discussion → Happy to be here, or anywhere for that matter.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Sep 05, 08:55am

  
  

  I would just like to break the ice here, and for me, that usually means asking impertinent questions with all the grace and elan of a water buffalo.

  The question is this:

  A-Minor is purely electronic. Nonetheless, it's literate, tasteful, and worth the time it takes to watch, to return each week and read.

  Is this the future of literature? Or just a temporary dock, where all the better vessels will find a home until the real next thing comes along?

  Can literature be sustained without financial motivation? Can writers continue to write without financial support? Willeveryone become their own 'angel?'

  I can remember a time when you could make a living as a writer and always thought that when I returned to it, the thing would still be there. What a shock.

  Anyway, that's my question. I really wanna know.

  JD

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• 
  Sam Rasnake

  Sep 05, 10:31pm

  
  

  Not really the future, James. It's become the present.

  And no - I don't believe... no matter the format ... that literature can be sustained without financial motivation. Yes, writers will write without the financial support. Not sure about the angel part... Either Wings of Desire or Blue Angel. Or, Angel and the Badman.

  As for the living ... Prose, yes. Fiction, maybe. Poetry, no.

  That's the world through my glasses.

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• 
  See ya

  Sep 07, 03:02pm

  
  

  Thanks for starting a very pressing discussion, James. I'm sorry I've only just visited and saw that it has been offered. I'm spreading my blanket a little thin, as my grandmother would say, and I'm falling behind a little.

  That aside, I agree with Sam. Since I independently published my first magazine, Cellar Door, in 2004, I've longed to be able to pay writers. As a writer first, it would be truly gratifying to give that to another. But even with Cellar Door, which was a print only quarterly, the number of copies and subscriptions sold only covered the costs (and not always that) for the next issue.

  My dream: a rebirth to those days when the Bradburys and the Vonneguts and the Salingers and Fitzgeralds were able to make livings as writers and only writers. I don't know the path to getting there, but I'm traveling in the only direction I know, as are all of us.

  Thanks again, James. It could easily be that discussions like this are one part of that end resulting rebirth. Change, I believe, begins first through casual conversations between kindred spirits.

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