When I got out of graduate school (University of Chicago) I moved to California to follow a long and rather tragic relationship to the bitter end (which came pretty quickly) and simply decided to stay put and try to figure out what came next. I worked for a builder for about a year, which was very interesting but hard on me physically. I tried to make money making ceramics and selling them and found that to be unrealistic.

I figured out that if i was just making, or just decorating, it might work. So I started a little craft business making and selling hand-painted tile. (I bought bisque tile by the box, decorated, glazed, packed, shipped, etc.) It was an interesting venture. I always felt like I was a visitor in the craft world and no one around me knew it - something like a secret agent. Several years into this a friend and neighbor (I lived in a warehouse mostly occupied by artists) started writing criticism. I was thinking about it already but she goaded me into it and thus my career as a writer began. I have always been able to write and to draw, so I never took either skill very seriously, since I assumed that if I could do these things then everyone could. (In those early years just out of grad school I wrote poetry pretty seriously and published, hung out with poets, etc. But that too was sort of a distraction from my real path in life. Read on.)

I started writing magazine pieces - spending more and more time in galleries - and as I did interviews with famous painters and sculptors I realized that they were just people like me. It struck me that I could either blow my life feeling sorry for myself or I could try to be what I was always meant to be, an artist and a writer. So I started making work again (objects, that is - I'd been drawing all along, but not in a focused way) and at the same time I started making real money writing. How? Scripts for audio tours for museum exhibitions; Catalogue essays for galleries and museums; Articles, columns, and reviews for magazines, etc. Around the late 1980's I started showing work and decided that I needed to take better long-term care of myself. (A disastrous string of relationships suggested that no one else was going to do it.) I had the money for a down-payment on a cheap house and there was one neighborhood left that didn't scare me here in East Oakland. I bought a house and moved. I closed the tile business and started selling art. I also started teaching a little bit, here and there, though that didn't really get rolling until a decade later.

Since then I have made my living writing, selling work and teaching, in varying percentages from year to year. I did a big public art project and actually made good money from it. Since I had my daughters, I have been teaching and writing more, making work less (I wanted to focus on them - I had them very late in life and they will be my first, last and only children) but now I am getting back to my work and will have a solo show again soon.

This juggling act is very hard once you have kids. it has almost killed me at various moments in the last five years. I find that I can do three things but not four, and since raising kids is not something I can take or leave - and to some extent the other things are - I've chosen to back away from teaching. I'm lucky that i can - writing is actually better paying - but I have gotten a lot from being with students. You don't always get to do everything you want, life isn't long enough for that. But I have never had to do work I hated, or even disliked. Life isn't long enough for that either. I always tell students to try to find work that feels worthwhile and that they enjoy. And that if they want kids not to wait as long as I did. Twins at 47 is pretty damn rigorous. If i didn't have a husband who gets good benefits through his job, which also provides a regular paycheck (he started looking for this kind of work when we found out it was going to be twins) it would be pretty tough. I feel very lucky and hope to live to be very old so I can keep on doing all those things I want to be doing and maybe even get to see grandchildren.