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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edged for The Spectator, and my guest this week is the writer Mason Curry, whose new book is Making Art and Making a Living Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. And it's just not adventures in funding Mason's creative life that it's all about. It deals with this whole question, which seems to be a perennial one,

of how you make art and don't at the same time starve to death. Mason, welcome.

Thanks for having me. Yeah. Glad to be here. I mean, can you tell me what the germ of this approach to the subject was?

We've all got those pictures of, you know, poets starving and garrets and so forth.

But what made you think this is something we need to look at?

Well, you know, my, I've published two previous books about the work habits and daily routines and schedules of

writers and artists and other creative people. And I always had another question, which was,

wait, how did anybody afford to have the time to organize to be creative or to be an artist or

writer? You know, it's like, it's one thing to do this work,

but it's a whole other thing to afford the time and the space and the materials to do this work

and also the mind space. So I think it's just, as you say, a prennial question, kind of an eternal

dilemma of any creative life. And I just wanted to tell some stories about how people thought about it, what choices

they made, how that influenced the work they made in their larger careers.

I mean, before we dive into some of the specifics, because you kind of organize your book

thematically, you know, in terms of different strategies for putting food on the table,

I'm kind of intrigued by what general conclusions

you drew about the great sweep of history in terms of, you know, is this idea, which has been

...