The economics of freelancing is fascinating. I calculated at some point, that at the end of the year, that I had made my living by 300 cheques, and - but these are small checks, almost all of them, are small checks - and if you have 300 bosses you don't have any bosses. And I loved the independence, and I would get up in the morning knowing I was going to work on poems first thing, but not knowing much else. And I wouldn't know what poems I was going to work on... I'd work on what felt like... I felt like working on in the morning. And then I might go to a children's book or do an essay for The Times Literary Supplement, or an essay for Yankee Magazine, or Ford Times, or something. It was really exciting, and I also felt like a pirate... I felt I was... I was getting away with something by making a living as a freelancer. I think my... my new Connecticut family were all businessmen, and I may have inherited business genes because I think I handled it well, but I was very lucky with a couple of things. The book that was selling when we came here, that allowed us to take that year off, was a freshman English textbook, and I had begun that when I was first separated because my salary from the university was not so much as I owed in child support - I was behind every month - so I took a... an advance to write the freshman English textbook, and then got really interested in it and it did very well for a number of years. It's past its time now. It was called, Writing Well, and then later I did all sorts of books... The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes, that was great fun to do and so on. I did more textbooks, I did 12 children's books all told, one called Ox-Cart Man won the Caldecott Prize as the best picture book... Barbara Cooney illustrated it and she did a beautiful job, and it won that prize and it still sells a great deal. The Japanese translation sells many copies every year - still - and it's... it came out about 1980 or something, but... the American book used to sell all the time too. So I put it together all sorts of ways. At the same time I was giving my most energetic moments to writing poetry, and Jane was putting everything into writing poetry and getting better and better, and the stimulus of her getting better and better was - if this was competitive, so be it - it made me want to get better and better too. It was just wonderful.
