Thank you for saying what I have wanted to say to a whining writer for the last 6 years. Get over yourself and get to work. You might be surprised by what you will produce if you just quit whining and risk a little bit of your pseudo-intellectual self-involved self (sorry, too editorial?). I supervise and yes, edit, the work of writers and artists and many do not fall into the above category; but for those who do, that's why you didn't get the job.

Thank you, Mr Keillor, I feel better now.

I'm writing, teaching, writing, teaching...when have I got time to moan?

Great article, there are hundreds of whingey, moaner groaners out there.

And totally agree with Skint. I adore writing and the only slight and miniscule moan that I have is that I wish there were more hours in the day....to write!

The premise for the article is a myth. Writers do not moan because the process of writing is hard - writing is a joy, a communion with the most fundamental urge in the human psyche.

Maybe successful writers moan because they are under pressure to finish their next literary masterpiece; how else will they pay for the ranch extension?

Writers do moan a lot though: mostly about how hard it is to pay the rent and get a decent publishing deal.

The disparity between my emotional response to GK's article and the emotional response I felt after browsing a few of the letters posted in reply to the same reminds me of the time I fell asleep while paddling my canoe down a particularly calm stretch of the Brazos River only to be wakened by the sudden sickening sound of a water mocasin slapping heavily into the bottom of my canoe.

Here this article sits in cyberspace, a calm musing on the enjoyable nature of doing what a man enjoys most, and then there's the outcry of embittered writers out there whose words lash out in fury like the waterlogged pit viper hissing from the underside of my thwarts. I like to say "thwarts;" it's more fun than describing the wooden support that keeps my canoe in its proper shape.

Anyway, the remarkable thing about being able to post a response to a column like this is that readers like me sometimes get startled by the juxtaposition of conflicting opinions and are more likely to go back and re-read the primary source...in an age where there is more information available than any one person can possibly process, the power to make someone go back and read something as innocuous as GK's essay is as profound as that power which ultimately capsized my boat.

GK's correct, I think. If you can make a living writing, then have fun and be thankful, even if it takes a while to earn respect at it. And those of you who were so vehemently opposed to GK for being successful, tall, white, old, smug, or whatever...thanks for sharing your views...you helped to reaffirm my fondness for the rabbit-chasing storyteller who is a throwback to the time in America when people had patience for ambling and drifting until haphazardly stumbling upon a point.

Garrison Keillor, spare us your precious whimsy and your dreadful Prairie Home Companion. You and your self-satisfaction are the best argument for all young people NOT to become writers. No one gives a f*** about your impressions of the kinds of lives young people today will face, since you seem completely cut-off from anyone who is not a white male over sixty-five.

Garrison Keillor: Lake Wobegon’s Ivory Tower

by Moira Manion

OK, let me say this once. I agree with Mr. Keillor’s editorial in that I detest writers who are enamoured with the myth of the Suffering Artist. In “Take Joy: A Book for Writers,” Jane Yolen wrote on the topic with wit and humor, and without Mr. Keillor’s wagging finger and superior tone. Whiner, heal thyself.

I’m not sure what world Mr. Keillor grew up in. It sure sounds nice, so nice that indeed, one who’s had it shouldn’t complain about it. My friends, co-workers and I haven’t seen that world.

Because, you see, life isn’t necessarily good when you grow up. You don’t own a car, because you can’t afford one. You don’t go where you like, because you have two minimum wage jobs, and if you have enough money left at the end of the month to see a movie, it’s a good month. You might sing along with the radio, if you’re not too tired, but you don’t have a cell phone, because the monthly installments you’re paying to the health clinic for treatment of the flu you had last winter don’t leave money for luxuries. As it is, your phone has been cut off three times in the past ten months, because when it’s a choice between a phone and groceries, food pretty much gets priority.

You wait for that lucky day when someone is willing to pay you for something you do well. In the meanwhile, which means the rest of your life, you work retail, where customers treat you as if the only reason you were conceived was to serve them and their screaming children, Hunter and Sophia, who are tearing up the displays. You might marry, hoping for that financial security and love that Dubyah says poor people will find in Holy Matrimony –-unless you’re gay, which in that case, too bad. Your husband, a struggling writer, dumps you and your son for a mistress and a better career, and you find out the cost of politicians slashing welfare and A.D.C., so it's time for Job Number Three. You send your son to day care at a center of questionable reputation (the only one you can afford), so you can scrape the toilets of the parents of Hunter and Sophia.

You don’t read history, or much of anything else, because if you have any free time at all, you’re exhausted. Besides, libraries are usually closed due to lack of funding, because EVERYONE has a computer (except you), and libraries are only for the homeless and poor anyway. You attempt to go to college, but you don’t qualify for any grants because it’s considered that your three minimum wage jobs pay you too much, but your three crappy jobs aren’t enough for tuition and day care. You’d love to go to Rome, or even Montana, but you don’t, ever, because just when you have any amount of savings, you get pneumonia and lose hours of work, which doesn’t provide health insurance, or you’re laid off, or you miss a payment on the credit card you got to help pay the rent and now the monthly payments have tripled.

You have no idea what the “mortgage years” are. You rent an apartment in a neighborhood where drunks and gangs stalk, because that’s the apartment you can afford. Your building is sold to become luxury condos called “Le Merde Parisian,” where the parents of Hunter and Sophia move, and you’re forced to live in the closet of a friend’s efficiency, because you don’t have enough money for the deposit and first month’s rent on a new apartment. People ignore you or treat you like vermin, because you’re poor, even though it’s because of you that their houses and Hummers are clean, their food is harvested, slaughtered, cooked, and served in Uptown restaurants and Block E clubs, their offices at work are spotless, and they never have to see what was smeared on the floor and walls of their office restrooms when you arrived at five A.M. to clean.

You’re unknown. No one asks for your photograph, or wants to do a story about your life –-you poor in America were depicted in comic strips, movies and television Once Upon a Time, but they don’t want to hear about you now, thank you very much. Their book clubs read “Nickel & Dimed,” didn’t they? What MORE can you want?

And then one day you read a whining column by a man with nothing to complain about, telling you to Shut Up because Life is Beautiful. And you want to ask him if he scrapes the dried you-know-what from his own toilets. Because life and beauty are truly based on perspective. He’s a tall man; maybe he should spend more time on his hands and knees and see the underside of Life for a while.

Moira Manion

Professional cartoonist and illustrator

Bookshop clerk and cleaning woman

Radio Commentator: “Working Poor for Christmas” was originally taped in December 2005 for Minnesota Public Radio’s new program, "The Loop." It was so popular that a shorter version was sold to American Public Media’s national program, "Marketplace," and aired to seven million listeners.

The Loop’s original full-length version (scroll down to “Why aren’t you SMILING?”):

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/minnesota/the_loop/2005/12/episode_3_the_l.php

Marketplace’s shorter version:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/12/23/PM200512237.html