I need a patron.

Like Rembrandt or Michelangelo.  Not that I am them.  But maybe they wouldn’t have been them either if they hadn’t had patrons.

And we would have been deprived of The Last Supper and the Sistine Chapel.  I am sure, were I pressed, I could name you dozens of other great painters, writers, thinkers, inventors, who were supported by the rich and powerful just so they could do their thing.  Think of Ford Maddox Ford, one of my own personal favorites.  Perhaps the world would have been deprived of one of its most powerful and stunning novels had he not been given place after place to live and hand out after hand out just because people believed in his art?

Okay, Wallace Stevens ran an insurance agency and Anthony Trollope worked for the Post Office.  But should they have had to?  Look what happened to Herman Melville.  His first two novels sold wonderfully well, but after that he failed to sell well at all and was reduced, a broken man, to working at the customs office for the rest of his life.  Moby Dick, his masterwork, wasn’t a success until after his death!  And you all know about Van Gogh.  Who needs millions years and years after you’re gone?

I know Dickens wrote at his kitchen table with his nine kids clamoring around but at least he had a newspaper waiting for his every chapter.  And he had a wife taking care of those kids.  I need a wife if I can’t have a patron.  But I am the wife.  And the mother.  And the chief cook and bottle washer.  Errand runner, taxi driver, bill payer. You name it.

I have so many ideas running around in my head that they tumble over each other and spill out my ears.  By the time I can pull over to the side of the road, half of them are gone.  By the time I can stop the shopping cart and find a pen and paper, I’ve lost my best lines.  By the time the writing for hire gets done, the writing for love is lost forever.  By the time I can drag myself out of bed, I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted to say already.

Open Salon and anywhere else I blog is a luxury, just like the housekeeper I don’t have and the cable I do allow myself.  Every moment I read or write online is a moment I should be making money.  Every hour I allow myself to work on my novel is a guilty pleasure.  Despite the fact that over the many years I have been writing I have come This Close (imagine my thumb and index finger mere centimeters away).  I’ve had two agents who adored my work but could not sell it to editors at publishing houses.  I’ve won contests and been published widely. I’ve had the editors who’ve given me those awards write me and say “By the time I send you this letter informing you your novel was a finalist in this prize I feel sure you will have already found a publisher.”  Ha! I’ve received many fellowships and been in several anthologies, and yet (dot, dot, dot). I’ve even published a groundbreaking nonfiction book to wonderful reviews that sold only a few thousand copies.

Isn’t it possible that the Sistine Chapel might have remained unfinished or The Good Soldier would be but a chapter outline had they not had patrons? Who knows what great works we never got to see at all because those guys never even had patrons in the first place?

So, if anyone is interested, applications are being accepted.  No reasonable offer will be turned down.  That way I can hire an amanuensis, housekeeper, chief cook and bottle washer, chauffeur for my teenage daughter, and I can settle down and become the next Philip Roth.

Barring that, I’m open to a MacArthur Grant.