Not just any book, this book: The Starving Artists Survival Guide

So what if I’m not exactly starving? It doesn’t have a single recipe for spicing up a seven-cent package of ramen with a bit of fresh-caught alley cat. No, this is a book for the rejected artist, and I am most certainly numbered in that crowd.

This book has instructions for Fun With Rejection Letters! (Try a toilet paper effigy!) It has Rejection Haiku! (Skipping to mailbox/find my own SASE/rot, editor, rot.) It has reassurance (Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, then wrote a glowing review under a pen name. Dustin Hoffman was a janitor, Whoopi Goldberg a corpse beautician.) It has encouragement (Louisa May Alcott wrote as many as fourteen hours a day. Charles Dickens regularly got up at seven a.m., took a bath in cold water, then began writing.) Compassion (Ten Good Reasons to Keep Your Head Out of the Oven) and even a good swift kick in the pants (Think you’ve got it bad? Poe was an orphan before he was two, watched his wife spend six years dying of tuberculosis, was so poor he lived on molasses and bread for weeks at a time, and died at forty from inflammation of the brain.)

Also included are discussions of the Housing Situation (Lofts aren’t easy to come by, and mom’s basement means your sex life is doomed), interior decorating on an artist’s income (bean cans are surprisingly versatile!), and The Artist as Social Animal (When the concept of “a nice little vacation” is suggested…)

Described as “A Blackened Chicken Soup for the Artistic Soul,” this book lives up to its name. It brings hope and a much needed snicker or six.

And when all else fails, remember: When someone once robbed Picasso’s garret, they took everything but his art.

He who laughs last, my friend.

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