Jill Bialosky's Move to the Big City Documented at Literary Hub

This week, Literary Hub invites readers to check out an excerpt from Jill Bialosky's new memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life. In it, Bialosky divulges the details of her experience relocating from the Midwest to Manhattan, as a recent M.F.A. graduate: "The city is a strange, forbidding place, so many people trapped on one island. I am overwhelmed by the smells of rotting fruit and cooked meat from the street vendors, the garbage, the way in which the city’s inhabitants adopt the street as their private living room." Let's pick up there: 

I’m a Midwest girl; I’m used to open spaces. There are times when I begin to doubt my calling and my reasons for being here. I won’t survive on poetry alone. I have to eat and figure out how to support myself. I go to Bolton’s discount clothing store and buy my first suit and pair of black pumps for job interviews. The color of the pencil skirt and matching jacket I choose is cranberry, and when I look in the mirror, I feel immediately grown up. I barely recognize myself. I answer an ad in the New York Times for a position as an editorial assistant for a religion and philosophy editor at a university press where I’m required to take a typing test. I interview and am hired for the position. I’m glad to have a job that pays the rent, offers health benefits, and doesn’t involve waiting on customers in a restaurant.

It’s my first real nine-to-five job. I type letters, file correspondence, and take phone messages. I prepare manuscripts for production and occasionally read submissions and write reports about them. I’m fascinated by the various stages of how a book is made, how it arrives in the form of carefully typed manuscript pages and roughly 12 months later it becomes a book. I share a tiny, two-room apartment on West 73rd, in a building where many aging ex-Zeigfield Follies actresses reside, with a poet friend and classmate from the Iowa Workshop. When I pass through the lobby on my way to work, the ladies, with their dyed blue-and-purple hair, thick make-up, and sagging skin, congregate there with their shopping carts, glancing at themselves in the mirrored wall. In Midtown the city is a teeming hive of concrete and glass. Everywhere I look, more buildings, more anonymous strangers filling subway cars and rushing in and out of offices. At night, home from the office, I retire to my room, sit at my musty, flea-market-find oak desk, turn on my Selectric typewriter, and work on poems. I flip through poetry books for inspiration and companionship. I am restless, unsure, lonely. Eight months pass and I hear about a new position at a trade house that publishes fiction and poetry and is more suited to my interests. I apply and am offered a job and eagerly accept. I like my new job, but I wonder if I’ve made the right choice, if I’ll ever publish a book of my own, or be able to support myself in this city. Outside my window, in the street below, people dine in cafés and drink in bars, or stroll home after the theater or a concert. Sometimes it seems as if the whole city is going on without me and an unnamed desire travels through my being. Sometimes that desire is so great I can’t contain it. I get dressed and go out and walk up and down Broadway just to get out of my own head. The desire is like a red coal burning inside my body.

Read more at Literary Hub. After you get done there, you may want to keep reading because poetry will save your life.