Keep the Home Fires Burning

Rosalia working in the studio

Keep the Home Fires Burning: Why Your Creative Life Must Be the Center

Why Holding a Job Outside the Studio Isn’t Always a Detour

Let’s say you’re an artist, a poet, a composer—whatever form your practice takes. You’ve got your fire, your vision, your discipline. But you’ve also got bills. You’ve got gravity. And maybe you’ve got a job. Not in the studio, not at the easel or keyboard, but in an office, a hospital, a classroom, a cab. You clock in, clock out, and maybe it gnaws at you. Maybe it makes you feel like you're betraying your calling.

You're not. You’re in good company.

Your inner creative life—your vision, your voice, your fire—is the core. Everything else must orbit around that. Your creative life is not a luxury, not a hobby, not something you get to if there’s time. If it’s the center, then your job, whatever it may be, must revolve around it.

This goes against the grain of how most of the world is set up. We’re taught to get a good job first, fit in our art second, and call it “balance.” But for artists, poets, composers—who know this is their life’s work—that doesn’t work. That’s backwards. You can’t put the flame on the periphery and expect it not to go out.

And yet, you still have to live. Which means you still have to work.

But it turns out, you’re in good company.

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The Company You Keep

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Visual Artists

Philip Guston (Painter, WPA artist, teacher)

“Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.”
While Guston didn’t speak much about his early employment with the WPA, it gave him a structure and sense of purpose during the Depression and introduced him to large-scale public works—formative for his later murals.

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Henry Darger (Janitor, reclusive artist)

He left no interviews, but in his posthumous journals:

“Work is for money. Art is for the world I know inside.”
Darger worked quietly for decades, creating his 15,000-page novel and massive artworks, proving that even the most invisible laborer might carry an epic inner world.

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Poets and Writers

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T.S. Eliot (Banker, Faber & Faber editor)

“I like my job. It's peaceful. It leaves my mind free to think.”
Eliot found that the structure and routine of his bank job allowed his poetic mind to incubate ideas without being financially pressured.

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Wallace Stevens (Insurance executive)

“It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job.”
“Money is a kind of poetry.”
He was vice president of an insurance company and won the Pulitzer Prize while working full time. For Stevens, the job offered stability and a counterbalance to the abstractions of poetry.

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William Carlos Williams (Physician)

“I’ve had to learn that the thing I am doing will never be done. That’s the work of art.”
“The job gave me the chance to see real life.”
Williams treated patients during the day and wrote at night. His medical work directly shaped his poetic observations, giving him raw, unfiltered encounters with humanity.

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Franz Kafka (Insurance clerk)

“My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling.”
Kafka deeply resented his day job, feeling it drained his energy and fragmented his creative time. Still, some scholars believe the bureaucratic absurdity he faced fueled his fiction (The Trial, The Castle).

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Charles Bukowski (Postal worker)

“It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse. … It’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man over the edge.”
Bukowski quit the post office at age 49, but it provided the raw material for his early books. He described the years there as both soul-killing and strangely rich in observation.

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Composers and Musicians

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Charles Ives (Insurance executive)

“My work in insurance was to me just as important as my music.”
“You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.”
Ives pioneered modernist American music, but refused to rely on it for income. He built a successful career selling insurance and composed at night, claiming the separation preserved the integrity of both.

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Philip Glass (Plumber, cab driver)

“I was careful never to take a job that would require any intellectual energy. I knew that I needed that for my music.”
Even after Einstein on the Beach premiered at the Met, he kept driving a cab. Once, he delivered plumbing supplies to a client who recognized him and said, “But you’re Philip Glass!” to which he replied, “Yes, but I’m working today.”

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Erik Satie (Cabaret pianist)

“Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself.”
Satie worked for years in nightclubs and cabarets in Montmartre, playing background music. The repetitive, minimalist structures he played for pay helped shape his unique style.

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Themes in Their Reflections

• Stability vs. Freedom – For Stevens and Williams, the job gave psychological and financial stability.

• Conflict and Sacrifice – Kafka felt torn, viewing the job as a thief of time and soul.

• Integration – Ives and Williams viewed their professions as sources of inspiration.

• Discipline and Duality – Glass carefully chose jobs that wouldn’t interfere with his real work: composing.

• Humility and Camouflage – Many, like Bukowski and Darger, created in obscurity without seeking attention.

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Choose the Job That Lets You Stay Awake

Not all jobs are created equal, especially for an artist. Some jobs bleed you dry. They take the same part of you that your work needs—the attention, the intuition, the emotional depth, the clarity. Others ask for your body but leave your mind free. Or they give you structure and rhythm without draining your inner life.

The trick is to find work that doesn’t compete with your art for the same oxygen.

Philip Glass knew this. That’s why he chose plumbing and cab driving—not out of low ambition, but high strategy.

That’s a level of awareness most artists don’t get taught in school. You have to ask: What part of me does this job use? What part of me does it feed? What part of me does it starve?

Some artists need silence after creative work. Others need movement, contact, even a little chaos. Some thrive in routine, others in the unpredictability of service work. Some need to be surrounded by life—like William Carlos Williams making house calls as a doctor. Others, like Kafka, work behind a desk and learn to build labyrinths from bureaucracy.

A good job won’t make your art for you—but it might make it possible.

And maybe, just maybe, it’ll keep you from demanding that your art carry too much. Art isn’t meant to solve your finances, win you a reputation, or make you feel worthwhile. It’s meant to be your authentic path in life. And if a day job helps you keep it that way—so be it.

Choose wisely and strategically. Choose humbly. Choose with one ear pressed to the ground.

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Jobs That Can Starve Your Art

Just as some jobs leave your creative core intact—or even feed it—others quietly dismantle it. These are the jobs that take more than they give. They might look impressive, pay well, or seem like the “smart choice,” but if they rob you of clarity, time, or the subtle pulse of intuition, they’re too expensive.

Avoid jobs that:

1. Require Constant Decision-Making or Emotional Investment

Jobs in management, counseling, law, high-pressure sales, or anything that demands constant mental or emotional engagement often leave little left for your own work. These roles consume the same parts of the self that art draws from—discernment, empathy, insight—and can leave you too depleted to create.

2. Blur the Line Between Your Art and Commerce

Creative-adjacent jobs can be seductive: graphic design, advertising, gallery work, even teaching art full-time. But they can also tangle your creative instinct in approval-seeking and productivity metrics. If the job hijacks your artistic voice for someone else’s vision, it may slowly dissolve your own.

3. Require You to Perform a Persona

Any role where you're constantly “on”—customer service, acting as a brand ambassador, sales rep, or public-facing personality—can erode your sense of inner quiet. If you’re always wearing a mask, it gets harder to return to the blank page or canvas honestly.

4. Demand Long, Rigid Hours Without Recovery Time

It’s not just the hours—it’s what they cost you. Many artists can work long days and still make art if the job leaves the mind free. But jobs that steal your mornings and your nights with nothing left in between become a kind of slow starvation.

5. Appeal to Your Ego but Not Your Soul

Sometimes the worst jobs are the ones that flatter you—roles where you’re praised, promoted, or paid well but slowly lose track of what you were trying to do in the first place. If the job becomes your identity, the art can get buried beneath it.

The Question to Ask

At the end of the day, the most important question is:

Does this job align with my long term goals, or does it slowly destroy them?

If it pays the rent, gives you a rhythm, lets your inner world stay lit—and you can walk away from it at the end of the day with a quiet heart—that’s a good job.

And if not, it might be time to make a change.

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Let the Art Stay Sacred

When you’re not relying on your art to pay every bill, win approval, or prove your worth, you’re free to let it stay authentic and sincere. You can make what needs to be made, not concerned about what sells. You can fail without fear. You can grow without performance pressure. You can hold the line between soul and market.

That’s the long game. That’s how the real ones last.

So yes—work. But don’t forget what the work is really for. You are protecting something. Feeding something. Keeping something lit.

And that something is the reason you’re here.

Make everything else revolve around that.