Editor's Note:

The line between amateur and professional is much clearer in the trades than in the arts. The cleanest, but slipperiest, distinction is between those who get paid for their work and those who do not. A student recently announced that her fashion blog garnered her an income of 68 cents, through paid advertisement. Is she now a professional writer?

Conversely, should the distinction be whether an individual can make a living at writing? Like many fiction-writers, it takes me roughly 3-5 years to write and publish a book—which I have done three times—the total of which has yielded me barely five figures. I write every day and get paid for what I produce, but could scarcely pay the bills by writing alone, much less support a family. Am I then not a professional writer?

I'm interested in the amateur/professional line, not for how it may validate those who live on one side of the fence, but for what it says about those writers who stand on its broad beams.

Some of the best writers, poets, and translators who have appeared in the pages of Pleiades derive their primary income from activities other than writing. Apart from teachers and editors, they are computer scientists (Zachary Mason), software developers (Brian Jay Stanley), medical device quality assurance managers (Elizabeth Wright), and lawyers (Daniel Ginsburg). We cannot rightly call them "outsider artists"—are not all of us trained in language?—but we might acknowledge that their art is a result of pure passion for storytelling or poetry without being tinged by the dye of careerism.

Featured in this issue are four writers for whom this is either their very first story publication (Kaia Preus and Eli Barrett) or nearly so (Jie Liu and Kate Velguth). These literary discoveries include students and writers from other professions. Kaia is a museum visitor coordinator. Eli is an elementary school librarian. Kate is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. Jie is a graduate student from China. This "class" of four emerging voices represents a generation of writers that is not bound to the same definitions of amateur and professional that defined the previous generation of writers. Whether an individual is MFA-bound or destined for the office or the factory or the classroom is no longer the sole determiner of their literary output. A distinctive literary voice can come from anywhere, and Pleiades has long been the incubator for this far-flung and unconventionally trained breed.

Of the many kinds of diversity that we strive to take into account, vocational diversity is often overlooked. It is not as formative of identity, of course, as race, or class, or gender, all of which are inextricably bound up in our forever-selves. Yet how an individual spends his/her workday can have a deep influence on their worldview, and without a range of professions represented in the literary arts, the varieties of experience that we can collectively draw upon are narrowed to the point of insularity. I encourage my writing students to interview real people doing the jobs that their characters are doing, so that their representations of those professions aren't shaped, by default, by pop culture types. Without this kind of outreach, their work would be diminished. But without writers speaking from within those actual professions, as rare as they may be, the culture as a whole is diminished.

So, Vivas to those who light bunsen burners! And to those who put up drywall! And to all those who stand in the glow of the copy machines! And to those who change the ink in the copy machines! The world needs your words too, and Pleiades awaits you.