I've always wanted to be successful as a writer, to find the rhythms of my own stories and a voice others wanted to hear. I've studied for eleven years, and never lived the moment I have so often imagined: holding a freshly-published story or reading a congratulatory letter from a first-rate editor. You might say writing is its own reward, but that's bullshit.

What or who made me think I could write? When I go back to try and find a reason for the mess I'm in now (my uncertain career, my un-payable debt, my isolation) I remember a seemingly inconsequential college job at, of all places, an antiquarian book store, a few friends and fathers, and a small town I had escaped to, Sarasota.

Right now there are about 20,000 unaccomplished, undergraduate writers and more than 3,000 graduates like me who are polishing and revising just as many unpublished novels and stories. Who, like me, have spent years studying craft and language to produce work that will never be well-published, that will never support families, create retirement plans, or generate jobs. In fact, every year, thousands graduate from well over one hundred institutions where fiction technique is studied, and find themselves in the same dire circumstances. And that's me. Number 16,467. No distinctions whatsoever.

It's important to understand that any one of these students, that I, could have been convinced to go into law or optometry or internal medicine—any number of respectable careers that need intelligent apprentices. John Gardner once advised that writing is, "at least as hard as brain surgery." But I didn't get a straight forward speech from an MD Uncle or a successful neighbor about wasting my worthy mind.

Instead, professors and successful writers made fantastic arguments in the journals I admired about the relevance of writing programs, the significance of art and culture and writing in relation to teaching and artistic endeavor. They discuss, or really, argue over the importance of writers, defend or attack the quality of writing the programs produce. They discuss the crisis in the academic job market and offer solace, justification to the unemployed. But no one seems to wonder why so many people believe they have the talent, or the intelligence, or whatever it takes, to become writers in the first place. Because maybe James Michener was right when he said in a fiction workshop I attended at Eckerd College almost nine years ago: if you don't think you can do it better than Tolstoy we don't need you.

In 1991, in my early twenties, I moved from the suburbs of Tampa, Florida with my new wife, Leah, 150 miles down the gulf coast to a small, tourist town. I'd met Leah when she was the receptionist of an animal hospital where I also worked as a veterinary technician. I liked her articulate fingers when she handed files to me, as well as her turquoise ring, her tough, country-girl smile, her curly, dark hair and the sterling silver band she wore around her bicep. Leah wanted to be an RN. She had just inherited a house in Sarasota and that's why we moved there.

Over the years Leah's mother had built on and on — bedrooms and living rooms and bathrooms — until the house became a sprawling five-bedroom estate. We lived happily in the old sections, in the dark, red-cedar paneled rooms where, from the jalousie windows, I watched a small strip of beach off Sarasota Bay appear at low tide every morning for the next five years.

My desire to write grew in that house, in that marriage, and was supported by the town of Sarasota and my job in the heart of it. It could have been the security of a marriage and a house plus outside influences, legends of writers, and coincidence. I just don't know precisely. But I believe that the business owners and city commissioners, and the various committees for economic growth wanted to promote and foster a literary image. They wanted to keep the past alive because it was good business. And Sarasota did have a literary past, somewhat. It pulled me in, and was exactly what I didn't need. Let me explain.

In Downtown Sarasota, in the early nineties, you might have found a cafe surrounded by red geraniums, a little place owned by an alleged former high-class French prostitute named Sylvie who served the finest brie omelets I've tasted. Her art nouveau wrought iron tables faced the street and sidewalk, and on Sunday afternoons the twelve-speed bikes were tipped three deep against short, old-fashioned street lamps with glass crowns.

Not far from Sylvie's you could walk to the Foster Harmon gallery where original paintings by the brothers Raphael and Moses Soyer, as well as Milt Avery and Andrew Wyeth were sold. There was also a Foster Harmon gallery in New York City. Like much of Sarasota, The Foster Harmon was a winter business—a pipeline from the artistic and cultural Mecca that New York City was to me then as a Southerner who'd never traveled farther than Atlanta. The Foster Harmon was where I first stood before a painting that was selling for over 300,000 dollars and tried to understand why. My father is a painter. His paintings have titles like, Massacre of the Innocents, Agony Masks, Bitter Picture and Detached Female Grooming in Harsh Landscape.

Most of my father's paintings are over six feet tall and just as wide. To a boy they seemed monstrous. They have dark backgrounds with faint images of cities in the distance, or mountains, and then figures, mostly people, up close, but with strange distortions. You see floating ledges, snake-like torsos, intestines, whole bodies with tails and arms fighting for the center of the canvas. The people, the figures, often looked to me like they were in tremendous pain.

I can't do my father's career justice. But, during the sixties and seventies—just around the time I was born—he was doing well. Galleries in New Orleans showed his work and sold many of the paintings I've only seen in gallery monographs and brochures. I've walked down Toulouse with him and stared at the boarded-up oval windows, the rutted porches, the rusted iron gingerbread of buildings that he says were once galleries and offices and apartments where he played out the early days of his career, and where he lost it.

Because sometime in the early eighties my father's career ended. The reasons are not entirely clear, but what is left over is unambiguous. He lives in a condemned double shotgun filled with paintings. Sometimes, the house has no running water, and if it does run, the water is bad. It has a sour smell like spoiled black beans and if you make the mistake of drinking it, it has a heavy, aluminum and dirt taste. Clearly, I stood in front of Milt Avery's little sketched palm trees, the cartoonish sky and sand and wondered why Milt Avery's painting was on that wall and not my father's. It was then I became aware of history in terms of men who made things. And in making the thing, a painting, a novel, a movie, there were no promises.