How Xhenet Aliu Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Books
“The more hours you put in at your job, the more money you made. Why would you risk going into debt for school?”
Xhenet Aliu is the author of the novel Brass and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize winner for her novel Domesticated Wild Things. Aliu has worked as a waitress, an office temp, and a private investigator and is now an academic librarian and creative writing instructor. Here’s how she made ends meet.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Medium: Growing up, what did “going to work” mean?
Xhenet Aliu: It meant working on an assembly line somewhere, having a card you punched into a machine. I grew up in a 100 percent blue-collar family. Construction or manufacturing was pretty much it. I worked the feminine version of these—service jobs or the front office.
But in the ’90s, manufacturing was hit really hard. The factories would shut down except for maybe five or six people, because to close down altogether made them responsible for environmental cleanup. My mom always managed to squeak through the layoffs as part of that skeleton crew because she has an incredible work ethic. My stepdad was in construction, and if…
