NEW YORK, April 7 — “I might be close to solvent,” the poet and essayist Brian Blanchfield said, “but I still think like a deeply insolvent person.”

Blanchfield, 42, was in a conference room near Times Square recently as part of an unusual group: 10 sometimes-struggling writers suddenly in possession of US$50,000 (RM194,987) each. Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards, given annually to up-and-coming authors of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, they were learning how to handle not just the unexpected payouts but also the complicated emotions that money can inspire: Ignorance, confusion, shame, panic, the occasional bout of inchoate elation.

“For years I have had nothing, like zero,” one participant said. A second asked: “When you deposit a check to your bank account for US$50,000, does that affect your credit score?” (No, was the answer. In fact, the money is being handed out over two years, in two tranches of US$25,000, to dilute the tax burden.)

It’s great to receive a big wad of cash, of course, especially when you’re a writer with an erratic income trying to cobble together a living from part-time day jobs, intermittent advances, peripatetic teaching gigs and the occasional one-time grant. But unexpected sums bring unexpected burdens, both practical (What does this mean for my tax situation?) and psychological (Am I a fraud who does not deserve this money?).

“For a lot of artists who are not financially secure, a sudden windfall can be amazing,” said Amy Smith, who was leading the workshop. “But it can also bring new anxiety about how to manage it and plan for it.”

Smith, a director of a dance theatre company in Philadelphia and an accountant who prepares taxes for people in the arts, told the writers to educate themselves. “Financial worry,” she said, shouldn’t be “the centre of your life”.

She added: “If you are concerned about your financial situation, I want to stress that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Our culture doesn’t support artists the way it should, and we internalise the chronic undervaluation of ourselves.” (Still, most of the participants said they felt uneasy enough about the subject that they asked that their names not be used for this article.)

Smith was working under the auspices of Creative Capital, a foundation that provides grants and professional support services to people in the arts. Other organisations, including the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Kresge Foundation, the Sundance Documentary Filmmaker Programme and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, offer similar programmes through Creative Capital. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation created a new grant program — the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards — that integrates Creative Capital’s financial planning curriculum into the five-year structure of the grant.

The Whiting began offering its seminars three years ago. “I suddenly had awful visions of our writers being on the hook for taxes at the end of a year that was supposed to offer them freedom,” said Courtney Hodell, the foundation’s director of writers’ programs. “The idea was to set up a space where creative people could ask questions of a professional who understands how writers live and work, talk frankly with one another about their issues and experiences around money, and generally neutralise the taboo that can keep people from making informed decisions.”

Around the table, conversation was open, candid — part useful instruction, part pep talk, part encounter group. The writers spoke of confusion and angst surrounding many of the topics Smith covered, including student loans, mortgages, retirement, credit cards, poorly paying adjunct professorships and the dreaded IRS Schedule C that self-employed people have to fill out.

“When I was a poet living under the stairs in Brooklyn, I tried to be self-employed on my taxes," Blanchfield said. (Like Harry Potter’s room at the Dursleys’ house, his studio apartment was, in fact, under the stairs.) One year, he said, he made something like US$250 from his poetry but reported US$4,500 in writing-related expenses, triggering a warning letter from the IRS about a possible audit. “It made me really scared,” he said. (“There are a lot of ways to show that you are a legitimate professional writer,” Smith counselled. “Don’t let fear prevent you from deducting for expenses.”)

After the session, several of the writers elaborated on their situations.

“There’s a temptation to use magical money for magical purposes, to say, I should just throw the money up in the air and quit my job for a year and write my book,” said Alice Sola Kim, 32, who supports herself in part from her job as the executive assistant to a Columbia University professor, writes short fiction and nonfiction for a variety of publications and is working on a novel. “But this has taught me there’s another way, too, that I can be prudent about the future.”

Like many of the writers, Kim said she had a conflicted attitude toward money. She grew up without much in Seattle — her mother was frugal, but her father was profligate.

“It can feel like this stuff just doesn’t apply to people who grow up poor or have been poor or don’t have a sense of money,” she said. “When you get money, you either hoard it like a dragon because you feel it’s not really real, or you spend it because you need to spend it. It doesn’t feel relevant to be thinking about things like Roth IRAs.”

Mitchell S. Jackson, 40 and the author of a novel and a book of essays and short stories, said that until recently he supported himself largely through teaching. At one time, he taught something like eight classes, paying between US$1,800 and US$5,500 each, at different colleges. He made a lot less than he had when he worked at his first job, dealing crack and other drugs as a teenager in Portland, Oregon.

“I don’t think I ever got it out of my mind how a drug dealer spends money,” he said, “which is really frivolous. It comes fast, and you spend it just as fast, and that’s set the tone. I know it’s not an entirely intelligent way to deal with my finances.”

In the seminar, Smith admonished the group members to refuse to work for nothing and to demand to be paid what their time and writing are worth.

“Never say, ‘I usually get x, but… ’” she advised. “That means you’ve gone in apologising. Always say, ‘My rate is y, what I need to charge is y’. Just so it’s simple and clear, like when a plumber comes to your house to fix your sink.”

Blanchfield, whose latest work, a book of essays, comes out this week, said he had been particularly inspired by this concept.

“It was like a great therapy session, in that she was saying that the right answer to anyone who wants you to work for less than you can live on, or do work that does not have a measurable gain for your writing career, is no,” he said. “The right answer is no! I thought that was pretty great.” — The New York Times