The idea first came to her after she’d gotten a scholarship to a workshop on formal poetry at a little college in Pennsylvania. Tuition was over two thousand dollars, and the workshop had attracted more than a few Christian poets, who’d flown in from all over the country. They’d been good workshop participants, polite and deferential, dutifully taking copious notes about their poems. Though they were better dressed and more formally educated than the evangelical Christians Marianne had grown up with, she recognized the same placid countenances: self-satisfaction masquerading as serenity. During a discussion of process, Marianne had been surprised and a little horrified to discover that many of them wrote more than one poem a day.

That was years ago, and the evangelicals, it seemed, had more and more to say. In Marianne’s hometown, religious signs, haphazardly stenciled onto primer-painted plywood, began to appear by the roadside, along with political messages, mostly veiled threats against President Obama. Letters to the editor, which frequently invoked God, now took up two whole pages of their tiny weekly paper. In many parts of the country, it was okay now to question anything put forth by science—evolution, climate change, black holes—as an attack on God. And they had money: you could turn on any television set to see as much.

The motel was on the gulf, Eric was telling her, with a pool and a sculpture garden designed by his aunt. It was near Sarasota, a haven for artists of all kinds. What could be more inspirational to a community of inspirational writers?

“But that was a joke,” Marianne said, twisting the coiled black phone cord around her arm. “A joke about taking money from Christians. Which I’m all about, but it was a joke.”

“Think about it,” Eric said. “You’re getting kicked out of your apartment—where else will you go? You wouldn’t have to teach.”

“I’d have to teach Christians.”

“For two weeks at a time!” he said. “And it wouldn’t be Christians, necessarily. We could sell it as a place to work on inspirational writing.”

“Inspirational writing.” Marianne scraped a kitchen chair across the linoleum and sat down near the fan. She’d found the chair on the street and always meant to fix it up—paint the rusty legs a cheerful color, replace the cracked vinyl seat. It was absurd to think that someone with so little follow-through, someone who couldn’t even do minor DIY projects or pay her bills on time, would be successful at running a school.

“Right,” said Eric, apparently taking her silence for interest. “It’s really popular right now, it has been for years. Especially the Christian market. And no one is capitalizing on that. We would be the first.”

“Listen to you,” she said. “Capitalize. Selling. We didn’t go to school to learn to sell our work. I didn’t, anyway. Clearly.”