Wealth & Money Quote by Tony Hillerman

There’s a quiet bait-and-switch in Hillerman framing these essays as a mere graduate-school “project.” He’s naming the credential chase - the Master of Arts, the respectable ticket back into letters - while letting the real story leak out between the clauses: a working journalist walking away from the daily churn and choosing, deliberately, to be taught again.

The syntax does the work. It’s one long sentence built on plainspoken pivots: “when I quit,” “and went back.” No romance about vocation, no myth of the novelist as destined genius. Instead, Hillerman casts writing as labor with a résumé attached. The subtext is mildly defiant: you can leave the newsroom without renouncing seriousness; you can seek institutional validation without letting it define the work. Calling the collection “my project” sounds modest, but it also claims ownership. This wasn’t an assignment that happened to become a book; it was a self-directed retooling.

Context matters: mid-century American letters treated the MFA pipeline and the newsroom as rival training grounds, one associated with refinement, the other with grit. Hillerman’s line bridges them. He positions the essays as a hinge between professional reporting and literary craft, hinting that the observational muscle of an editor can be repurposed into narrative voice. The title itself - The Great Taos Bank Robbery - suggests the kind of local, textured American story a newsroom would notice first. The degree may have been the pretext; the deeper intent was reinvention.