Writing Poverty

 I should be able to answer this question from The Walrus: Why Is It So Hard for Writers to Talk about the Working Class?

When I started turning my Indiana experiences into short stories, I was going back to an idea I had forty years ago. Then I ran up against William Faulkner and could not find anything comparable in Indiana history. What I realized now was there was something comparable: the failure of the economy in the factory towns of Indiana, but even it was through the lives of middle class types, mostly. Even those are not getting published. So it goes.

Why I gave up writing 40 years ago was money and not feeling like I had anything worth telling comparable to my models. I lacked the nerve contained in the following:

When the panel moderator turned to writer Sylvia McNicoll and asked to what she credited her “longevity as a writer,” McNicoll gave an unexpected—and honest—answer: “I credit my longevity as a writer to always being able to accept less income.”

When talking about an industry that brings $1.7 billion to the Ontario economy alone, her statement is shocking—but so are the numbers. “There’s a class issue that we don’t always talk about in writing and publishing, where you need to be able to afford this life,” acknowledged John Degen, the executive director of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He pointed out that the average annual income authors earn from their writing is around $10,000.

As a result, there will be voices and stories we won’t and can’t hear. “We are not going to hear from poor people,” said McNicoll. They’re too busy hustling multiple jobs, they’re tired, they don’t have the resources to buy the mental space to write. This means that the stories we do hear will be told by certain specific voices: those who can afford to tell stories, whether those stories are their own or others’. In a later conversation with me, McNicoll noted she had been able to operate as a writer making less and less money because she had other jobs and because she had a husband with a full-time job.

That is Canada, it is here.

Writing, the arts define our culture, and I think much of the rise of MAGA is a distortion or a misunderstanding of American culture. Read the article for the difference between Canadian poor and American poor, and the Canadians worry that voices are being silenced, that their culture is distorted.

That’s one of the most powerful aspects of storytelling: when you hear the first-hand, authentic voices of those who have experiences vastly different from your own, you become a part of the storyteller’s world. “I don’t understand why people feel so threatened by having to learn about a variety of different life experiences—and maybe care about them,” says Vannicola. “Most people are passive, which is part of the problem.” It’s easy to stay within your own community, not having to see how others live, not having to know hardships. And if you don’t know those stories, you don’t have to feel responsible for them.

But who we hear from is often a function of those who have the power to amplify their stories and voices—or, equally, to choose not to hear them. That’s why authentic voices are so important. Listening to a story like Harris’s frames a perspective that allows you to see a different point of view while making it difficult to turn your head away. Then, Vannicola says, you have to ask yourself: What are you going to do about it?

What are Americans doing to protect our culture?

sch 6/19