On Writing Poverty

A trope, a trend, and still, poor writers are marginalized.

My first fiction manuscript won an award at my school but never got picked up by an agent, and it lives in a drawer now. It’s called THE OPEN CURTAIN. The book is semi-autobiographical— about a former stripper turned wildland firefighter whose mother gets sick. The protagonist (me, essentially) has to quit firefighting and come home to Olympia, WA, to care for her mother.

The book is about poverty, drug addiction, and how easy it is for a past that someone considers “shameful” (though I don’t believe in being ashamed about my past anymore) to reach into the present and pull someone down into it. How easy it is to be drowned by the things we had to do and the people we were while living in poverty, and how poverty is always right there, at the doorstep, waiting.

It’s my belief that the book didn’t get picked up because it wasn’t polished enough, and/or because it avoided the tropes that exist in literature about poverty. The thing is, many writers who write poverty haven’t experienced …