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 true poverty. The most famous, well-received poverty narratives are often written by writers who’ve had access to excellent education and know how to write a super-tight, polished, sensationalized narrative. They package their poor characters into neat little boxes. Because they can. Because they have distance.
Those of us who have lived, are living, and/or continue to live in poverty— those of us who’ve had to move several times a year because of evictions, who’ve been plunged into darkness mid-winter because of an unpaid electricity bill, who’ve survived on Top Ramen and were raised without babysitters or daycare or private school (or even consistent public school); those of us to whom the writing world and writing life once seemed (or still seems) like a fantasyland or pipe dream— we don’t have the privilege of that distance.
Whenever I am writing about poverty, my characters are always versions of me or the people I’ve loved. Most of them are dead. Parts of me are dead, and I must revive them when I write.
The act of remembering itself is a renewing of the trauma of poverty and everything that comes with it. It’s really hard. Painful. And within that remembering I am doing myself and everyone I’ve known an injustice unless I write against the cliche’d and familiar narratives of poverty. Because we aren’t like that. We are and were real people, living real lives. Lives just as meaningful as any one else’s.
I am tired of middle-class and above writers writing poverty.
This is not because I think that writers should only write what they know. This is not me saying you can write anything, just make sure it’s good. This is because, when a writer who has not experienced poverty writes poverty narratives, they are engaging with a specific and particular history of writers with privilege writing about poverty, and they are edging out the voices of writers who have experienced or are experiencing poverty.
How can you truly write a character who has experienced life without a safety net and felt the visceral and terrifying abyss of homelessness (or the real threat of it) if you have not experienced that yourself? Is it truly possible to do so without perpetuating the marginalization of impoverished writers?
I don’t think it is.
And why not write about poverty from a particular perspective? A perspective of someone middle-class or higher?
Because you can also engage with poverty and concepts of capitalism from that perspective.
Why not? Because writing poverty well gives writers clout. It’s an aura. In the writing world, and in the art world in general, coming from poverty or knowing poverty has an aura. But only if you can do it really well (read: in a way that doesn’t challenge the upper classes too terribly), and keep the narrative tight. Then you’ve made it.
There’s this weird thing I’ve noticed with my rich friends. This kind of shame about their privilege.
I get it. I’m white. As a white person I have a lot of unearned privilege, despite having been poor for most of my life. But I don’t try to hide my whiteness or what it has given me. Yet, many of my wealthy (middle-class and above is wealthy to me!) friends and/or peers get poverty confused with not having money.
I remember when I was working as a server while I was in college— my co-worker was complaining about being poor. But really, she didn’t have spending money. Her parents had money and she could have called them and asked them for help.
I did not have anyone to call and ask for help, and I still don’t. My safety net is GoFundMe.
I remember when one of my friends tried to justify her very expensive car when I said something along the lines of I don’t know why someone would spend 80k on a car when that could pay for someone’s college. What they didn’t understand was that I wasn’t criticizing them, I was criticizing a system that’s existed forever. One where some people are born into wealth, and most are born into poverty.
Those of us that exist in this writer’s world, who came from poverty— actual poverty— the kind with abuse and neglect and single parents and absent parents and living with relatives and not enough food and the television as our parent and cavities and falling-apart houses and flappy shoes— we have stories to tell, too.
And we’re tired of other people pretending to know our stories.
They don’t. They can’t.
As I write this, I also have to acknowledge: I am someone who got out. Though I still live below the poverty level currently, I have resources many of my peers do not have, and may never have. In writing poverty, I must acknowledge that I have something others didn’t have. That my mother married a middle-class man when I was thirteen, and his money offered me something. This, despite what he stole from me. That from the ages of 18-27, I could ask for money and it would be there. So, I have experienced that safety net. And I have experienced (and continue to experience) its absence, like two giant bookends, which only make its temporary presence more meaningful.
In the second year of my MFA I wrote a short story about R. Kelly. It was a good story (uh…on the sentence level??), except I failed to state outright the race of my characters, or the content I was engaging with.
Luckily, my workshop wasn’t white. Though it’s telling that the white half of my workshop thought my story was good, and I should keep working on it, while the feedback from my workshop-mates of color was: what the fuck is going on here, and why do you need to write this story?
I wanted to write the story because I have been kidnapped. Because I have been sexually exploited. Because I was a sex-worker. But why write it through the lens of R. Kelly, and the stories of Black women? Well, that reasoning was selfish. I wanted to use that material. It was edgy. It made my story, I thought, more interesting. I also wanted to give voice to those women trapped in that house, but the truth is that it wasn’t my place, because my voice is not and will never be their voices. I’m grateful to my workshop-mates for their honesty. Then, and other times. I never revised that story.
And I will never write from the POV of a Black character, or an Indigenous character, or a character outside of my personal experience or perspective. I simply isn’t my place, and really, I don’t need to. I have my own stories to tell.
But I will definitely read as many of those stories as I can get my hands on. Because those stories have a lot to teach me, as a writer and as a human being.
I feel fine writing a character who is wealthy. Because I know about wealth in a way that a wealthy person will never know about poverty. I have felt wealth’s power over me, in the same way I’ve felt men’s power over me. Having worked in a service position (nanny, housecleaner) for wealthy people, I feel I have that right.
But they could never write accurately about me, because I was always serving them— they only saw the version of myself I created to please them. And that dynamic exists inherently between the wealthy and poor; at least in my experience. There is this part of me that always wants to please whose with power over me. Because I have felt the consequences of that power.
But I will not write a character who is Black from a first-person POV. I don’t think that’s my place as a white writer. For many reasons— but also because in writing a Black story, or a story from any marginalized perspective with which I have no personal experience, I am taking someone’s voice away. I am a marauder, plundering the richness of someone else’s life and pretending to know it, and then capitalizing on that success. In writing someone else’s experience, I am stealing something.
To steal someone’s story, a writer has to lie to themselves and create a fortress of justification. Which is why so many writers who do this, and have done this, refuse to engage with the very populations who call them out (the populations they purported to care about by “empathizing” with their experiences). Because they’d have to admit what they’ve done.
In the above tweet, aureleo sans is commenting on two recent releases about which I have little knowledge, but the phenomenon is a familiar one. She, like me, has experienced homelessness. I don’t know her, but I know that our voices are few. That those of us who have been homeless are often robbed of our voices, and always robbed of our humanity. And I know that, when writers choose to write poverty because they want to write a good story, and poverty seems more interesting to them than the middle-class or wealthy, they are failing to see how fucked-up they are. Because it’s not just poor people who are fucked-up. In fact, some of the least fucked-up people I know are poor, and/or grew up poor. Some of the most honest people I know come from poverty.
Some of the most dishonest people I know are rich. Because rich people have to lie to themselves in order to justify their wealth. In a way, that’s harder to write. So I can understand why a writer coming from a financially stable background might not want to look at themselves in that way.
Really, it’s braver to write what you can understand, because it forces you to look at yourself clearly. Maybe that’s why so many white writers refuse to write about their whiteness, and instead want only to write the “other.” Because in writing the “other,” they don’t have to look at themselves honestly. Instead, they can tell themselves they’re developing “empathy” by trying to live in someone else’s perspective.
What if empathy isn’t about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes? What if it’s about looking at yourself clearly enough that you can see people for who they are, rather than strengthening your projection of who you think they are, or should be? What if seeing people for who they are dissolves their “otherness,” and by writing the “other” and continuing to view them as “other” even while writing their stories, it only strengthens the sense of saviorism sewn like a thread of poison through whiteness?
In this Variety piece, Alexander Chee writes about writing the other (he also writes about this in his book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (aureleo sans cites this downthread from her tweet). He asks these questions of the writer wanting to write the other:
Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view?
Do you read writers from this community currently?
Why do you want to tell this story?
He answers these questions beautifully, and you should go read the piece and buy his book.
I wonder if many, many writers have asked themselves these questions. I wonder if the writer of that terrible book asked herself: Why do I want to tell this story? If there wasn’t some white savior part of herself who thought: I can tell this story better than the people I’m writing about can tell it.
Because a story can always be told differently.
And as Chee says in his answer to “Why do you want to tell this story,” writing a story that isn’t yours requires a lot of work. Sensitivity readers (the concept of which I am incredibly suspicious, given that it implies one opinion from one group equals all opinions from one group) and research. Why not write it from where you are, instead of assuming knowledge and experience you don’t have?
This does not limit fiction. It expands its breadth.Writing from a limited space of knowing limits fiction.
And who says fiction needs to be a certain way because it’s been a certain way? Voices are allowed to exist in the zeitgeist that weren’t allowed in before. So, what are you adding when you write?
I am even asking myself this question as I write this, because I know many people who can and will say what I am saying better than I am saying it. But I know poverty, so that’s the story I’ll stick to here.
I’m not asking you not to imagine. I am asking you to imagine better.
I am saying: just because you can write it well (according to whom??) doesn’t mean you should write it.
Resources:
Read Craft in the Real World by Matthew Sallesses to learn about making your workshops better.
Read Roxane Gay’s Hunger because it’s good, and check out her Substack, The Audacity, where Gay showcases emerging writers. Something to know: in 2011, before I went to college at 32 and before I got my MFA, I submitted a nonfiction piece that ended up in Gay’s hands, and she gave me incredible feedback on it and generously worked with me, though it didn’t get published. She’s the “real deal” as one of my favorite people would say.
If you like aureleo sans, you should take her workshop in October.
Read this Vox First-Person piece by Myriam Gurba, about racism in that book I mentioned.
Read Kiese Laymon’s essay “You Are The Second Person” in Guernica, and then go buy his book Heavy.
Read Andrea Bennett’s essay about being poor and being a writer and also being invisible. It’s really good, and you can read it here.
Read Don Lee’s essay about a terrible waiter who did what many white people do, which is assume that whiteness equals American, and nothing else. Lee writes beautifully about the many varying responses to a racist question and the phenomenon of constantly being othered because of your appearance.
Please comment below with resources and thoughts!