Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Heartland
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.sarahsmarsh.com/
CITY:
STATE: KS
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2010017041 |
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2010017041 |
| HEADING: | Smarsh, Sarah |
| 000 | 00395nz a2200121n 450 |
| 001 | 8219129 |
| 005 | 20100322115226.0 |
| 008 | 100322n| acannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2010017041 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Smarsh, Sarah |
| 670 | __ |a Smarsh, Sarah. Outlaw tales of Kansas, c2010: |b ECIP t.p. (Sarah Smarsh) data view (assist. prof. of English, Washburn Univ., Topeka, Kansas) |
| 953 | __ |a rf08 |
PERSONAL
Born in KS.
EDUCATION:University of Kansas, graduated; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, and educator. Washburn University, Topeka, KS, assistant professor. Has also taught at Columbia University, Ottawa University, the Writing Barn (Austin, TX), and the Lawrence Arts Center (KS). Previously, worked as a grant writer and development director for nonprofits. Member of advisory board for I’m First.
MEMBER:Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters, and Editors, Journalism and Women Symposium.
AWARDS:Fellowship, Center for Kansas Studies; Shorenstein Fellowship, Harvard University, 2018. Grants from organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Kansas Arts Commission, and Kansas Humanities Council.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the New York Times, New Yorker, London Guardian, McSweeney’s, Texas Observer, Guernica, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Pacific Standard, Longreads, VQR, and Harper’s online. Contributor to anthologies, including Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Columnist for On Being radio program.
SIDELIGHTS
Sarah Smarsh is a writer, educator, and journalist. She holds degrees from the University of Kansas and Columbia University. Smarsh has taught at colleges, including Ottawa University, Columbia University, and Washburn University. Previously, worked as a grant writer and development director for nonprofits. Smarsh has written articles that have appeared in publications, including the New York Times, New Yorker, London Guardian, McSweeney’s, Texas Observer, Guernica, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Pacific Standard, Longreads, VQR, and Harper’s online. Smarsh is the author of the books, Outlaw Tales of Kansas: True Stories of the Sunflower State’s Most Infamous Crooks, Culprits, and Cutthroats and It Happened in Kansas: Remarkable Events That Shaped History.
In 2018, Smarsh released Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. In this volume, she tells of her own family’s intergenerational poverty and her upbringing in Kansas. In an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, excerpts of which appeared on the National Public Radio website, Smarsh noted: “Toward the beginning, I directly address a term that gets at that within the context of my own racial experience, whiteness: ‘white trash.’ Trash, of course, is garbage; it is dispensable; it is, by definition, something to be thrown away. And it’s a dangerous way to talk about human beings, about ourselves, about our country. I think it says a lot about the way that power and these power structures and strata in this so-called socioeconomic ladder that we measure our country by really often informs our language in some really destructive ways.” Smarsh notes that many of her female family members were teenage mothers and that she made a conscious effort not to become one herself. She addresses sections of Heartland to August, an unborn daughter she did not have. Smarsh uses stories about her family members to illustrate the difficulty poor people have in getting ahead in today’s America.
In an interview with Angela Chen, contributor to the Longreads website, Smarsh discussed the origins of the book, stating: “When it comes to the seed of the book, or being called to write about it, that happened in childhood. My Grandma Betty, one of the main characters of my story, tells me that she remembers a time when we were driving and I was in the passenger seat and I was eight, and I said: ‘Grandma, someday I’ll write a book about you.’ The most touching part is that when she told me, I asked her: ‘Did you believe me when I said that?’ And she said: ‘Yes, I did, I just knew you would.'” Smarsh continued: “Even though we weren’t a bookish family, my mom being really the only reader in the whole crew other than myself, I had this compulsion or calling, and apparently it seemed plausible enough that she thought it would come to pass, and thirty years later it did.” Smarsh told Ryan Smith, writer on the Chicago Reader website: “For me, writing about poverty and class is a choice, but it also feels like a responsibility.”
Critics offered praised for Heartland. A Kirkus Reviews writer described it as “a potent social and economic message embedded within an affecting memoir.” Reviewing the book on the Christian Science Monitor website, Stephanie Hanes commented: “While Heartland has its flaws—a structure that sometimes feels forced, a narrative that does not smoothly transition between storytelling and sociological claims—overall the book is an absorbing, important work in a country that needs to know more about itself.” Kate Tuttle, contributor to the online version of the Boston Globe, called the volume a “sharply-observed, big-hearted memoir” and noted: “What this book offers is a tour through the messy and changed reality of the American dream, and a love letter to the unruly but still beautiful place she called home.” “Smarsh is an invaluable guide to flyover country, worth twenty abstract-noun-espousing op-ed columnists,” asserted Francesca Mari on the New York Times Online. Mari also described Heartland as “a deeply humane memoir with crackles of clarifying insight.” Writing on the Los Angeles Times website, Leah Hampton remarked: “Smarsh offers not just a revision of familiar manly tales of struggle in the sticks, but indeed a new brand of feminism, one that invokes the history of early American activism.” Anita Felicelli, critic on the Datebook website, suggested: “Understanding widening wealth inequality in our nation is a project that should concern anyone who has a conscience — a robust, expansive middle class is vital to democracy, and arguably to the functioning of our particular Constitution. Smarsh’s Heartland is a book we need: an observant, affectionate portrait of working-class America that possesses the power to resonate with readers of all classes.” “This is a difficult, but illuminating, book for these class-riven times,” wrote Amy Stewart on the Minneapolis Star Tribune Online.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2018, Joan Curbow, review of Heartland: A Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide, p. 8.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of Heartland.
Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2018, review of Heartland, p. 55.
ONLINE
BookReporter.com, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (October 16, 2018), author profile.
Boston Globe Online, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ (September 14, 2018), Kate Tuttle, review of Heartland.
Chicago Reader, https://www.chicagoreader.com/ (April 24, 2017), Ryan Smith, author interview.
Christian Science Monitor Online, https://www.csmonitor.com/ (September 12, 2018), Stephanie Hanes, review of Heartland.
Datebook, https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/ (September 15, 2018), Anita Felicelli, review of Heartland.
Longreads, https://longreads.com/ (September 18, 2018), Angela Chen, author interview.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (September 28, 2018), Leah Hampton, review of Heartland.
Minneapolis Star Tribune Online, http://www.startribune.com/ (September 23, 2018), Amy Stewart, review of Heartland.
National Public Radio Online, https://www.npr.org/ (September 16, 2018), Lulu Garcia-Navarro, author interview.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (September 10, 2018), Francesca Mari, review of Heartland.
Sarah Smarsh website, https://www.sarahsmarsh.com/ (October 16, 2018).
St. Louis Post Dispatch Online, https://www.stltoday.com/ (September 15, 2018), Dale Singer, review of Heartland.
SARAH SMARSH
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HEARTLAND: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth coming 9/18/18 from Scribner Books
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JOURNALIST Sarah has reported on socioeconomic class, politics and public policy for The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Harper's online, VQR, Pacific Standard, Longreads, Guernica, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and many others. She was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government during the spring 2018 semester.
Her book on the American working poor and her upbringing in rural Kansas, HEARTLAND: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, is forthcoming from Scribner in September 2018. She's also developing a podcast about class and rural America.
Her essays appear in Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (Penguin Books, September 2017) and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living (Simon & Schuster, January 2017).
In 2017, she wrote at length about intersections among socioeconomic class, feminism and the music and career of Dolly Parton for the roots-music publication No Depression, with partnering support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Sarah has filed more than a thousand news stories, and her essays and criticism on cultural boundaries have been published by The Cut, The Texas Observer, Creative Nonfiction, McSweeney's, The Baffler, The Morning News and more; her essays "Poor Teeth" (Aeon) and "The First Person on Mars" (Vela) were both listed as notables in Best American Essays. She was a columnist for On Being, a public-media enterprise examining meaning in the 21st century, in 2016.
Beyond work in reporting and commentary, Sarah formerly made a living writing popular-history books and airline-magazine features, revising travel guides, compiling grant proposals, editing manuscripts, writing Web copy and otherwise applying the professional pen. She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Journalism and Women Symposium.
SPEAKER Sarah has spoken on social issues, media, literature and history at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy; TedX Topeka; the Chicago Humanities Festival; Texas Book Festival; Google/Knight Foundation's Newsgeist at Arizona State's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism; Popular/American Culture Association National Conference; the Associated Writing Programs National Conference; Kansas Conference on Poverty; Southampton Writers Conference; the National Archives; KGB Bar, and numerous public radio programs, high schools, bookstores, bars, and civic organizations. She is a stage alum of Literary Death Match and other storytelling series.
EDUCATOR Sarah has taught creative writing and journalism at Washburn University, Columbia University, Ottawa University, the Writing Barn (Austin, Tex.), and the Lawrence (Kan.) Arts Center. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia, as well as degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas. Her previous education involved eight southern-Kansas schools, from a two-thousand-student high school to a two-room prairie schoolhouse.
CITIZEN A fifth-generation Kansas farm kid, Sarah is a fellow of the Center for Kansas Studies and has led or contributed to creative, public projects funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kansas Humanities Council, the Kansas Arts Commission and others. A former grant-writer and development director for social-service agencies addressing poverty, she aims for anything she writes--journalistic, literary, both or otherwise--to have a backbone of civic responsibility. As an undergraduate, she received support through the federal McNair Scholars Program, which encourages first-generation, low-income and minority college students to pursue graduate degrees and employment in academia; as a professor, she chaired the faculty-staff diversity initiative of Washburn University in Topeka. She serves on the advisory board for I'm First, a national organization funded by the Gates Foundation that provides support and resources for first-generation college students.
https://www.sarahsmarsh.com/about
Biography
Sarah Smarsh
Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics and public policy for The Guardian, VQR, NewYorker.com, Harpers.org, The Texas Observer and many others. She is currently a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. A former professor of nonfiction writing, Smarsh is a frequent speaker on economic inequality and related media narratives. She lives in Kansas. HEARTLAND is her first book.
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April 24, 2017 Arts & Culture | Lit Feature
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Sarah Smarsh’s insight into the lives of the working poor comes from her own wealth of experience
A discussion with the writer in advance of her appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival
By Ryan Smith @ryansmithwriter
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click to enlarge Sarah Smarsh
Sarah Smarsh
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[Recommended] “Rich Man, Poor Man: Tales of Two Americas”
Sat 4/29, noon-1 PM
First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple
77 W. Washington
chicagohumanities.org
$15, $12 for members, $10 for students and teachers
For her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich worked several minimum-wage jobs. In the process she documented the precarious lives of the millions of Americans who are mired in poverty—particularly in a time when "the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors." More than a decade later, freelance journalist Sarah Smarsh arrived at a sadly similar conclusion in "Poor Teeth," her incisive 2014 essay about the ever-growing class divide in America as seen through the lens of dental care (or lack thereof) and the "psychological hell" many people experience for "having poor teeth in a rich, capitalist country."
Smarsh was flooded with hundreds of messages from readers who reached out to thank her for writing about an issue that's rarely covered by the mainstream media. "It was a realization like, oh shit, I need to keep writing about these kind of things for these people because there's so few of these narratives out there," Smarsh says. "For me, writing about poverty and class is a choice, but it also feels like a responsibility."
Unlike Ehrenreich, Smarsh didn't require an immersive experiment into the world of the working poor—she's already lived it. Prior to being an Ivy League grad and college professor, the 36-year-old Kansas native was a fifth-generation farm kid whose family eked out a humble existence on subpoverty-level wages. Smarsh draws on her wealth of personal experience in a new anthology, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided State (Penguin), and her first book, In the Red (Scribner), due next year.
On Saturday, April 29, Smarsh will appear for a reading and conversation with John Freeman as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. I spoke with Smarsh over the phone about poverty, social class, and the problems of seeing politics through a red state/blue state lens.
What prompted you to focus on social class in your writing?
I never made a conscious decision to do it, but what I gravitated to as a writer has always had a common thread of somehow intersecting with economics and class and rural/urban issues. When I got the attention for "Bad Teeth" and heard so many people say 'Oh my god, I see myself in what you wrote and there are so few pieces like that out there,' it made me realize I need to keep doing this for those people and for myself. Growing up, I had a vacuum of those same kinds of narratives. To this day, the only piece of pop culture I felt I connected to and represented my people was Roseanne. She's a genius, and I'm so grateful as a ten-year-old that I had that show. I think I can speak to social class experientially in a way that not many people who end up with a platform like I have can. It's an honor.
I know bits and pieces of your biography from essays you've written. Can you give me an overview of your background and how it's shaped your work?
As a toddler, I lived in a trailer on a patch of dirt next to a windswept lake and a wheat field near Wichita. My dad is a construction worker and was a farmer and my mom lived a transient midwest life. My mom got pregnant with me when she was 17, and so they moved into what felt then like a nice little 700-square-foot tiny wooden structure out in the country. After my parents got a divorce, I moved permanently into my grandparents' farm when I was 11 and spent my adolescence and high school there. We never had cable TV or air-conditioning or computers, but we always had food and shelter and clothes, and I loved living on a farm. So I didn't think of us as poor, even though we were living under the poverty line.
It was a time when class wasn't really part of the American consciousness. I think it's finally beginning to rightly be acknowledged now. I didn't conceive of ourselves on a place on a class ladder. If I'd had that language as a teenager, I'd have considered myself middle-class. Looking back it now seems triumphant and also a little sad that there's there's such a disconnect between the language of where we thought we were on the ladder and where we actually were. I remember later going to grad school at Columbia and realizing that the annual tuition was higher than the income of anyone in my family—by a lot.
Besides bad teeth, what are some of the other effects of the kinds of poverty you and your family and community have experienced?
There's so many ways in which poverty is a violence on the body and mind. I think we often jump to the health-care discussion, but that's a very reactive after-the-fact kind of thing. Consider that the bodies of my family actually look different than the cosmopolitan class I'm now a part of. My dad has been a construction worker for almost 50 years, and his fingers are swollen to the size of hot dogs—his hands calloused and his knuckles busted. I think his fingernails have been bruised every day of my life.
Life when you're engaged in physical labor—as so many poor people are—comes with more inherent dangers. Skin cancer is very common in the rural communities like the one I grew up in. It was like a rite of passage to get a hunk of skin cut out of your face because you work in a field every day for decades. A lot of working-class jobs these days are much less about farming and factories and more health-care and service-industry work, and a lot of people I know have backaches and weight problems because the kind of food they can afford begets obesity, compounded by the fact that they can't afford health care.
When you grow up poor, there's also this psychological notion—there's isn't room or space for long-term planning. Your focus is on immediate survival. I used to take buckets of feed out to pasture to feed the cattle on a three-wheeler because (ATVs) are so dangerous, and I didn't even have a helmet.
It doesn't appear that the poverty problem is going to get any better under Trump.
Yes, Trump is a disaster, but neoliberalism under both parties has also been a disaster in so many ways. It was under Bill Clinton's watch that welfare was dismantled and poverty criminalized. The big question for progressives like myself—can the Democratic Party be salvaged? Do late capitalism and the American machine have to fall apart and be rebuilt—and that will be ugly and painful for a lot of people—or will it look like a moderate shift in the right direction? That's not going to happen under Trump, and I'm not convinced it would have unless under a very progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders.
Last fall, you wrote a piece for the Guardian about how the media wrongly turned the white working class into a scapegoat for Trump's win. "Poor whites are bad" is a narrative that won't go away.
It's convenient for the middle- and upper-class pundits and politicians who set the conversation in this country to stick up for most of the whites in this country and create a stereotype of a rural white bigot. Trump was a white phenomenon—regardless of class. My grandma is a working-class white Kansas woman who caucused for Bernie Sanders—it was the first time she ever voted in the primary. She voted for Clinton in the general and loathed Donald Trump.
Here's the thing, in my red state of Kansas, 60 percent voted Republican and 40 percent Democrat. But let's say less than half of the population voted—at least one-third of the population is erased by this red-blue map. There's so many decent working people that come in all colors and backgrounds. v
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Tags: Lit Feature, Sarah Smarsh, Poor Teeth, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided State, Chicago Humanities Fest, poverty, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders
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QUOTED: "a potent social and economic message embedded within an affecting memoir."
Smarsh, Sarah: HEARTLAND
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Smarsh, Sarah HEARTLAND Scribner (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 9, 18 ISBN: 978-1-5011-3309-1
Journalist Smarsh explores socio-economic class and poverty through an account of her low- income, rural Kansas-based extended family.
In her first book, addressed to her imaginary daughter--the author, born in 1980, is childless by choice--the author emphasizes how those with solid financial situations often lack understanding about families such as hers. Smarsh, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, lived a nomadic life until becoming a first-generation college student. Smarsh vowed to herself and her imaginary daughter to escape the traps that enslaved her mother, grandmothers, female cousins, and others in her family. "So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up's nightmare," she writes. "Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too." Because the author does not proceed chronologically, the numerous strands of family history can be difficult to follow. However, Smarsh would almost surely contend that the specific family strands are less important for readers to grasp than the powerful message of class bias illustrated by those strands. As the author notes, given her ambition, autodidactic nature, and extraordinary beauty, her biological mother could have made more of herself in a different socio-economic situation. But the reality of becoming a teenage mother created hurdles that Smarsh's mother could never overcome; her lack of money, despite steady employment, complicated every potential move upward. The author's father, a skilled carpenter and overall handyman, was not a good provider or a dependable husband, but her love for him is fierce, as is her love for grandparents beset by multiple challenges. While she admits that some of those challenges were self-created, others were caused by significant systemic problems perpetuated by government at all levels. Later, when Smarsh finally reached college, she faced a new struggle: overcoming stereotypes about so-called "white trash." Then, she writes, "I began to understand the depth of the rift that is economic inequality."
1 of 4 9/30/18, 7:41 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
A potent social and economic message embedded within an affecting memoir.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Smarsh, Sarah: HEARTLAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723405/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9271ff93. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723405
2 of 4 9/30/18, 7:41 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Heartland: A Daughter of the
Working Class Reconciles an
American Divide
Joan Curbow
Booklist.
114.22 (Aug. 1, 2018): p8. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Heartland: A Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide.
By Sarah Smarsh.
Sept. 2018. 304p. Scribner, $26 (9781501133091); e-book, $13.99 (9781501133114). 330.
Growing up as one of the working poor has become a familiar theme of memoirs of late, but this book is more than a female-authored Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Smarsh employs an unusual and effective technique, throughout the book addressing her daughter, who does not, in reality, exist. Rather, she's the future that seemed destined for Smarsh, the same future that had been destined for and realized by all the women in her family. Smarsh comes from a long line of women who married young, survived with barely enough money, and continually scrabbled along with low- paying jobs while trying to stay one step ahead of domestic violence or eviction. All of this was to be her legacy despite the strong work ethic, self-sufficiency, and pride that also run in her family. Smarsh was finally able to climb out of difficult circumstances, but her story is a trenchant analysis of the realities of an economic inequality whose cultural divide allows "the powerful to make harmful decisions in policy and politics." Elucidating reading on the challenges many face in getting ahead.--Joan Curbow
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Curbow, Joan. "Heartland: A Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide."
Booklist, 1 Aug. 2018, p. 8. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A550613025/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=19154bc9. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A550613025
3 of 4 9/30/18, 7:41 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Heartland: A Daughter of the
Working Class Reconciles an
American Divide
Publishers Weekly.
265.24 (June 11, 2018): p55. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Heartland: A Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide Sarah Smarsh. Scribner, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-1-5011-3309-1
"Class is an illusion with real consequences," Smarsh writes in this candid and courageous memoir of growing up in a family of working-class farmers in Kansas during the 1980s and '90s. A writing professor and journalist whose work has appeared in the Guardian and the New Yorker, Smarsh tells her story to her inner child, whose "unborn spirit" allows Smarsh to break the cycle of poverty that constrained her family for generations. Smarsh was born to a teenage mother, and the women in her family were all young mothers who hardened and aged early from the work it took to survive the day-to-day. Smarsh writes with love and care about these women and the men who married them, including her father and Grandpa Arnie, but she also lays bare their hardships (for many poor women, "there is a violence to merely existing: the pregnancies without health care, the babies that can't be had, the repetitive physical jobs") and the shame of being poor ("to experience economic poverty ... is to live with constant reminders of what you don't have"). It is through education that Smarsh is able to avoid their fate; but while hers is a happy ending, she is still haunted by the fact that being poor is associated with being bad. Smarsh's raw and intimate narrative exposes a country of economic inequality that "has failed its children." Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Heartland: A Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide." Publishers
Weekly, 11 June 2018, p. 55. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A542967343/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f4f42637. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542967343
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QUOTED: "While Heartland has its flaws—a structure that sometimes feels forced, a narrative that does not smoothly transition between storytelling and sociological claims—overall the book is an absorbing, important work in a country that needs to know more about itself."
'Heartland' offers a bleak but compelling portrait of white poverty
Journalist and professor Sarah Smarsh places her family at the center of a narrative that mixes dysfunction with resilience.
stack of books What are you reading?
September 12, 2018
By Stephanie Hanes
@stephaniehanes
Some miles into the country west of Wichita, Kansas, in a farmhouse with a crumbling chimney and rusted chain link fence, a young Sarah Smarsh talked silently to the imaginary daughter she might have one day.
She talked about moving, which she did a dizzying number of times in her young life thanks to parents without security in housing, employment, or relationships. She shared how her body felt after working on the farm, or while cuddled next to intoxicated relatives in a sled pulled far too fast by a tractor. And she talked about how she would try her hardest not to have this illusory child – a long shot goal given the history of her family, a collection of hard-working, hard-living teenage mothers and the often violent men who came in and out of their lives.
This relationship with the daughter who didn’t exist offers both structure and dreamlike quality to Smarsh’s new book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. But it is her family that takes center stage in this bleak yet compelling portrait of white poverty in America, a narrative of dysfunction mixed with resilience.
Although her stories are occasionally difficult to follow, given chronological jumps in what is already a complicated family tree, readers get to know Smarsh’s beautiful and emotionally scarred mother; her feisty grandmother with the generous heart and large collection of ex-husbands; her quiet father whose artistry in woodworking meant little during the recession of the late 2000s; the biological grandfather who killed people for hire; and the grandfather-by-marriage who offered kind encouragement. The complexity of these characters, and the lingering sense of desolation that accompanies them, seems the central point of “Heartland.” It is far too easy to stereotype the poor, the Midwest, or those who live in the country, Smarsh tells us. The reality is much more nuanced, and all the more heartbreaking.
Smarsh’s argues throughout “Heartland” that there are larger forces at work in the misery that has consumed her family and others like it; that decisions made by those without first-hand understanding of poverty have had a terrible impact on both the livelihoods and culture of what are sometimes called “the working poor.” The lives of her relatives can be mapped, she writes, “against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills.”
But even worse, she suggests, is the widespread denial that her family’s class exists at all; that somehow poverty – and in particular white poverty – comes from some fundamental failing, a lack of motivation or character, rather than an economic and political system that makes it all but impossible to break multi-generational woe. So deep flows this denial and shame that even her own family members couldn’t see themselves as “poor,” despite piles of evidence and heartbreak to the contrary.
“That we could live on a patch of Kansas dirt with a tub of Crisco lard and a $1 rebate coupon in an envelope on the kitchen counter and call ourselves middle class was at once a triumph of contentedness and a sad comment on our country’s lack of awareness about its own economic structure,” she writes.
As accurate as they may be, the real power of “Heartland” lies less in Smarsh’s explicit sociological arguments, which can veer toward jargon or read as somewhat tired liberal tropes, but in her startlingly vivid scenes of an impoverished childhood. Many of these narratives are painful. There is insight of how her mother could have saved much-needed money by breastfeeding, yet believed this would be “the lowest shame of poverty” so paid for formula. Or the time when Smarsh checked on a litter of kittens in her father’s work garage, only to find them beheaded by a possum while their mother was out hunting.
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This last story was a metaphor, Smarsh points out, for the “hard truth of the wild place we lived: Parents left their children to hunt for food so they wouldn’t starve to death, but those moments without protections offered plenty other ways to die.”
The reader knows quite early on in the book that somehow Smarsh has found a different future than the one she inherited. She is a professor, a journalist, a writer who can now publish a book. And while “Heartland” has its flaws – a structure that sometimes feels forced, a narrative that does not smoothly transition between storytelling and sociological claims – overall the book is an absorbing, important work in a country that needs to know more about itself.
Working hard, earning little, in 'Heartland'
By Dale Singer Special to the Post-Dispatch Sep 15, 2018 (0)
This is a book about hard work, hard lives and hard truths.
For Sarah Smarsh, a proud fifth-generation Kansan, the hard truth is that since the election of Ronald Reagan — in the same year she was born — families that work hard have seen their lives get worse.
Part memories, part economic analysis, part sociological treatise, “Heartland” ties together various threads of American society of the last 40 years, coming up with the situation that is the book’s subtitle: “A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.”
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"Heartland" by Sarah Smarsh
"Heartland"
By Sarah Smarsh
Published by Scribner, 290 pages, $26
If someone did a word cloud from the text of “Heartland,” the four-letter word “poor” would stand out large. Early on, Smarsh offers a facetious list of the advantages of poverty: “no careers or properties to maintain, no community meetings or social status to be responsible to. If there was a car that ran and a bit of gas money, we could just leave.”
But as the song goes, such freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. And for families such as Smarsh’s, whom she brands as the “white working class,” poverty poses special dilemmas:
“Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot? … The middle-class-white stories we read in the news and saw in movies might as well have taken place on Mars.”
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"Heartland" by Sarah Smarsh
Sarah Smarsh
And the problem, she emphasizes, stems not from a reluctance to labor long, difficult hours but from factors beyond the control of her family and others like them — often even beyond their comprehension.
“Being as we got up before dawn to do chores and didn’t quit until after dark,” Smarsh writes, “it was plain that the problem with our outcomes wasn’t lack of hard work. The problem was with commodities markets, with big business, with Wall Street — things so far away and impenetrable to us that all we could do was shake our heads, hate the government, and get the combine into the shed before it started to hail.”
In her remembrances of the women in her family — Dorothy and Betty and Jeannie and Polly and Pud — liquor and domestic violence and sudden relocation are never far away. Smarsh and others like her moved so often they attended too many schools to count, and starting fresh became either a skill they mastered or a reason to give up altogether.
Smarsh learned the first lesson, excelling in her studies to the extent she earned a scholarship to college, attended Ivy League schools and established herself as an articulate writer about her demographic, even if that writing often has a hard edge. But that new status clearly doesn’t mean she has forgotten or forsaken her roots.
“I’ve seen something of the world,” she writes, “but I still live in my home state. I have a good leather bag, but I love it most for the fact that it cost $3 at the Goodwill. I have a cell phone, but I get voice mail messages from collection agencies looking for my immediate family members. I have a graduate degree but a heap of debt acquired in obtaining it.”
Smarsh’s book is persuasive not only for the facts she marshals, but also because of the way she expresses it. (It made the longlist Thursday for a National Book Award.) Here’s how she uses minute detail to get across the tenuous state of the lives of her family:
“Clothes didn’t hang from Grandpa Arnie but rather stretched across him. He was as tanklike as his tractors and combines. He was of average height but had the shoulders of a lineman, a bovine torso, and a round belly that threatened the snaps on the thin, brown plaid shirts he wore to threads.”
In a series of asides throughout “Heartland,” Smarsh addresses an imaginary child (she has never been pregnant). To avoid early single motherhood, a fate of so many of her peers, she needed to exercise strict discipline:
“I went to road parties but didn’t drink, instead getting my puking friends home safely along dark dirt roads in their cars that I didn’t yet have a license to drive. I had boyfriends but kept my jeans zipped.”
And in her silent speeches to a never-born child, Smarsh spells out clearly what she has gained, what she has had to leave behind and the cost for both.
“My life has been a bridge between two places: the working poor and ‘higher’ economic classes. The city and the country. College-educated coworkers and disenfranchised loved ones. A somewhat conservative upbringing and a liberal adulthood. Home in the middle of the country and work on the East Coast. The physical world where I talk to people and the formless dimension where I talk to you.
“Stretching your arms that far can be painful.”
Dale Singer retired in 2017 after a 45-year career in journalism in St. Louis. He lives in west St. Louis County.
QUOTED: "sharply-observed, big-hearted memoir."
"What this book offers is a tour through the messy and changed reality of the American dream, and a love letter to the unruly but still beautiful place she called home."
Making sense of American poverty and her own life
Vibe Images/stock.adobe.com
By Kate Tuttle Globe Correspondent September 14, 2018
“America didn’t talk about class when I was growing up,” writes Sarah Smarsh. Born to a teenage mother in the summer of 1980, she was a poor child in Kansas, a state that went big that fall for Reagan’s gauzy vision of morning in America, even as the farm economy that had once supported its people began to crumble. For a family like Smarsh’s, which was rooted to the land on one side and terrifyingly unrooted from much of anything on the other, the allegedly booming economy Reagan’s presidency created never trickled down to them. Instead, she writes, her childhood took place during “the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills.”
In her sharply-observed, big-hearted memoir, “Heartland,” Smarsh chronicles the human toll of inequality, her own childhood a case study. She moved more than 20 times, her young life a patchwork of different school districts and households, cared for by adults who struggled to remain sober, employed, and clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Mostly, she toggled back and forth between the hard-won stability of her maternal grandparents’ farmhouse and her mother’s more transient lifestyle. (Grandmother Betty, like her daughter, gave birth while a teen; Betty was just 34 when Smarsh was born.)
Growing up in “the space of neglect where adults were too busy working or too drunk afterward to look after me,” Smarsh became a keen observer, tightly wound, and careful to stay alert, for “[e]very moment of my childhood required vigilance.” She loved all her relatives, but knew, “so deeply that I wasn’t even conscious of it, that my family was on the outside of something considered normal.”
Smarsh writes about coming of age in a place most Americans have never visited, associated mainly with lines from “The Wizard of Oz.” Like Smarsh, when I left Kansas for Boston, I could count on being called Dorothy any time I mentioned my home state. Unlike Smarsh, I never lived or worked on a farm, an experience she recounts with clear-eyed appreciation for its joys, its hardships, and its people. Whether lauded as salt of the earth or dismissed as hicks, Smarsh argues, these are lives that deserve to be seen clearly. “The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields,” she writes. “But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as ‘flyover country,’ is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witness and ill understood in concrete landscapes.”
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Smarsh writes movingly of her father, Nick, an itinerant carpenter, and her grandfathers, whose hard work defined and often shortened their lives. But its her mother, Jeannie, and grandmother Betty who occupy the book’s emotional center. Betty “wasn’t the farming kind,” Smarsh writes; in fact, the “whole family, which consisted mostly of single moms and their daughters, was hard to pin down.” Rural poverty is hard on a man, she makes clear, but it’s downright dangerous for a woman, especially when an early pregnancy can trap her into a life without security or opportunity. “Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder,” she writes; for smart working-class women, dreams often die early, and painfully. “Being physically objectified that many times over — as a labor machine, a producer of children, and a decorative object — all while being aware of your unexpressed talent can make the body feel like a prison.”
Throughout the book, Smarsh writes in a form of address to an imagined child — an unborn, perhaps never-to-be-born daughter she names August. As a literary convention, it’s occasionally unsuccessful — much like novels disguised as diaries, the second-person narrative can strain good sentences into bad — but there’s an emotional power that comes through, a resonance that keeps readers focused on the weight and importance of Smarsh’s project: “to articulate what no one articulated for me: what it means to be a poor child in a rich country founded on the promise of equality.”
In the book’s most heartbreaking moments, Smarsh reckons with the sense of shame that poverty bestows, and its persistence even in a life that is, by any external measure, a success. Her teachers had always noticed she was smart, Smarsh writes, “the defining intervention of my life.” Unlike the women who came before her, she graduated from high school, then college, without having a baby — but she rankles at being asked “how she escaped” and refuses to engage in judgmental anthropological dissection of the people she came from. In this way, “Heartland” serves as a corrective to the finger-wagging in books like “Hillbilly Elegy,” which focus on the symptoms of inequality rather than its causes. After all, Smarsh argues, “[s]ociety’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.” Instead, what this book offers is a tour through the messy and changed reality of the American dream, and a love letter to the unruly but still beautiful place she called home.
HEARTLAND:
A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
By Sarah Smarsh
Scribner, 290 pp., $26
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Kate Tuttle, president of the National Book Critics Circle, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.
QUOTED: "For me, writing about poverty and class is a choice, but it also feels like a responsibility."
Sarah Smarsh’s insight into the lives of the working poor comes from her own wealth of experience
A discussion with the writer in advance of her appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival
By Ryan Smith @ryansmithwriter
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click to enlarge Sarah Smarsh
Sarah Smarsh
Aaron Lindberg Photography
[Recommended] “Rich Man, Poor Man: Tales of Two Americas”
Sat 4/29, noon-1 PM
First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple
77 W. Washington
chicagohumanities.org
$15, $12 for members, $10 for students and teachers
For her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, author and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich worked several minimum-wage jobs. In the process she documented the precarious lives of the millions of Americans who are mired in poverty—particularly in a time when "the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors." More than a decade later, freelance journalist Sarah Smarsh arrived at a sadly similar conclusion in "Poor Teeth," her incisive 2014 essay about the ever-growing class divide in America as seen through the lens of dental care (or lack thereof) and the "psychological hell" many people experience for "having poor teeth in a rich, capitalist country."
Smarsh was flooded with hundreds of messages from readers who reached out to thank her for writing about an issue that's rarely covered by the mainstream media. "It was a realization like, oh shit, I need to keep writing about these kind of things for these people because there's so few of these narratives out there," Smarsh says. "For me, writing about poverty and class is a choice, but it also feels like a responsibility."
Unlike Ehrenreich, Smarsh didn't require an immersive experiment into the world of the working poor—she's already lived it. Prior to being an Ivy League grad and college professor, the 36-year-old Kansas native was a fifth-generation farm kid whose family eked out a humble existence on subpoverty-level wages. Smarsh draws on her wealth of personal experience in a new anthology, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided State (Penguin), and her first book, In the Red (Scribner), due next year.
On Saturday, April 29, Smarsh will appear for a reading and conversation with John Freeman as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. I spoke with Smarsh over the phone about poverty, social class, and the problems of seeing politics through a red state/blue state lens.
What prompted you to focus on social class in your writing?
I never made a conscious decision to do it, but what I gravitated to as a writer has always had a common thread of somehow intersecting with economics and class and rural/urban issues. When I got the attention for "Bad Teeth" and heard so many people say 'Oh my god, I see myself in what you wrote and there are so few pieces like that out there,' it made me realize I need to keep doing this for those people and for myself. Growing up, I had a vacuum of those same kinds of narratives. To this day, the only piece of pop culture I felt I connected to and represented my people was Roseanne. She's a genius, and I'm so grateful as a ten-year-old that I had that show. I think I can speak to social class experientially in a way that not many people who end up with a platform like I have can. It's an honor.
I know bits and pieces of your biography from essays you've written. Can you give me an overview of your background and how it's shaped your work?
As a toddler, I lived in a trailer on a patch of dirt next to a windswept lake and a wheat field near Wichita. My dad is a construction worker and was a farmer and my mom lived a transient midwest life. My mom got pregnant with me when she was 17, and so they moved into what felt then like a nice little 700-square-foot tiny wooden structure out in the country. After my parents got a divorce, I moved permanently into my grandparents' farm when I was 11 and spent my adolescence and high school there. We never had cable TV or air-conditioning or computers, but we always had food and shelter and clothes, and I loved living on a farm. So I didn't think of us as poor, even though we were living under the poverty line.
It was a time when class wasn't really part of the American consciousness. I think it's finally beginning to rightly be acknowledged now. I didn't conceive of ourselves on a place on a class ladder. If I'd had that language as a teenager, I'd have considered myself middle-class. Looking back it now seems triumphant and also a little sad that there's there's such a disconnect between the language of where we thought we were on the ladder and where we actually were. I remember later going to grad school at Columbia and realizing that the annual tuition was higher than the income of anyone in my family—by a lot.
Besides bad teeth, what are some of the other effects of the kinds of poverty you and your family and community have experienced?
There's so many ways in which poverty is a violence on the body and mind. I think we often jump to the health-care discussion, but that's a very reactive after-the-fact kind of thing. Consider that the bodies of my family actually look different than the cosmopolitan class I'm now a part of. My dad has been a construction worker for almost 50 years, and his fingers are swollen to the size of hot dogs—his hands calloused and his knuckles busted. I think his fingernails have been bruised every day of my life.
Life when you're engaged in physical labor—as so many poor people are—comes with more inherent dangers. Skin cancer is very common in the rural communities like the one I grew up in. It was like a rite of passage to get a hunk of skin cut out of your face because you work in a field every day for decades. A lot of working-class jobs these days are much less about farming and factories and more health-care and service-industry work, and a lot of people I know have backaches and weight problems because the kind of food they can afford begets obesity, compounded by the fact that they can't afford health care.
When you grow up poor, there's also this psychological notion—there's isn't room or space for long-term planning. Your focus is on immediate survival. I used to take buckets of feed out to pasture to feed the cattle on a three-wheeler because (ATVs) are so dangerous, and I didn't even have a helmet.
It doesn't appear that the poverty problem is going to get any better under Trump.
Yes, Trump is a disaster, but neoliberalism under both parties has also been a disaster in so many ways. It was under Bill Clinton's watch that welfare was dismantled and poverty criminalized. The big question for progressives like myself—can the Democratic Party be salvaged? Do late capitalism and the American machine have to fall apart and be rebuilt—and that will be ugly and painful for a lot of people—or will it look like a moderate shift in the right direction? That's not going to happen under Trump, and I'm not convinced it would have unless under a very progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders.
Last fall, you wrote a piece for the Guardian about how the media wrongly turned the white working class into a scapegoat for Trump's win. "Poor whites are bad" is a narrative that won't go away.
It's convenient for the middle- and upper-class pundits and politicians who set the conversation in this country to stick up for most of the whites in this country and create a stereotype of a rural white bigot. Trump was a white phenomenon—regardless of class. My grandma is a working-class white Kansas woman who caucused for Bernie Sanders—it was the first time she ever voted in the primary. She voted for Clinton in the general and loathed Donald Trump.
Here's the thing, in my red state of Kansas, 60 percent voted Republican and 40 percent Democrat. But let's say less than half of the population voted—at least one-third of the population is erased by this red-blue map. There's so many decent working people that come in all colors and backgrounds. v
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Tags: Lit Feature, Sarah Smarsh, Poor Teeth, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided State, Chicago Humanities Fest, poverty, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders
QUOTED: "Smarsh is an invaluable guide to flyover country, worth twenty abstract-noun-espousing op-ed columnists."
"a deeply humane memoir with crackles of clarifying insight."
She Grew Up Poor on a Kansas Farm. Her Memoir Is an Attempt to Understand Why.
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Sarah SmarshCreditCreditPaul Andrews
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By Francesca Mari
Sept. 10, 2018
HEARTLAND
A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
By Sarah Smarsh
290 pp. Scribner. $26.
Sarah Smarsh’s memoir, “Heartland,” opens with a perplexing ode to an imaginary baby. “I’m glad you never ended up as a physical reality in my life. But we talked for so many years that I don’t guess I’ll ever stop talking to you.” Throughout the book an apparition of the author’s unborn child pops into the prose like Ally McBeal’s Baby Cha-Cha, inducing the otherwise sage Smarsh to write in the inexorably sentimental second person.
Forgive the baby.
We all have our best registers, our natural octaves, and Smarsh’s is the grounded, oral, anecdotal range of her hardscrabble Kansas kinfolk. Fortunately, the tales of their adventures and misadventures make up the majority of her elucidating first book, about the working poor in the Midwest. “They speak a firm sort of poetry, made of things and actions,” Smarsh writes. She is most eloquent when she does too, mixing lived experience with a learned perspective.
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Smarsh escaped poverty, she believes, because, unlike her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, she didn’t become a teenage mom. In part, she says, this was because she was among the first generation of her family to have at least one constant home, dating to when her maternal grandmother, Betty, married her seventh husband, Arnie. (By contrast, Smarsh’s mom, Jeannie, moved 48 times before starting high school.) Such is the reality of poverty. The memoir flickers to life at that home, a humble farmhouse on 160 acres of wheat fields outside Wichita.
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With an abundance of land and an under-abundance of cash, Arnie gleefully invents new forms of entertainment. One weekend he loads family and their sloshing solo cups into a tattered canoe, hitches it to his truck and rips through the snowy fields. Through the stories of Smarsh’s witty but withholding mother, her tender but luckless father, her generous step-grandfather and hazardously vivacious grandmother, Smarsh shows how the poor seldom have the vantage to identify the systemic forces suppressing them. Rather, they make do.
From the farm, the book circumambulates several major themes: body, land, shame. Smarsh describes the toll of labor on those who have no choice but to do it — a work force priced out of health insurance by its privatization. Neighbors are maimed by combines and the author’s father nearly dies from chemical poisoning a week into a job transporting used cleaning solvent. Women absorb their husbands’ frustrations, blow by blow. Meanwhile, big agribusinesses strangle the region’s family farms, leaving behind a brackish residue of shame — the shame of being poor and white.
“Poor whiteness,” Smarsh writes, “is a peculiar offense in that society imbues whiteness with power — not just by making it the racial norm next to which the rest are ‘others’ but by using it as a shorthand for economic stability.”
Smarsh is an invaluable guide to flyover country, worth 20 abstract-noun-espousing op-ed columnists. She was raised by those who voted against their own interests. “People on welfare were presumed ‘lazy,’ and for us there was no more hurtful word,” she writes. “Within that framework, financially comfortable liberals may rest assured that their fortunes result from personal merit while generously insisting they be taxed to help the ‘needy.’ Impoverished people, then, must do one of two things: Concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them.”
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A deeply humane memoir with crackles of clarifying insight, “Heartland” is one of a growing number of important works — including Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted” and Amy Goldstein’s “Janesville” — that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial decline. Or, perhaps, simply: class. It’s a term that Smarsh argues wasn’t mentioned during her childhood in the 1980s and ’90s. “This lack of acknowledgment at once invalidated what we were experiencing and shamed us if we tried to express it.”
With deft primers on the Homestead Act, the farming crisis of the ’80s and Reaganomics, Smarsh shows how the false promise of the “American dream” was used to subjugate the poor. It’s a powerful mantra. But so too is What would I tell my daughter? Smarsh invokes her unborn baby in this memoir because asking this question, she says, is what kept her life on track, enabling her to chase an education and take advantage of the can-do attitude that is her inheritance. What would I tell my daughter? is an effective life hack, immediately summoning one’s purest intentions and aspirations. Unlike the American dream, it isn’t premised on abstract hope but on concrete advice. It cuts the crap.
Francesca Mari is a senior editor at The California Sunday Magazine.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 15, 2018, on Page 21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Plainsong. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
QUOTED: "Smarsh offers not just a revision of familiar manly tales of struggle in the sticks, but indeed a new brand of feminism, one that invokes the history of early American activism."
A vital new book about America's divide: 'Heartland' by Sarah Smarsh
By Leah Hampton
Sep 28, 2018 | 6:00 AM
A vital new book about America's divide: 'Heartland' by Sarah Smarsh
Sarah Smarsh, author of "Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth." (Paul Andrews)
In August 1981, the summer of author Sarah Smarsh’s birth, my parents were broke. Again. My father, a Vietnam vet armed only with a good mechanic’s hands, left the service and entered the dismal job market of the early Reagan years. We returned to our familial roots in the rural South, and what followed was a decade of shoestring budgets and the shoeless invisibility of that era’s draconian social policies. This geographic and fiscal marginalization granted me a childhood similar to the one Smarsh describes in her deeply affecting debut, “Heartland.”
It was into this same thin sliver of subsistence — just above the poverty line and just below the gaze of suburban liberals — that Sarah Smarsh was born. Thanks to the timing of her birth, her family, like mine and many others, would “map our lives against the destruction of the working class,” such that “wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit newspapers in the new millennium.”
“Heartland” recounts five generations of Smarsh exploits in the farmlands of Kansas, from pioneer days to the Obama era, when the author finally breaks into the middle class.
The book is a personal, decades-long story of America’s coordinated assault on its underclass. We meet Grandma Betty, Sarah’s teenage parents and other hardworking — and often hard-drinking — relatives. Smarsh stresses the work in working poor; “It’s a hell of a thing,” the author writes, “to grow the food, serve the drinks, hammer the houses, and assemble the airplanes that bodies with more money eat and drink and occupy and board, while your own body can’t go to the doctor.” The Smarshes give up their bodies to the American Dream, raising your crops and butchering your meat. The wages for that labor are chronic stress, strained relationships and physical decline. “A society that considers your body dispensable,” we learn, “will inflict a violence upon you.”
Young Sarah endures the direct effect of a wide range of economic policies: farm subsidies, banking deregulation, education cutbacks (“If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books”).
“Heartland” also confronts the racial politics of poverty. Where lesser writers might invoke the term “white trash” as a badge of honor, Smarsh interrogates her own whiteness, rejecting the term “white working class” as divisive and harmful. She explains the overtly racist foundations of government aid programs and reminds us of the unconscious biases that separate people of color from the very idea of opportunity. We live in a society that “imbues whiteness with power … using it as shorthand for economic stability.” Our economy is designed around the idea that whites aren’t supposed to live the way we force black and brown people to live. Thus, identifying “white trash” as a separate class means they receive disproportionate visibility, over and above what we give to nonwhites facing the same (and worse) economic hardship. We already erase communities of color, Smarsh says, so glorifying white poverty only exacerbates others’ oppression.
Readers with social justice sympathies should be aware that they may not be the choir to whom Smarsh is preaching here. The author has little patience for the pitying nods of elite leftists who view people like her as “the ‘needy.’ ” Smarsh’s memoir delicately juggles the conflicting lessons of poverty, demonstrating how “society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.” Similarly, right-leaning readers may be expecting the usual hagiography about farmers, but “Heartland” avoids these pitfalls. In short, because farms are often a go-to setting for Americana, you may think you have read this book before. You haven’t. This is not “The Grapes of Wrath” or “Hillbilly Elegy,” and it is never saccharine or self-deluding. This is a tough, no-nonsense woman telling truth, and telling it hard.
"Heartland" by Sarah Smarsh
"Heartland" by Sarah Smarsh (Scribner)
Thanks to persistent false narratives about poverty, families like mine and Smarsh’s — perhaps yours too — wasted generations believing in “trickle down” economics, leaving us “standing outside with our mouths open praying for money to rain.” Sarah Smarsh and I, and so many girls like us, moved whenever banks foreclosed and ate a lot of cheap tray lunches in underfunded public school cafeterias. These experiences solidified our mistrust of institutions, which accounts for many rural people voting against the very policies that might have aided us. Ultimately, we concluded that “the American Dream has a price tag on it,” and “the poorer you are, the higher the price.”
But, as Smarsh explains, just as many found that injustice only solidified our radical ideologies. “Some invisible hand ... affected us in ways we didn’t have the knowledge to describe or the access to fight.” “Heartland” is, in part, a recounting of the “deep progressive roots” in the author’s rural community, where women’s rights, abolition and pro-labor sentiments shaped her backstory. Young Sarah discovers and identifies with this still-extant legacy (especially Kansas’ intersectional suffrage movement) while putting herself through college. Education leads to her political awakening and, eventually, her career in journalism.
The strongest element of “Heartland,” then, is its unabashed womanliness. At a time of national reckoning about endemic misogyny, “Heartland” does some serious feminist consciousness raising. A rural woman suffers unique abuse in a rigged economic system; she is merely “a labor machine, a producer of children, and a decorative object.”
Powerlessness is inflicted, ironically, on the powerful, for these are women of untold, untapped strength. Smarsh offers not just a revision of familiar manly tales of struggle in the sticks, but indeed a new brand of feminism, one that invokes the history of early American activism. The book is written as an address to the author’s imagined daughter, a quasi-imaginary friend Smarsh invents in early childhood. This narrative device allows the book to be both tender and didactic without becoming sentimental. Here is a child, Smarsh says, and here is why I never let her be born.
Thus, Democrats seeking a “blue wave” in November would do well to read this book closely. Having spent my life in rural communities with women like Sarah Smarsh, I know my neighbors will appreciate the thesis of “Heartland.” Rurality has been co-opted into “a brand cultivated by conservative forces,” but with a bit of outreach, rural voters might be the very group that halts our country’s slide to the right. There is rich soil in America’s flyover states, and if we follow Smarsh’s path, we will find families like mine and the author’s, full of sensible, resilient women who may be disenfranchised, but who are also uniquely poised and equipped to aid in the revolution, and in our collective liberation.
Hampton is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and edits Bat City Review.
::
“Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth”
Sarah Smarsh
Scribner: 304 pp., $26
QUOTED: "Understanding widening wealth inequality in our nation is a project that should concern anyone who has a conscience — a robust, expansive middle class is vital to democracy, and arguably to the functioning of our particular Constitution. Smarsh’s Heartland is a book we need: an observant, affectionate portrait of working-class America that possesses the power to resonate with readers of all classes."
Review: ‘Heartland,’ by Sarah Smarsh
Anita Felicelli September 15, 2018 Updated: September 19, 2018, 2:48 pm
“Heartland” Photo: Scribner
In 2004, Thomas Frank asked “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” His book questioned why so many working-class Americans voted for conservative politicians whose policies harmed them. Since then, there have been many liberal-minded books that take a close look at states believed to be deep red, with a few digging into Kansas’ radical past (a notable example being Andrew Malan Milward’s imaginative 2015 short story collection “I Was a Revolutionary”). Sarah Smarsh’s intelligent, affecting memoir “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth” asks a braver question than Frank did: What’s the matter with the American dream?
Smarsh was born in rural Kansas to a Catholic farming family weeks before the Reagan era began. Her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother were teen mothers. She notes that while her family didn’t go hungry or without shelter in a chronic way, all of them knew what it was like to need something necessary and go without due to lack of money. She remembers, “That we could live on a patch of Kansas dirt with a tub of Crisco lard and a $1 rebate coupon in an envelope on the kitchen counter and call ourselves middle class was at once a triumph of contentedness and a sad comment on our country’s lack of awareness about its own economic structures. Class didn’t exist in a democracy like ours.”
Smarsh’s grandmother Betty was 16 when she was impregnated by a Wichita street thug. Smarsh’s mother Jeannie was beautiful, smart and talented yet wound up a teenage mother, accidentally impregnated by Nick Smarsh, a farmer and carpenter. Jeannie experiences pregnancy as an “inevitable life sentence.” Due to motherhood and poverty, Smarsh explains, her mother was unable to overcome her socioeconomic circumstances and pursue work related to her natural talents. From a young age, Smarsh is determined not to wind up a teenage mother.
Some of the most compelling passages in the memoir detail the particular challenges of working women forced by early motherhood to depend on men whose economic stress sometimes led to domestic violence. Smarsh describes a dissonance whereby women in her family tenaciously worked to earn money and yet were made so incredibly vulnerable by motherhood, by the lack of an equal wage, by the failure of our courts to handle divorce and wage garnishment and domestic violence fairly, that they needed to stay with men in spite of abuse or risk losing their children. Their daily, grinding hardships were magnified by natural disasters and economic downturns.
Sarah Smarsh Photo: Paul Andrews
It’s through encounters in school with those from middle-class or affluent homes that Smarsh sees her own home as poor. Education, too, allows her to understand that the root of her family’s hardships was their inability to transcend class no matter how hard they worked. While her mother’s first vote was for Jimmy Carter, the author’s own first vote was for Ronald Reagan. Her political viewpoint only shifts from conservative to progressive after reading sociology studies that reveal America is not the meritocracy she believed, and that “if you are poor, you are likely to stay poor, no matter how hard you work.”
Although it’s dedicated to Jeannie, “Heartland” is treated as an address to an unborn daughter. Smarsh writes to her: “I hear a voice unlike the ones in my house or on the news that told me my place in the world … I was just a kid, but I knew the other voices were wrong and yours was right because my body felt like a calm hollow when you echoed in it.” The mysticism of this device dovetails nicely with Smarsh’s insights about her family’s working-class reliance on intuition over formal logic. Perhaps because it’s a letter to an unborn daughter, Smarsh’s tone is gentler, more homespun than it was in her popular 2014 Aeon essay “Poor Teeth” (framed around “Orange Is the New Black” character Pennsatucky Doggett); toward the end, it teeters at the precipice of sentimentality, but doesn’t fall off.
There are dangers to drawing broad political conclusions exclusively from one’s own family history. For example, in his bootstraps memoir about growing up in the Appalachian culture, “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance pushes a conservative agenda related to the personal choices of the poor, while remaining willfully blind to what larger forces shaped their lives. However, unlike Vance, Smarsh persuades by skillfully integrating her family’s story into the social and legal history of America. She elegantly parses the way in which the framework of our society permits the working poor to be devastated by accidents and natural phenomena, while the affluent register similar events merely as inconvenience. Fans of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” will find a similar progressive message in “Heartland,” but told from a warmer, more intimate perspective.
Early in her memoir, Smarsh writes, “the American Dream has a price tag on it. … The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it.” Understanding widening wealth inequality in our nation is a project that should concern anyone who has a conscience — a robust, expansive middle class is vital to democracy, and arguably to the functioning of our particular Constitution. Smarsh’s “Heartland” is a book we need: an observant, affectionate portrait of working-class America that possesses the power to resonate with readers of all classes.
Heartland
A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
By Sarah Smarsh
(Scribner; 290 pages; $26)
Anita Felicelli Anita Felicelli’s writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her debut collection of stories, “Love Songs for a Lost Continent,” will be published in October. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
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QUOTED: "When it comes to the seed of the book, or being called to write about it, that happened in childhood. My Grandma Betty, one of the main characters of my story, tells me that she remembers a time when we were driving and I was in the passenger seat and I was eight, and I said: 'Grandma, someday I’ll write a book about you.' The most touching part is that when she told me, I asked her: 'Did you believe me when I said that?' And she said: 'Yes, I did, I just knew you would.'"
"Even though we weren’t a bookish family, my mom being really the only reader in the whole crew other than myself, I had this compulsion or calling, and apparently it seemed plausible enough that she thought it would come to pass, and thirty years later it did."
An Interview with Sarah Smarsh, Author of ‘Heartland’
The author of “Heartland,” a National Book Award longlisted memoir about growing up poor in rural America, gives her views on politics, identity, and cultural appropriation.
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Angela Chen | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)
“I was born a fifth-generation Kansas farmer,” writes Sarah Smarsh, “roots so deep in the country where I was raised that I rode tractors on the same land where my ancestors rode wagons.”
In her memoir Heartland, Smarsh tells the story of four generations of that Kansas family. The book reaches back to a great-grandmother working multiple jobs and beaten by her husband, but is addressed to a future generation that will never be: Smarsh’s unborn daughter August.
Smarsh, the daughter of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a teenage mother, “was on a mission toward a life unlike the one I was handed.” August is a theoretical child born during Smarsh’s teenage years, whose very existence would have continued the line of teenage motherhood and derailed Smarsh’s mission. August is at once a guiding principle (“what would I tell my daughter to do?”) and a symbol of the poverty Smarsh worked to escape.
Heartland is the story of a family and the story of a class in America, an explanation to August of all she would have inherited and lost. I spoke to Smarsh by phone between New York and Kansas, where she lives. We discussed the invisibility of class, how “the country” has become a clichéd set of imagery, and how politicians on the left can reach alienated voters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Angela Chen: You write that you worked on this book for 15 years, which of course means you were writing it long before you sold it. Was there a moment when you knew you had to do this project?
Sarah Smarsh: I received my first research grant to work on the family history portion of this project in 2002, and so there are passages in there literally written then, when I was a senior in college. Many of those family stories — like the passage about my Grandfather Arnie’s death — were written when they were very fresh, and I knew they were going to build into a book although I didn’t know exactly what shape that would be. I finished my nonfiction MFA at Columbia in 2005. This had been my MFA thesis, and I spent the next decade unsuccessfully trying to get agent representation and a book deal, taking full-time jobs to make ends meet in the meanwhile.
But when it comes to the seed of the book, or being called to write about it, that happened in childhood. My Grandma Betty, one of the main characters of my story, tells me that she remembers a time when we were driving and I was in the passenger seat and I was eight, and I said, “Grandma, someday I’ll write a book about you.” The most touching part is that when she told me, I asked her, “did you believe me when I said that?” And she said, “yes, I did, I just knew you would.” Even though we weren’t a bookish family, my mom being really the only reader in the whole crew other than myself, I had this compulsion or calling, and apparently it seemed plausible enough that she thought it would come to pass, and 30 years later it did.
If a large faction of the country is claiming that you don’t have a fair grievance, that is an incredibly difficult psychological tension to bear.
Was there a particular family member that was hardest to write about? That you wanted to shield, knowing the stereotypes and prejudices that people already have against the poor?
Always, even when writing about perfect strangers, I have real — maybe even higher than is professionally advised — empathy for my sources. I often write about people who are not used to being written about or are marginalized by society. Often, they are at once so happy to share their stories and have someone care, and at the same time maybe don’t understand what it means to have your story be read by so many people. So I always try to say, over and over, this is what I’m understanding and this is how I’m going to present it, does it feel right to you?
This was a process of so many years with my immediate family that I felt very confident about their blessings. But I will say that with my stepparents in particular, I was writing about them in the context of my upbringing, and that necessarily means there’s a more narrow glimpse of them by way of events that involve my own life. I don’t regret anything that I presented, but I feel sensitivity to the fact that they have much bigger stories that put their own decisions and lives into a more whole and compassionate context, stories that just by necessity couldn’t appear in the book.
Early on, you talk about how we have this deep lack of awareness about class. You write: “The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was.” How did this understanding — or lack of it — arise? Who was telling you there wasn’t a problem?
That’s a two-part answer. One is that my family was saying class wasn’t a problem. That could be regional or cultural. I was raised in a rural German Catholic Midwestern family and also I was a child and there was not really a childhood anywhere around me where adults are asking children, “how do you feel?” It was just silence in the face of facts that should have been more acknowledged.
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The second part of that answer is that, at a much bigger level, society and American culture deny that class is even a thing in this country. Unlike in the United Kingdom, where class is a complicated but more accessible and older discussion, the U.S. was founded on this premise of equality and meritocracy. Along the way, we have begun to reckon with certain holes in that — certainly along lines of race and gender — but class is a later arrival in that discussion of correcting notions about this country as a place where everyone has an equal and fair shot. If you are growing up on the losing end of some sort of inequality, if a large faction of the country is claiming that you don’t have a fair grievance, that is an incredibly difficult psychological tension to bear.
You mention that your family thought you were middle-class, though in retrospect you know you grew up in poverty. If you thought you were middle class, who did you consider to be poor?
Not that this came up often, but I think we thought we were middle class because we didn’t starve and we weren’t homeless. There was never, not once, a moment growing up when I thought of myself as poor. In fact, still, every time I say “grew up in poverty,” I feel this inner reluctance to even use that terminology. Partly it’s because we have such terrible language and definitions for discussing these experiences, but also because there’s a part of me that feels like it’s a disservice to people who are homeless for me to say “poor.”
But in the context of this country and even by just the very technical definition that the federal government comes up with, yes, we were in poverty. It’s one of the reasons that class is such a difficult discussion. It’s hard to define and when you add in a layer of denial, it becomes nearly impossible to see.
What would it look like for a country girl today, to be aware of class? How would that change her, even though awareness alone wouldn’t make the poverty go away?
I had wondered this before. I grew up at the last breath of the pre-digital moment. Now, it’s increasingly the case that even kids out in the country have access to the Internet, and this of course shifts their awareness of where they are in the various pecking orders that society prescribes. I think that since I was an ambitious and information-hungry kid, I would have been all over that Internet. I probably would have, in this moment, been following the various kinds of socioeconomic justice movements that are going on and I would have recognized something about my life and struggle.
Now whether that would have motivated me with a sort of hopeful activism or been demoralizing, I don’t know. I will say that in the end, I’m actually really grateful that, growing up, I didn’t realize how screwed I was. I felt the “being screwed,” I felt the disadvantage in my day-to-day life, but I didn’t impose any particular meaning, it was just life as I knew it. Perhaps that allowed me to keep putting one foot in front of the other with just a completely unreasonable optimism, which in many ways is one of the things about my individual disposition that allowed me to beat some of the odds.
While factors like gender and race and sexual orientation continue to impact the outcomes, ignoring economics and that plight is basically saying… ‘you don’t deserve any help because you have no frickin’ excuse for your poverty.’
Nowadays, “country” isn’t just a place, it’s tied to an image, like long beards and being pro-life and pro-guns. How did “country as an image” develop? What’s the effect of people who aren’t country adopting this image?
I think that in this moment of historic wealth inequality, there is almost an envy of the working class. There’s maybe a sense of guilt for one’s own privilege and affluence, and even some romanticization of manual labor that is problematic in many ways. Perhaps these style affectations are part of that. I think there might be an undercurrent of people of means who, rather than being ostentatious, are subconsciously attempting to downplay their own unfair advantage in the world.
As a result, places like Walmart sell pre-torn jeans. These styles of clothing meant to evoke poverty or wear are now sold new at the same stores where people — who have no other option of nice, sparkly, new expensive things — shop. It’s so perverse. Just by necessity, I kept from our farmhouse pieces of furniture and now brand-new, knock-off versions of these things are peddled by Magnolia Homes and Joanna Gaines via HGTV. One part of me finds it funny and then part of me is like, “do you really want to live on a farm? Because if you do, you’re gonna have to get off your ass and do a lot more than you probably are doing in this fancy home that is ‘farmhouse chic.’”
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Do you see it as a form of appropriation? I know plenty of upper-middle-class people who wouldn’t dream of, for example, wearing a qipao, but are happy to have a “farmhouse wedding.”
My personal disposition is that I don’t personally get angry about this, but yes, absolutely. It speaks to an extent to which class is still invisible. Many people who would have a rustic farm-style wedding on which they spend $40,000 would never affect some sort of style that they understood to be associated with a race or culture other than their own.
Take the trend of “barnwood” furniture. Barns to me are symbols of the past and beautiful relics of the landscape that I occupy and now there are hard-up carpenters from the same class roving the countryside and finding barns to tear down so they can build coffee tables and put them on Facebook Marketplace for upper-middle-class people and say “this is made out of barnwood from Oklahoma.” It’s beautiful and I have a coffee table made of it, but I live in this place and I grew up working in barns. It’s a little different.
Regarding weddings, we’re at this moment when big-ag and corporations have destroyed family farms across the country for decades. This is not remotely a new story. But while people of means in cities most often turned a blind eye to that issue, now they want to be farmers for a day and hold their expensive wedding. Some ranchers I know are now augmenting their inadequate income as working ranchers by offering their home as an event space over the weekend. That’s their own choice and they may find it wonderful, but I personally think it speaks to a deep disconnect in our culture between the reality of the working poor and rural America and people outside of that who, in my experience, simultaneously make fun of that culture and appropriate its physical touchstones.
One recurring theme in your book is that invisibility and erasure leads to shame. For example, in college, which is ostensibly the place where people have “made it,” there weren’t resources for people like you, only for people of color or sexual minorities or international students. What sort of changes should be we making to combat this erasure? And how do we make sure that we’re not stigmatizing people who need those resources?
In early adulthood, we separate two groups of people into the “educated” and the “uneducated” and that is a huge line in the sand in so many American lives in terms of what their outcomes are going to be. While factors like gender and race and sexual orientation continue to impact the outcomes, ignoring economics and that plight is basically saying, “all of these issues about our lives matter except for capitalism.” It is saying, “you don’t deserve any help because you have no frickin’ excuse for your poverty.” Of course, that’s not how it works.
I was a professor for five years, and in my service work in academia I was always pushing for definitions of diversity to be expanded to include socioeconomic class, which of course intersects with everything else. For me, the ultimate solution would be free public college for everyone, regardless of household income, rich or poor. The beauty of that is that it simultaneously corrects the problem and removes the stigma of need.
Who is showing up for someone’s vote goes a long way, especially in communities that have a lot more to do with old-fashioned handshakes than some more urban environments.
One issue you address directly is also one that is a big question of the moment: Why do the rural working poor vote Republican?
This has so many layers. The Republican Party saw an opportunity among that demographic and the Democratic Party decided not to acknowledge it. Just the sheer force of attention is huge in this discussion and who is showing up for someone’s vote goes a long way, especially in communities that have a lot more to do with old-fashioned handshakes than some more urban environments. Conservatives have successfully and artfully claimed that space and people who are born there are no different than someone who was born into a liberal enclave in New York City. It’s easy to get on our high horse about liberal ideas from a different place, but if these same people had been born into it, I’m not sure of the likelihood they would be saying something different. I do think that often people’s political affiliations and votes have more to do with group culture and where they’re from than with a real, examined and informed foundation.
There are myriad ways that “country life” is socialist: asking your neighbor to help you pull a broken-down tractor out of the field, checking on the old lady down the dirt road because her husband died ten years ago and she lives three miles away from any other neighbor. Community is incredibly important in a rural context. However, simultaneously, there is a sense of geographic and economic removal from basically all the places that politics and public policy happen. In such a way, it is easy for Republicans who want to tear down government to weaponize that and make government the bad guy.
These are people who are not on Twitter all day dissecting politics, they’re by and large trying to survive every day and probably not even watching the news in the evening because they’re so tired and disgusted with their lives that they just want some entertainment. In that life, which those of us who are part of the chattering class can forget, it is possible for there to be a large distance between what you really believe and what you live out in your day-to-day life and the party that you say you’re for and who you vote for.
When I got to college, I gained a formal understanding of all these aspects of political discourse. That created a shift in my politics but it wasn’t as though my beliefs about people changed. I always loved all people. I genuinely thought that because of where I was from and very limited information sources that affirmative action was unfair. When I got to college and learned that your outcomes in life are statistically impacted by your race, I realized, “oh, affirmative action is the fairest thing in the world.”
How do we solve this disconnect?
One solution is fighting for our public schools. It’s remarkable that a lot of liberal Americans claim that they’re all for public this and that, but they send their own children to private school and fail to make the connection between the civic crisis we find ourselves in today and the lack of understanding among so many Americans of what democracy even means. We need a revitalized, robust civics education. Of course, power doesn’t want that because it’s very dangerous for people to understand their own right and the history of this country and its crimes against its own people.
Then it’s all about enfranchising people, getting people to vote and to believe their vote matters. Democrats framing the question as “how do we get those conservative white rural people to vote for us?” is the wrong question. In terms of political efficiency and expediency, the far more important question is, “why don’t we show up there and see if it turns out there are a whole bunch of people who agree with us who haven’t been voting?” These are people who have lived in places where 7 out of 10 local races are uncontested by the Democratic Party, who have maybe felt unhappy with our choice of national candidates for myriad reasons. It’s about acknowledging that these places that we call “red” contain millions and millions and millions of people who have never even voted before.
* * *
Angela Chen (@chengela) is a science journalist at The Verge, previously a reporter with The Wall Street Journal. Her reporting and essays have also been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Aeon Magazine, Pacific Standard, Hazlitt, and more. Her first book, ACE, is forthcoming from Beacon Press.
Posted by Angela Chen on September 18, 2018
QUOTED: "Toward the beginning, I directly address a term that gets at that within the context of my own racial experience, whiteness: "white trash." Trash, of course, is garbage; it is dispensable; it is, by definition, something to be thrown away. And it's a dangerous way to talk about human beings, about ourselves, about our country. I think it says a lot about the way that power and these power structures and strata in this so-called socioeconomic ladder that we measure our country by really often informs our language in some really destructive ways."
She Thought Her Family Was Middle Class, Not Broke In The Richest Country On Earth
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September 16, 20188:21 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Heartland
Heartland
A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh
Hardcover, 290 pages
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Sarah Smarsh grew up in rural Kansas — the fifth generation to farm the same land, riding tractors where her ancestors rode wagons. There was never enough money and prospects were few. She was part of the what has become popularized as the white working class. But back then, she didn't know it.
"I never in a million years thought that I was poor, and I don't think that my family would have used that word either when we were — well, and many are — living that experience," Smarsh told NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro in an interview for Weekend Edition Sunday. "Our sense was: We got enough to eat, and there is a roof keeping the elements off of our head, and so I guess, if someone would have asked, we would have thought we were, say, middle class.
Her new book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, has just been nominated for the annual National Book Foundation longlist awards in non-fiction category. In it, Smarsh talks about how her family story reflects the wider story of inequality and poverty in America.
Interview Highlights
On the term "intergenerational poverty" and its limits
Yeah, and even the term poverty — since I write about class, I think about the power of words and our word choice often, and I never in a million years thought that I was poor, and I don't think that my family would have used that word either when we were — well, and many are — living that experience. Our sense was: We got enough to eat, and there is a roof keeping the elements off of our head, and so I guess, if someone would have asked, we would have thought we were, say, middle class. And I think that "working poor" is a good term for the experience my family was living, because that kind of gets at the reason that we were poor, which is not for lack of effort and participation in these systems that we're encouraged to believe in. It was rather for markets and low wages that we had no control over ourselves.
So much storytelling about poverty is overlaid with this sense of pity and sometimes even condescension that casts it as this overwhelmingly bleak experience. And in fact, my life and my family was often brimming with humor and joy and love — a lot of hardship too of course.
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On being a child from a line of teenage mothers
For some reason — I don't know if it was just my disposition as a kid — the future journalist in me was always looking around, trying to get to the bottom of things, and to understand all these deep truths about our family that no one was talking about. And I knew my mom was unhappy, and I knew that something about it had to do with her role as a mother. This, I think, fostered in me a really precocious sense of my own would-be participation in that same path.
And so by the time I was of childbearing age, even as a prepubescent, I was already consciously thinking about how I really wanted to make sure that I didn't have a baby when I was really young and really poor. That absolutely informed the way that I structured this book, which is addressed to that would-have-been child that I did successfully circumvent having. Teenage pregnancy has everything to do with poverty, in some ways, and it's something that we — that I have not really seen addressed outright as much as I think it ought to be: This relationship between the female body, her womb, motherhood and one's socioeconomic outcomes.
On how the working poor are viewed as dispensable, and on poor whiteness in particular
Why Is It Still OK To 'Trash' Poor White People?
Code Switch
Why Is It Still OK To 'Trash' Poor White People?
Toward the beginning, I directly address a term that gets at that within the context of my own racial experience, whiteness: "white trash." Trash, of course, is garbage; it is dispensable; it is, by definition, something to be thrown away. And it's a dangerous way to talk about human beings, about ourselves, about our country. I think it says a lot about the way that power and these power structures and strata in this so-called socioeconomic ladder that we measure our country by really often informs our language in some really destructive ways. ...
I often find that there is a particular derision toward or contempt for poor whiteness that comes from better-off whites. You know, this is a very different experience on the privilege continuum than being a person of color. But it still nonetheless has something to do with race, I think. ... If we have a culture really built on the foundations of white supremacy and ideas that are deeply embedded in our society about whiteness essentially being a shorthand for economic stability and power ... it's kind of implicit in that, for the white people that trade in those ideas, that that's sort of the right order of things. Even, let's say, well-to-do white people who fancy themselves liberal and progressive have such a hateful, venomous attitude toward members of their own race who have not won in this capitalist society, in economic terms. And that seems to me to suggest that they are offended by essentially looking in the mirror, seeing someone who is more a physical reflection of themselves in whiteness, who is living the shame of poverty.
On the increased attention paid to the white working class following the 2016 presidential election
On the one hand, you know, coming from rural America, I think, oh, all right, now we're getting some attention in national discussion. But the hell of it is, it's often, from my view, the wrong attention, framed the wrong way, asking the wrong questions, and making the wrong assessments. I'd almost rather just be left alone. So we've sort of moved from a sense of invisibility to a stunning, broad stereotype casting millions of Americans as somehow a political and cultural monolith. It seems to me that what's going on right now is the scapegoating of a group that I know in some pockets to be very progressive, and is not at all represented by the media attention that's going on right now.
On what her family thinks of the book
Yeah, the way they look at it, I think, is: This is a very strange and rare experience for one to have, to be made a character in a nonfiction book. But they understand work. They respect work. They're not necessarily book people, but they know I'm doing my job, and they respect that. And though — I think the way they see stories is: If it's true, it's true. So there's neither pride nor shame on their part. I think they just feel like — they believe I got it right, and that's the best review I could get.
Hiba Ahmad and Barrie Hardymon produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.
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QUOTED: "This is a difficult, but illuminating, book for these class-riven times."
Reviews: "Heartland,' by Sarah Smarsh, and 'Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit,' by Amy Stewart
September 23, 2018 — 2:00pm
“Heartland,” by Sarah Smarsh
“Heartland,” by Sarah Smarsh
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Heartland
By Sarah Smarsh. (Scribner, 304 pages, $26.)
The subtitle of Sarah Smarsh's "Heartland" is "A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth." Her timing is impeccable, given the country's growing divide around class. Her goal is nothing less than disputing the belief that some people — specifically "white trash" — are just meant to be, that the bad choices they make regarding sex or alcohol or jobs or education are, well, practically in their DNA and not the result of cultural forces.
She writes of her family, fifth-generation wheat farmers in Kansas on her dad's side, a legacy of teenage pregnancies on her mom's side. In the United States, she writes, "the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry" that has less to do with race or gender than with "what your actions have failed to accomplish — financial success within capitalism — and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy." Successful white people denigrate poor white people for their failure to succeed as they have, she contends. In other words, without race as an excuse, impoverished white people are victims of their own bad choices. And there's not much anyone can do about that, eh?
This is a provocative, well-researched book for our times. Yet one nit: Smarsh sets up this book as a note to an imaginary daughter, a childhood creation who shaped many of Smarsh's own smart decisions by prompting her to think, "What would I tell my daughter to do?" Good tactic. Except that the resulting random sentences addressed to "you" always come as a surprise, the reader not being steeped in her life-altering experience.
“Miss Kopp Just Won’t Stop” by Amy Stewart
Smarsh does bring her insistence on maintaining this trope to a decent explanation in her final pages, but by that time it all seems a little labored.
Importantly, she acknowledges that her own success as a university professor risks undermining her message that many decisions are taken out of the hands of "white trash" who would otherwise make other choices if they could. She says people often ask, "How did you get out?" Her answer: "Mine isn't a story about a destination that was reached but rather about sacrifices I don't believe anyone, certainly no child, should ever have to make." Which is about the only thing she can say. This is a difficult, but illuminating, book for these class-riven times.
KIM ODE
Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit By Amy Stewart. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 309 pages, $26.)
The fourth, funniest and best of the Miss Kopp books finds Constance Kopp at a crossroads. It's the eve of the 1916 elections and the first female deputy in Hackensack, N.J., may be out of a job, since her supportive boss is running for national office and his likely successor can't stand her. While she waits for the results of the election, though, she keeps busy with a baffling case: A man has had his wife committed to an "insane asylum" for the fourth time, despite overwhelming evidence of her sanity. What gives?
The answer, as in most of Kopp's cases, is that the wife has the misfortune of living in a time when men make all the decisions. A feminist before the word was widely used, Kopp does what she can to ease the lives of the women in the Bergen County jail, most of whom are there because they're poor or depressed, while fulfilling her deputy duties as capably as her male colleagues. Here she is, for instance, when a convict makes a break for it in the opening pages: "I did what any officer of the law would do: I tucked my handbag under my arm, gathered my skirts in my hands, and ran him down."
Kopp's first-person account is wry and un-self-pitying, despite the long odds she faces both at the job and at home, where her quirky sisters are after her to bring home more money and less notoriety. The novel is more interested in characters than plot but it's great fun — fans of the Maisie Dobbs series will love it — and a timely reminder that women have been fighting the equity battle for generations.
CHRIS HEWITT
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