WORKING CLASS WRITING: ABOUT, FOR, AND SOMETIMES BY, COMMON PEOPLE

Working-class writing is writing that takes seriously the lives of working-class people.

Working-class people are the common people, regular people who don’t have university degrees, who work with their hands or on their feet, and who get paid an hourly wage.

Working-class fiction is usually for, about, and by working-class folks. Think the works of Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Kit de Waal.

But it also has been written by more privileged people such as Dickens and Steinbeck. Sometimes, the story is about the workings of social class itself. Katherine Mansfield’s classic tale, The Doll’s House, comes to mind, as do the works of several authors from days of yore.

Some fiction categorized as African American or Indigenous or gay lit. is also working-class fiction. Examples are found in the works of Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and James Baldwin.

The key is that the stories centre the lives of working-class characters, whatever their colour or identity, and show understanding of those lives.

The irony is that, unless you’ve studied social class at university,

you’re probably not even sure how to define it. Most of us aren’t.

​Working-class people least of all.

But think about a triangle with the skinniest point at the top. The working class of any nation, usually the majority, are just north of those in poverty and just south of the middle classes (business owners and professionals such as teachers, social workers, doctors, lawyers).

The tiny group of truly wealthy are way, way above the rest. The more privileged, the fewer people in each group.

Class is relevant to everything. Just like race, just like gender. Everyone has a class background, lives in a certain class (usually the one they came from), and class-based attitudes, realities, and experiences weave in and out of our daily lives.

For writers, most importantly, the class we come from, the class we write from, the class whose side we’re on, affects the authenticity of our stories.

Class can even determine who gets to read us.

Actually, a writer’s class origins can often influence whether anybody gets to read our stories at all. Publishers tend to be moneyed people, increasingly blind to the rest of us.

Weirdly, the more that institutions focus on identity politics, the more they seem to be erasing working-class lives, working-class voices, working-class stories.

My hope is that, in spite of all, this website and blog will help get me out there to you.

I think you know I come from the poorest of the poor. And every story I tell is about poor people, my people, often my family, and their actual lives.

​Yet, this isn’t about being a victim. Being poor is not synonymous with victimhood. And my characters aren’t portrayed as victims either. They are victimized often, that’s true, but it’s not what their stories are about.

The opposite. Their stories are about agency. Their agency, what they actually did about the things that happened to them, which often were not fair.

Their stories are about what they did right and what they did wrong. Their stories are about how they struggled and fought.

Or how they cheated the ones they loved and then lied like a sidewinder.

Or how they were patient and loyal and determined, they wouldn’t let go of each other—how they sank or swam together.

How they could keep on going, imperfect, limping, and then sometimes, just for a moment, how they would rise up with fortitude and grace, and speak the God damn truth.

If writers can’t give us that, then who can?