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Sarah Smarsh, "Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class" (Scribner, 2024)
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Sarah Smarsh
Style, every Home welcome to the New.
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Commercial Narrator 2
Books Network.
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Emily Everett
Hello everyone. Welcome to this is the Place, a podcast series from the Common magazine on the New Books Network. The Common publishes literature and art with a modern sense of place. I'm Emily Everett, managing editor of the magazine and host of the Channel. Normally we're talking to contributors to our most recent issue, but today we're changing things up. And in honor of the Commons 15th anniversary, we're going to chat with a few past contributors, some of the magazine's all stars from our years past and today. I'm so excited to be talking to Sarah Smarsh about her nonfiction work chronicling not just the plight of the working class in America, but also its strength and vibrancy and complexity. Her essay, Death of the Farm Family appeared in issue 8 of the Common way back in 2014. Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper's, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest country on Earth, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize. The winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize and a Best Books of the Year selection by President Barack Obama. Her 2020 book, she Come By It, Dolly Parton and the Women who Lived Her Songs, was a finalist for the National Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book, Bone of the Essays on America From a Daughter of The Working Class 2012-2024, is out now in paperback. She lives in rural Kansas, where she's currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem. Sarah Smarsh, thank you for joining us.
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Sarah Smarsh
Hey Emily, I am so happy to be here.
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Emily Everett
Would you set the scene for our conversation? You know, we're a journal about place, so we always want to hear where you're calling from and what it's like.
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Sarah Smarsh
There's yes, and that's one of many reasons that I love the common is that place peace? That's very central to my work and just everything about who and what I am. I grew up on a fifth generation wheat farm in Kansas, and while I am not actively farming, I do live in rural Kansas, to which I happily returned after some adventures in major metropolitan and coastal areas. So I'm coming at you from the wilds of Kansas, right in the middle of this country.
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Emily Everett
I would love to start off with a reading. Would you read maybe a few paragraphs from your latest book for us?
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Sarah Smarsh
I'm happy to. So this is from Bone of the Bone, my essay collection. A lot of work about class over the course of about a decade. And this in my introduction to the book. I'm kind of giving a little behind the scenes to the reader about what it was like to be talking about class or writing about class specifically at a time at which that really wasn't part of the discourse today. We might take for granted that, particularly in political frameworks, class is top of mind for a lot of folks trying to figure out what's going on in our country, most of them getting it wrong, by the way. But I've been thinking writing about class since I started making a living as a writer a quarter century ago almost. And that's largely because on that farm I mentioned, I was also in poverty and the like. Have enough to eat, have a roof over your head, but be technically below the federal poverty line, sort of poor. And so when I went off to college, I was a first generation college student. I was also born to a teen mother. There were all sorts of cycles. I was kind of breaking in, leaving my place and heading off for higher education, which just awakened in me, I suppose, at a tender age, a class consciousness that I didn't even have the words for because those words were in our kind of collective consciousness as an as a nation that fancies itself a meritocracy. And so here in the introduction to Bone of the Bone, I'm I'm describing some of the challenges to initially getting some of these pieces published about socioeconomic class, this great under examined aspect of the American identity. My country was not ready to hear what I had to say, or rather, the gatekeepers of an increasingly exclusive industry were not ready to let me be heard for several years, even as I landed a couple major digital bylines for Harper's reporting on a state constitutional crisis over school funding Kansas my essays on clas were turned down repeatedly by newspapers and magazines. The first such essay of mine to go viral, a 2014 examination of access to dentistry as class signifier, was rejected by multiple US Outlets before finally being published by the digital magazine eon, based in London, a place that, while no less rife with class problems, differs from mine for having discussed those problems for centuries. Then there was the matter of needing to eat. The first essay in this collection, a 2013 piece for the Huffington Post, notoriously built on the labor of unpaid writers seeking a quote unquote platform, received zero compensation. Though I was no fledgling journalist, by then I was 33 and had been a professional writer for more than a decade. Two years later, for a New Yorker digital piece about laws that unfairly punish the poor, also included in this book, I received for at least 40 cumulative hours of research, writing and responding to the meticulous editing and fact checking that makes the New Yorker a standard bearer worldwide $250 within hours of its publication. My excellent editor there, whom I trust was working with a scant budget of someone else's, emailed to say the piece was the second most popular read at the New Yorker website. Being underpaid by the world's eminent newspapers and magazines for illuminating socioeconomic struggle would become the central paradox of my work as an essayist, an insult that validates the points I make in their pages about undervalued labor and the chattering classes who can afford to write for peanuts since their wealth is assured by other means.
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Emily Everett
Thank you for reading that. It just speaks to me on so many levels. One thing that really struck home for me is that the novel that I recently wrote, a big part of the reason it's set in London in the UK is because I wanted to write about class and privilege in a place that really showcases that divide like is kind of honest and open about it and it feels like it's like a topic that should be front and center in the US and it feels to me like we can talk about wealth divides, but maybe not class at this point, sort of the billionaire class and that kind of thing. But you're also speaking to this idea of the sort of the chattering classes, which is something I very much encountered in publishing, which is that the people who can afford to do unfunded MFAs and work on their book without having a job and those kind of things, you know, those are the people that end up becoming gatekeepers, you know, becoming the people who decide what gets published. And it just sort of perpetuates this. I wonder what you would say has changed in terms of this idea of like whether we can talk about it or whether it's worth writing about or talking about.
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Sarah Smarsh
Yeah, I think what's changed is just that you hear the word, you hear the term, you hear our clunky sophomore language attempting to discuss this thing in the room that we've been denying for so long now. Whether we're talking about it well is another matter, but I do think so. The very first thing I ever wrote that was published nationally, I actually was still. I was writing for my student newspaper as a senior undergraduate at the University of Kansas, where I attended their fine journalism school. And I wrote a story about basically like class, blind loopholes, or excuse me, loophole isn't the right word, but blind spots in the fafsa, the Federal Application for Financial Student Aid, that any student who's attempting to get, you know, anything from a Pell Grant to a subsidized or unsubsidized loan by way of the federal government fills out. Often they do so with their parents, and often their parents are helping them pay for college, if not paying for all of it. For me, I was financially independent the second that I left that wheat farm in 1998. And so when I filled out the form, there's this, you know, this place where you enter your parents income, which is how they calculate your presumed financial need. And not only were my parents not helping pay for my college, I hadn't even lived with my parents since I was 11 years old. I was raised largely by my grandparents who were not my legal guardians, never officially adopted me. So, so by, so, so by law or, and you know, by, I'm not sure that's the right way to say it, but, but, but to, to, to fill out this form and get the magic number about what I qualified for, I had to list not just my mother's income, but also at the time she happened to be married to a guy who had, you know, like a, a modest, you might say, like lower middle class income. But, but even that was a, was a step above the life I was living. And so it was just like grossly, you know, inaccurately reflected my actual need and you know, dramatically affected my, my experience in terms of just rote resources. Yeah. As a kid who was already climbing an uphill battle. So I wrote this story about that, that I was able to see that other, that other journalists or budding cub reporters, you know, could not because of where I came from. And so I write this so and when I say journalists, I mean across the country, not just in this little college paper apparently because the Associated Press picked the story up and it went on the wire and was published in newspapers all over the country. Yeah. And which is pretty exciting for me at 21 or whatever. But from that moment on, you know, I've been ringing that same bell thematically, thinking a lot about class, talking about it, writing about it. And so, so that's how I like. So what has changed is that in, in those days, not only were the terms not like in the, the discourse like you know, working class, the billionaire class, the 1%, it the I was, I myself as someone who was like attempting to articulate what the hell was going on in my life, which I knew was some disadvantage that there just like wasn't a word for apparently I writer words for my tools struggled to come to a verbal understanding and articulation of this thing that was vexing me that I wanted to shine out. And then you Fast forward to 2015 and there was wild political climate bursting forth and class seemed to be front and center among pundits in figuring out and naming what was going on there. And those pundits themselves had the same sorts of class blind spots of whoever who designed the fafsa. And so even the well meaning among among them, it just, you know, I just would be pulling my hair out hearing their just grossly classist analyses about our political moment and specifically the rise of the far right, which I've written ad nauseam about with data backing it up, being mis portrayed as, you know, the, the result of poor white folks votes. It's all sorts of white folks. It's prior to this last election, very much white folks. That's accurate. Some shift in those demographics now in terms of racial diversity among conservatives and specifically voters for Donald Trump. But the roots of that movement and its rise and what we might call its base. And that sort of juggernaut within the national politics is much more complex than that. And so I wrote a lot about that and in that moment found that, I guess it's an improvement that now American editors want to hear what I have to say about class. But at the same time, 99% of people attempting to talk about that thing were doing so from a place of such privilege that they couldn't possibly understand that power continuum. So I think we're headed in the right direction, but it's still just a horribly nascent and primitive conversation in terms of our ability as a country to grapple with it.
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Emily Everett
Yeah, it's like, now we can talk about it, but we still can't talk about it correctly.
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Sarah Smarsh
That's the one. Yep.
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Emily Everett
One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast is because I also grew up on a small family farm, as you did, very working class. And it was just really refreshing to me to see someone writing about that way of life, having those conversations I didn't really see around me when I was growing up, nor. Nor when I entered publishing. And I feel like so much of book publishing these days is about what's new and edgy and cool, and everyone's trying to figure out what, what's, what's going to sell, you know, what had dollar signs in their eyes. And I'm just wondering, when you first started working on your books, were you worried at all that people wouldn't care about them? That, like rural stories, farm stories, poverty stories were just not going to be something you could, you could sell?
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Sarah Smarsh
Well, I'm going to answer that. I'm going to kind of peel that question into two parts. And by the way, always love to talk to a fellow farm girl. But, and it's, it means a lot to me that, that, you know, you felt seen in, in some important way, however general, and just the fact that I was speaking from that perspective. But, you know, the first part of your question about, you know, was I worried that people wouldn't care or see the value in the story. I already knew they didn't care or see the value in the story because. Because I knew I was one of those. I was one of those kids that always knew. I always knew I was going to be a writer. I mean, I, you know, there. I had a lot of other interests. Of course, I was, I, I kind of wanted to go into. I was always also an artist. I kind of wanted to go into visual art. And there were. I also loved math and economics, weirdly, Enough in college, but, but, but it, but writing was the thing that I could not shake. And it had been with me since I was a child. I, I had been like, I remember, like walking around very young, you know, kindergarten, first grade, and like narrating my own actions and like other people and in my, in third person, as I would like in real time, as I would like. I was like, just had this involuntary response to reality to turn it into exposition in my head. And so, you know, I, I was, I mentioned that I went to journalism school, but I also double majored because I, you know, I was sort of alluding to being an artsy fartsy at heart. I double majored in creative writing in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences as an English major, double major. And so while in the J school, I was taking my lens on class and I mentioned that story about the FAFSA hitting the AP wire. Meanwhile, I was in very personal, and we might say more creative ways, writing memoir essays in creative writing courses as an undergraduate. And then I got to hop in on some MFA courses, even though I was still an undergrad myself. And the feedback I got when I was in Kansas as an undergrad, even at a state university, I was something different in class terms than just about any student in any, in any classroom, most of whom, you know, had, let's say, vaguely middle class parents who also went to college, even if they were from small towns like myself. And so there was, you know, there was, there was always validation for my, my skills as a writer, happily enough. But, but the matter of what I was writing about, believe it or not, some of, some of the, some of the passages in my first book, Heartland, which came out in 2018, I wrote in some of those classes in like 2001 when I was, you know, just alas, like 21. And you know, I distinctly remember because I decided that, you know, if I could find the support and a way that I was going to apply for graduate school to attempt to sort of marry these two sides of my writer self, the, the journalist and the memoirist, through a nonfiction focused graduate writing program. I remember asking my advisor at KU to look over my, my creative sample that I was submitting in my applications. I applied to like six schools, I think. And he read it and he said, I'm going to be honest with you, if I, if I received this, then I would, I would say no, I would put you immediately in the rejection pile. And it was, you know, he, the only thing I, the only way I can make sense of that, because that same advisor slash instructor had, had, had good, had had good things to say about my skills as a writer. In fact, he let me into his graduate level class when I was an undergrad and all that. So, so I don't know his reasons, but I've lived enough years getting heat from people about, like, this class thing that. To suspect, you know, that that's my working theory anyway, of that he was saying, like, you can't send this, like, white trash story, basically. And, but my gut said, and my gut had, had gotten me that far in life, coming from circumstances that weren't just, you know, difficult for being rural and in poverty, but. But also some pretty severe abuse and neglect. I thought, you know, obviously this is not the feedback that one wants in the vulnerable act of sharing a piece of writing. And this happened to be passages about. Well, in fact, they're, they're, they're paragraphs that are in the book Heartland were in that creative sample. And I thought about listening to him and sending something else. And then I just, my gut said, this is who I am. This is what I am. And if they don't, if they don't want it, if they don't want me, then to hell with them. And I sent it and I got into my, my top school, which was Columbia. And. But there's.
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Commercial Narrator 3
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Sarah Smarsh
But then when I got to Columbia, it was not hard to figure out the reason behind the discomfort that some of my peers and professors felt with the place I was coming from. Namely squaring the fact that I was obviously an intelligent person with their ideas about what somebody who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas must and ought to be. So now I've lost completely the original question that I've been rambling to answer.
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Emily Everett
So good, so good, so good.
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Emily Everett
Cause I always find something amazing.
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Sarah Smarsh
My Nordstrom credit card.
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Emily Everett
Total queen treatment.
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Sarah Smarsh
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- [25:30]
Emily Everett
With Liberty Mutual.
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Sarah Smarsh
Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Emily Everett
Cut the camera.
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Sarah Smarsh
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
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Emily Everett
I'm just curious, like, probably I'm a little more mercenary than a lot of.
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Sarah Smarsh
Writers, but the point about calculating, are you worried about now? Is it going to sell okay? I already knew it was going to be an uphill battle about. Are these, are these folks in publishing, you know, going to care about this thing? And in fact, I got very clear. I mean, it couldn't be a more clear articulation of the answer to that question when for 10 years, Emily. I'm talking about 10 years, I sent, I queried agents and they wrote back or, or occasionally called. I think even happened back then sometimes. This is because I, I finished. I had a. A manuscript which had. Had been my master's thesis in 2005. It wasn't called Heartland yet and it didn't have in it a lot of the, you know, class analysis and the research and that sort of layer of the book that's, that's in the, that ultimately became part of it. But, but a lot of memoir was there. The spirit of the book was absolutely there. And, and the, and I started sending that out in 2005. And what I would hear back over and over is I think that you're a great writer, but I just don't. I'm just not sure that anybody would like, care about this. In other words, like, to your point, there's, there's not gonna be a market for it. And. But I just, I don't know. I guess I didn't, I didn't, I didn't lose any sleep over that for some reason, I think because coming out of, coming out of poverty is one of the blessings of it is like, the hell do I have to lose? Only, only got stuff to gain, nothing to lose. And by then, you know, I was working as a journalist. And while that isn't getting anybody rich, and certainly at that time, as the newspaper industry was collapsing around me, it, it was, it was a struggle. But I had, you know, I had this, that I, I was Halfway paying the bills here and there. I also had to like pour whiskey out of, you know, Roadhouse or whatever. But my, my book, it was like, this is my heart, this is my soul. And I'm not. This is, this is the book. It wasn't even like, like people will say, like, I think I might write a book, like, what would that be about? And I always think, girl, you got that all backwards. Because it's gotta be like the thing come, the book comes, the thing comes first. And then the, the f. Then I must write a book about it. Because if you're going the other direction, it's, it's, it's, it's too hard. It's. And it's too much heartache for it to be something that isn't just like setting you on fire, that you got to get it out. So it was sort of irrelevant whether the book was ever going to sell. It was my book and I had written it and I didn't give up on it. And I, I kept, you know, I queried for years and I kind of put it in a drawer. And then I had a couple essays which are contained in Bone of the Bone, which came out last year as that essay collection went viral in 2014. And now all of a sudden the agents were calling me. And then all my dreams came true and I ended up with this incredible publisher and, and, but, but the original thing about hooking me up, you know, us going out, and I was, you know, very fortunate that there was an auction and all the, all these, you know, just truly beyond my wildest imagination. But that was under the pretense of a collection of essays actually. And then once I got hooked up with my excellent editor, Kathy Belden at Scribner. Excellent doesn't do her justice. Legendary. She was like, you know, I think you have a, like a book length narrative in you. And I said, I done wrote it. I got, I got it right here. And so I pulled that old girl out of the drawer and you know, it's did. Needed a hell of a lot of work and it needed more layers. And the blessing or the kairos of that right timing is that in the, you know, ensuing years I had become a better writer and I had a bigger view, a more expansive view beyond the self and the memoir. While that's very much the heart of the book, it was the, the, the value, I believe, in the way I was hopefully able to be of service to that moment when all of a sudden the country was finally ready to talk about it. By that moment I had situated my family and my experience within the context of historical and sociological and cultural understandings that allowed me to weave in then a layer of analysis to say, you know, this is what this story about this family maybe means about our country. So it's, it was, it was a very happy ending, but it was some kind of combination of people telling me it would never get published and a bunch of leaps of faith and some very, you know, fortunate breaks that I myself can't take any credit for.
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Emily Everett
So I wonder, do you feel like, you know, when it eventually happened for you, it happened in a big way? You had the auction, it was a bestseller, it was a finalist for the National Book Award. Do you feel like you're, like you needed culture and publishing to catch up to where you were at? Like, do you feel like it was like the book needed to come out at the right time? Or do you feel like it's just, you know, sort of this, you had to do it for 10 years and keep it in the drawer and do all those things in order to get to the point where it could be that successful?
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Sarah Smarsh
I definitely think it's the former. I think I, the main issue was that the we just, I, I was seeing something that we, that, you know, the, that there wasn't yet space for in the discourse. And I should say, by the way, lest someone suspect that one particular juggernaut bestseller about working class white folks, We Shall Not Speak Its name, whose title We Shall Not Name, somehow paved the way for me. I'm going to give you a big nah and tell you. Actually I, I signed up with my publisher in 2015 and, and that book came out in 2016. So I was all. So, so I do think though that there, you know, but, but that's to the point because there were a couple other books, Terrorist Overs Educated, came out, I believe the same year as Heartland. While that's not about poverty, it's, it's kind of a fringe of society uphill battle kind of tale that involving geography and, and, and abuse and all that. And, and so there, there was there. I, I think there's a lot of evidence that it was sort of in the zeitgeist. It was the, the moment was, was ripe. And that had to do with, it had to do with all sorts of things that you can track pretty closely with the, the economic realities of our country in 2008, the, the great financial crisis, great recession, and then, you know, the Tea Party. That was sort of a class adjacent sort of thing. And then I would say, by the mid 2000 teens, even before Donald Trump's presidency and campaign, because I had my first couple essays on the topic go viral in 2014. So it was just, yeah, I think that I was able to see and start pushing for a conversation around something that my country. Well, I should say specifically the gatekeepers of our country and the messages that get out weren't ready to talk about. But. And it's a blessing, I suppose, that that's the case because I absolutely did become a better, as I mentioned, and a better writer and a more learned citizen of the world in the interim. And so it was for the good of the book, to be sure, but it was. It's for sure. One of the hardest things I've ever done was produce that book while living largely in financial distress and then keep at it and not give up on sending it out into outer space and hope that someone would send a signal back.
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Emily Everett
It's so interesting hearing about the early days of Heartland because thinking about your essay that was in the Common, Death of the Farm Family, which came out in 2014 in the Common. And it's rare that I'm talking to someone on the podcast who I didn't actually publish myself as managing editor. This was two years before I started at the magazine. I know it was over a decade ago, but what do you remember about the process? I'm kind of curious if. Were you just submitting work? Was your agent submitting work? I assume, like, it looks to me like it's like almost an excerpt that ended up in the memoir eventually.
- [36:06]
Sarah Smarsh
Totally. If I recall correctly, I'm 90% sure that I do. That piece came out, or at least the contract had already been signed for the Common to publish that essay before I got a lot of attention for a couple of other pieces and had an agent. So I know my agent was involved. I. In terms of, like, the. The material itself. I keep talking, for some reason, like, three times now, I've mentioned that I had written some of the passages that are in Heartland in my early 20s. And indeed, that's what was in the Common is part of that.
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Emily Everett
Yes. It's sort of. It's like Betty and Arnie meeting.
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Sarah Smarsh
Yeah. Yeah. And it's. And that ended up in. If I remember right, there's kind of like three. Three sort of moments or scenes that are more disparate or spread across the memoir once they were kind of situated within the vague chronology of that book, but they're more sort of packaged together or juxtaposed in that essay. And how that came to pass was I'm pretty sure I had met your fine publisher, Jen Acker, at. Or editor at. I don't know, like, maybe at awp, I think some conference. Yeah. Yeah. And at the time, I was also. I. I had. While I was still freelancing as a journalist in order to, like, eat and have benefits. And. And also because I love teaching and campuses, I was for about five years a creative nonfiction writing professor at a small university. So AWP is kind of part of that gig. I'm pretty sure I had met her and she, like, gave me her card and said, send me something. And I did, and she published it. And. Yeah. And I credit the comment, actually, in the. On the title page of the book for that.
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Emily Everett
One thing I really loved From Heartland was thinking about Kansas back into your childhood as a fairly. I don't know if progressive, not the right word, but like a feminist place, a place where people were so practical that they weren't ideological. There wasn't this divide that's become so stark and sort of cultural and weaponized. It was, you know, of course, women worked because they had to, because everybody was poor. And who would be precious about whether a woman can drive a tractor or not? And, you know, people need healthcare because everyone's always getting hurt. You know, like, it just seems so much more practical. And it was really nice to think about. You know, I have not been to Kansas, but, like, oh, that's a lie. I went to Kansas City. AWP to think about it sort of before we. Yeah. We saw these things be weaponized. And to see an assumption that people from Kansas have certain political beliefs, and you sort of talk about why people might have voted or not voted or which party, but it wasn't sort of an assumption like it is now. I just. I wonder what you would say about that in light of where we are today.
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Sarah Smarsh
Yeah. In terms of, like, kind of naming the shift of what. The context I grew up in and where we are now, or. Is that what you're getting at?
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Emily Everett
Yeah. Or. I mean, how does it feel to you now to be. I don't know.
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Sarah Smarsh
Yeah.
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Emily Everett
To see that. The way that people talk about that part of the country now and assume that people in that country feel and act and believe that's, like, not based in your reality at all.
- [40:04]
Sarah Smarsh
Yes. Yep, Yep, yep. Well, the hell of it, Emily, is that a lot of that. A lot of those just characterizations or stereotypes that took a very broad brush to, as you say, make assumptions about places and people largely reflecting that red and blue map that's been in our Midst for over 20 years now. When I was first writing against those narratives and pointing out why they were so problematic and dangerous and inaccurate in many ways, I stand by every one of those essays I wrote in that moment. The hell of it though is that those sorts of. There's a self fulfilling prophecy aspect to that sort of political framework or dialogue in a hypermedia moment where it's. If, if over and over and over you're shoving down the throats of everyone, this is what this place is red and this is what this place is blue, there, there can become, you know, it's sort of like, I suppose the political identity equivalent of like what, what's the word for like when a woman absorbs sexism?
- [41:36]
Emily Everett
Oh yeah. Internalized.
- [41:38]
Sarah Smarsh
Internalized, yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like an internalized political identity that maybe you didn't even grow up with. But now, my God, every time you look at the news is what they're telling you you are. And there's enough people down at the coffee shop that are that and now there's, there's like this sense of like, oh well. And very real political movements that are authentic in their reasons, however foolish or toxic. And so I think that, you know, my analysis now is not so much, you know, certainly those, let's say in Kansas that. Well, I never denied this for, at the, you know, in the presidential election, Kansas has voted for the Republican candidate for, you know, like a century or something crazy. I don't, but that's, you know, I, I was never denying the truth of, of those numbers, but rather saying, let's look at this, this huge political minority within places like Kansas where, you know, if it's like a 60, 40 split or maybe like a 70 or even a 7030 split where it's something like 2 in 5 people, at worst, 1 in 3 people or at least 1 in 3 people are like, that's a lot of people. And that red and blue map. And this is true in every state, of course, millions and millions and millions and millions of people are not represented by that map. And that includes not just the folks that voted for the losing party, it includes the just, you know, wildly enormous contingent of Americans who don't vote. That includes the, you know, voting eligible electorate, but, but also folks who, who can't vote for various reasons. So all I was ever saying was this is not. If you're trying to understand what Kansas is or what Massachusetts is or what New York State Or Utah or Nebraska is. It's so stupid to not look at least at even like it's is so complicated but at least you know talk about these, these large groups of people who, or something other than your political assumptions about the place or don't vote at all because it's very different. It's two very different things. Who won a winner take all election. We don't do ranked choice. We don't. You, you, you could win by 1% and then they, they paint your whole state red or whatever. You know now today and to your point about history and I love you bringing up the yes, historically very progressive roots of this part of the country. The sort of right here in the center. These, these plains states were ahead of the nation, even those in the Northeast and suffrage and, and all sorts of you know what at the time would have been considered a progressive cause like let's say well Kansas when it declared itself a free state by the way, largely with the help of folks from your fair state of Massachusetts who moved here as abolitionists. Yeah. That sparked no less than the Civil War. So these ideas about how different regions represent supposedly conservative conservatism or liberalism. It's a pretty, it's a pretty short sighted view. You know, something like West Virginia we would now you know, people would call that quote unquote Trump country. And it's only like 20 years ago that it wasn't one of the bluest places in the nation because of their strong union history and they're in coal country. So. But so all that's true and today if I were weighing in about these things which, which I largely donate more for various reasons but it's, it's, it's now the real. Unfortunately those messages, they, they sort of helped create a monster. I believe in terms of not just division but a sort of like hardening of these political psychologies that get into a place like a virus. And, and so it's. Yeah it's, it's, it's. As someone who works with words and believes in truth both objective and subjective, it's, it's a dangerous business to just get something flat ass wrong over and over and over and over on the nightly friggin news and like, like a reputable outlet. You know I'm not even talking about like places turn intentionally turning out propaganda. I'm talking about class blind spots among well meaning journalists and reporters is the what we tell ourselves about who and what we are as a country. And that's largely the province of, of the media. It, it can Become realer than whatever reality sparked the the. The stereotype or the assumption.
- [47:29]
Emily Everett
Yeah.
- [47:30]
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- [48:14]
Emily Everett
We'Ve been told that the sort of, you know, that those red states are sort of where this movement came from. And I think you're right, that it's actually sort of the opposite, that they're sort of the recipients of it, unfortunately. But I'm sure I'm also painting with too broad a brush.
- [48:30]
Sarah Smarsh
Just saying that. Well, I agree with that broad brush. So I'm gonna say, yes, that is correct. No, but I do think you're right.
- [48:40]
Emily Everett
So people always say to me that writing is hard. You know, if they find out I wrote a book, they say it must be so, so hard. And it always really makes me laugh because I grew up around people who were doing actual hard work. You know, farming is so hard. My father still does it. He's over 70. He's still going. He'll never retire. And I never really thought about it. My parents never really minded that I wanted to be a writer. But now when I talk to writers, when I think about writing as a profession. You said you were really interested in art, you were really interested in writing. And that kind of thing as a profession can feel like a big leap, like a luxury. You know, you've referred to sort of the chattering classes, and I sort of feel like, look at me, I'm in the chattering class now. You know, that's what I do. I wonder if you ever feel like that and if you're like, having to bridge that divide or perhaps that's like part of why you continue to love living in Kansas. I just, like, I Do feel like I have sort of these two parts of myself and that they don't always fit, fit perfectly together.
- [49:43]
Sarah Smarsh
Oh yeah, those two parts that is, that is real. In one of my essays in Bone to the bone from over 10 years ago, which is about teeth as a kind of class marker, specifically access to dentistry, I talk about, well, I quote, I believe W.E.B. du Bois called it dual consciousness when they're kind of two parts of the self that, you know, feel somehow at odds or oppositional within your understanding of your own identity, largely because the world around you is telling you that those two things don't go together. So for Du Bois, those two things were to be an African American man in his era who was also college educated and extremely erudite and welcomed into these spaces in, in which, you know, voices were being published and heard and, and respected and, and for me, by the way, not at all comparing my, my experience to his, my God, but, but for me, the defining dual consciousness of my coming of age and still today, though I've certainly reconciled it for myself at this point, but it has been a sense of consternation over the years is the seeming distance and real distance, but also culturally assigned distance between, yeah, the, the, the labor and the work and the fight to survive that I grew up in and the, you know, relative comforts of the now very fortunate, even, you know, middle class existence that I have as someone who's, who's living her dream as an author. Because those two people, you know, they're, they're the same, they're the same person, they're the same Sarah, but the, they can, they, they come with very different understandings and, and other folks that, that tend to wear those identities, only wear one or the other. And so when you're sort of, when the self is the, the bridge across that gulf, and I'm sure there are, you know, countless parallels to this in the realms of race and identity and ethnicity and sexuality and gender and so on. But for me, in class terms, to have that kind of where I came from and, and where I am now in terms of just, you know, to your, your point, what is work? I remember when work was like, I, I remember one summer I had, I didn't even know this was possible until it happened to me. And I'm probably now that I'm 45, going to be paying for it soon with my vision, but I, at one summer, which is a, I don't have to tell you the, you know, the, the hardest push of, of work out in, in the field well, depending on your crop, I suppose. We were in wheat country, so you're out harvesting under the sun and pulling rye out of the field and you're just, you're outside. You know, there's a reason. There's. The term farmer's tan is out in the summer sun. They're wearing a T shirt and, and their, their arm is like reddish brown from the T shirt line down. These being white folks in my, in my area. But I had, I got a sunburn on the corneas of my eyes. I remember coming inside and I was like, I can't see very well. And I was getting. I was sort of freaked out and I, I looked in the mirror and I could see this like, it. It almost looked like cataracts that had appeared o. In over an afternoon or something. Oh yeah. It scared the shit out of me. But they, they healed thankfully. But, you know, that's. I, I come from a world where that's. Well, and that's, that's child's play. I mean, there's, It's. I, I could easily. It. It wouldn't be hard for me to just tell you off the top of my head, like, 10 stories of people I knew in my family and community who are walking around with missing eyeballs and limbs and various cancers from chemicals or the sun and so on. Now, writing is, Is also damn hard, especially if you're like, cutting down to the bone to, to reveal the most personal and potentially shameful truth. And I don't actually. I would not. It's. It. Depending on the kind of writing you're doing and, and for. Well, I'm just going to speak for myself. For myself. The writing of, you know, what I do and what I share as, believe it or not, by nature, very private person, as a sort of like offering, I guess you might say, to the reader in hopes that either she feels seen and validated about something that before she felt alone or that she have her eyes open to something that she didn't before. Understand that in some way, if we're just talking about like on a level of 0 to 10, how hard is something? It isn't actually less hard than a summer wheat harvest. It's hard in a very different way. And it's hard in a way that won't sunburn your corneas. It's hard in a way if you're fortunate like me that, that you, you can pay the bills doing it. It's, it's. It's hard in a way that you're not worried about like where the electricity is going to stay on. Absolutely. You can be a writer and have that concern and I've lived that writer reality as well. But, but what you're getting at this thing of like I have the, the privilege of, you know, like sitting on my ass while I'm doing my work, basically. I mean as in when I'm reporting or researching, I'm going out, out and about into the world. But like, yeah, it's what, what I find. You know, if it was just me kind of squaring those two realities all, all it takes is for me to say, wow, thank God. Like it, it's actually kind of a beautiful thing because I, I so deeply appreciate the life that I have now. Imperfect though it is, it, it just, it just, it feels stable and calm and like I know I'm going to eat and, and I, my God, on top of all that, people are like, somebody might want to hear what I have to say about something, you know, what a, what a, what a friggin dream. Also true that you know, work on the farm and you know, this sort of. I grew up around a lot of construction workers and other types of manual labor too. All just beautiful and fulfilling in their ways but, but dangerous and hard in ways that something involving a computer is not. And so for me it's, it's actually there, there's a blessing in it because I just, I, I, I don't really experience much in the way of some sort of low level discontent or complaint that I find perhaps rife among other neurotic writers. I don't know. But, and human beings, you know, just human beings. I, I think that if you're, if the, the, the dual consciousness that you're reconciling involves one, that one experience identity that like really sucked and then, and then one that's like your dreams come true. It's like, oh, and hopefully it goes in that order. Then the dreams come true is like all the sweeter. You know, Like I, my, my husband who's a, was a construction worker for over 20 years and I'm a hobbyist interiors person and this, I've like remodeled three or four houses and we, the house we live in, we did that together and I always look around, think it takes so much energy and, and it's really hard work, but I always, I always look around and think like if, if you had the luxury of being able to hire out every single aspect of. I don't, I feel like I wouldn't, it wouldn't be as satisfying to like touch the walls if I wasn't the one that sanded down the sheetrock mud. So I. So there's a blessing in that. But then the challenge. And that's in. That's internal. That's unto me. The challenge comes in, is external. The challenge is that, like, the people I deeply love who are in one of those worlds, and the people I deeply love who are in the other one of those worlds, have never met each other, and I'm the only person they know who's from the other world. Do you know what I mean? I mean, very generally speaking. And that. That is lonely as hell. And I don't think that'll ever stop being lonely as hell. I've just. But I'm just. I'm just okay with it because it means, you know, I. I'm. I have perhaps less of a sense of belonging in either one of those spaces than someone who's. Who's always and only lived there. But I get to. But I get to see both. I get to know both. I get to have a greater understanding of the other because of the moments that I, you know, cross the bridge. And I wouldn't trade it for sure.
- [60:33]
Emily Everett
Yeah. I think it's also probably beneficial to the people in those two groups, you know, to know you and to be able to maybe experience a little slice of the other through you.
- [60:45]
Sarah Smarsh
Yeah, well, I hope so. I hope so. That's. That's what I try to do with the writing, so.
- [60:50]
Emily Everett
Well, always. Our last question for podcast guests is just to find out what you're working on now. What can you tell us about it?
- [60:59]
Sarah Smarsh
Thank you for that. Yes, I'm deep in the writing of my next book, which you mentioned in your lovely and generous intro, is about the tallgrass prairie ecosystem. And this might seem sort of out of left field for me on a major thematic pivot, but it's actually really of a piece with my other work. So the middle third of this North American continent for millennia was a great grassland, One of the great grasslands of the planet, you know, rivaling the African savannah in scale. And because of family farms like the one I grew up on. Well, and more specifically, in recent decades, massive corporate farming. But the. But the plow. The plow that my poor European ancestors came here and were given stolen land to dig into to turn into the agricultural center of the country, the ecosystem that got plowed under there. The tall grass prairie is the most endangered ecosystem in North America, and a lot of people have never heard of it. There's only about 3% of it left. And the majority of that sort of last stand of the prairie is in my great state of Kansas. And so it's an awareness I've had. My, well, I don't wouldn't go so far as to say my whole life it's very much been, you know, conveniently forgotten and made invisible even by the local culture. But it's, you know, I came into adulthood, became, and I've always been kind of a, I guess an earth whisperer. But I really sort of, around, I don't know, my late 20s, started becoming more of an environmental activist in some ways. And then it's like there's all these bumper stickers about the rainforest. And right here in my backyard is this place that's just as biodiverse and in some ways an even more valuable carbon sink than forests. And there's all sorts of surprises about grasslands and their importance on Earth. And the reason I believe this topic that's dear to my heart is sort of a compliment to my other work is it's right here in the middle of this country, just like the people I write about, kind of overlooked, undervalued, not enough people fighting for it. And the book, of course, it's not just ecological in topic or approach. There's culture and history and namely the prairies deep and ancient relationship to the indigenous peoples here. And even my own personal story of working with my husband to restore a piece of native prairie so that I researched that for, I don't know, four or five years. And I've been writing for close to a year now. I'm hoping it'll be at an indie bookstore near you in 2027.
- [64:24]
Emily Everett
I hope so too. That sounds absolutely wonderful. Sarah Smarsh, thank you so much for joining us. I could have talked to you all night. It's been so great talking.
- [64:34]
Sarah Smarsh
Likewise. Thank you, Emily.
- [64:36]
Emily Everett
Listeners, you can read Sarah's essay and subscribe to the latest issue atthecommononline.org.