I’m Ken and I’m a writer from a working class background - so live with it!
Let me give you a quote:
“Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.”
- Flannery O'Connor
Let me give you another quote:
“I have this sort of A.B.C. of creativity and it’s this: Always Be Collecting….It’s about honoring your own experience and background, your family dynamics, your own past, your ancestral past, the jobs you’ve had, the people who've passed through your life.”
-
Let me give you some context.
A while back I was at a literary event and mentioned that I am a writer from a working class background. I outlined some of the issues you might encounter if you are trying to break into what is, despite lots of good work going on, still a very white, very middle class, and (in the UK), very London-centric industry.
The next day someone who had been in the audience messaged me through my website to question my motives, and asked whether I really could justify saying I was a working class writer. The phrase ‘band wagon’ was used. The concept of ‘victim-culture’ was floated.
I replied. Kept it simple. Kept my anger inside. I explained that there is no singular working class experience. It can be present or past, it is part of social mobility and educational privilege. It is moulded through intersections of race, gender, disability, sexuality, and geography.
What I didn’t write was all the rush and hurry of thoughts that come to me when I feel I have to justify myself in this way. So this is some of the stuff I left out. Apologies if this appears as a rant, but, see, I haven’t quite been gentrified yet.
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like…”
Hello, I’m Ken. I’m a writer from a rural, working class background.
This, on face value, is a simple enough line. But the truth is, it’s taken me a long time to find this form of words, a long struggle to say I’m a writer at all. That’s part of my working class experience - the imposter syndrome, the sense of being liminal in the literary world, the feeling that if you don’t write poverty porn, nobody wants your work.
If you met me, looked at me, listened to me, I’d be easy to define. A white, middle-aged, middle-class man. All faint hints of privilege with a back-note of bourgeois trappings.
But we are not simply defined by where we have arrived, but through the journey to that point (thanks Flannery, thanks Kathy). It's in my blood. It’s social housing estates just outside small villages, small terraced homes and washing hung in back yards, neighbours talking with folded arms over fences, men leaning on bars in working men’s clubs, big TVs and brash cars, young, lost, lads throwing darts at passing cars, police sirens coming down your road, thin kids in run-down precincts swapping cigarettes. It’s families, babies, marriages, deaths. It’s what I return to again and again as a writer – it is about the people I have grown up with, about family, attitudes, the good and the bad in the way I face life.
There is a wheedling gremlin voice whispering into my ear as I type all this. About how people will react: “Oh looks, there you go again Ken, banging on about working class stuff, even though you live in a nice house and got educated and don’t even have an accent….”
I’ve got middle-class paranoia about being vulgar, combined with a working class bluntness about saying it as it is.
And all this emotional energy, this parlaying with myself, is hard to wade through. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I was the type of author who doesn’t have to think that much about it. You know, like those authors whose biographies start which Oxford or Cambridge or Ivy League college they went to as a student…
Dear Oxbridge or Ivy League Graduate Writers,
I just wanted to clarify that I don’t hate you. I don’t think your experiences are invalid. I don’t think you deserve less. I know you might have had many struggles of your own. It’s okay, you’re going to be fine. It’s just, you know, maybe think about things a bit sometimes?
Take care,
Ken
This creative urge didn’t start with writing for me. It started with music. I was the kid on the council estate who took up playing the bassoon because the state-run school I went to had one that nobody else wanted to play.
The bassoon! I should have just put a sign on my back saying ‘please feel free to kick my head in’. The family in the house next door had two brutishly large sons, whose hobbies included:
Syphoning petrol from neighbours cars
Drunk fighting
Occasional arson
They didn’t appreciate my dedication to off-key musical scales and halting Christmas carol melodies. There was, as a result, some awkwardness on the street, some name calling over the fence, threats to ram the instrument where the sun don’t shine.
But you know what, at least I didn’t have to go to hospital after my dad chucked me through the front window of the house for putting his boots on the fire.
So, that means I win, right?
Not belonging, that’s the thing. Am I a working class writer? Am I middle class writer? Does it even matter? The answers to these questions are often: Probably. Maybe. I don’t know.
Sometimes, when I talk about class, people look at me strangely. If I say in the course of a conversation (not in a boastful way, but factually) that I was the first person in my family to go to university, then someone will say the same thing, not always in solidarity, but as a ‘so what?’ a ‘get over it’.
And I understand this attitude. So why do I keep landing back at this place? Maybe it is because of the prevalence of identity politics today, the need to belong, the identification of a tribe, but also the drive to be seen as part of an oppressed minority group of some kind.
Probably, maybe, I don’t know.
Let me tell you what I do know. What working class writers want in one word - Choice. They don’t want to be trapped into some cock-measuring contest, writing just about how underprivileged they were or are, how much poverty they’ve endured, how hungry they’ve been.
They don’t want to have to filter their writing through middle class sensibilities, to suit a middle class readership. They don’t want to be forced into compressing working class experience into a few well-worn ideas: the misery memoir, the noble struggle against poverty, the bright kid “done good”.
They want to write about the complex fragility of life, to tell any story they wish to tell – about any class, through any genre, and in any situation – and to have a choice about how much they use their working class background as a lens to do that. They want to write using the hard-won perspective of their own lived experience, because it is detailed and rich and truthful.
Enough. I could go on with this topic for a good long time. Maybe I will come back to it. For now, just let me write and do what I can for other writers who have roots like me. That’s all.
Except, dear person-I-shall-not-name, who questioned my validity. You mate, can just go fuck yourself.
There, is that working class enough for you?
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Great post Ken. If only the judging and justifying could stop, we'd all have more energy for the things that matter. Here's for all the open-hearted people out there ❤️
Love this, Ken, even though I grew up in a land where class is a dead word. But the privilege and entitlement money brings are a whole other thing here. I grew up in a relentlessly downwardly mobile family cursed by alcohol and drugs and the kind of poverty that brings, of money, yes, but also of soul and hope and expansive view. I got to university on my own steam, in my thirties, but still struggle with the feelings of not fitting in and imposter issues you describe. So here’s to the misfits and outsiders. Our stories have as much literary currency as any others and we must tell them as honestly and proudly as we can.