>> was beautiful. i still think about my mother now. whenh i see a mother in the street with her kids are an old jewish lady fighting our arguing about the cost of an orange, i think about my mother. [laughter] get it. i'll pay foror it myself. >> thank you. thank you for coming to virginia. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> okay. welcome. here tonight is a very special person from her time as a ku student. dr. mary claytor is the associate director of undergraduate studies in the university honors lecturer in english. she tucked her in her freshman honors seminar on creative writing and allied she takes full credit for her success. so please help me welcome dr. mary klayder. [applause]

>> welcome. it is really a thrill. i can't even tell you what a thrill it is to introduce sarah smarsh tonight. i first met sarah before she started a ku and was fortunate enough to have her in my freshman writing seminar so you want to be a writer and still going on 24 years. we have a lot of writers. and you have the benefit of her abilities and she was the seminar system are the same class for senior year. during those years i watched her become a tenacious thinker and writer. one who is hungry to explore her own world and tell its truths. she's been doing that ever since. there holds an mfa in nonfiction writing from columbia as well as degrees in journalism and english from the university of kansas. her previous educational aid southern kansas schools for may 2000 student high school to a two room prairie schoolhouse. terrace decorative writing journalism at washburn university, columbia university, ottawa university and the

lawrence arts center. she has reported on socioeconomic class politics and public policy for "the guardian," "the new york times," "the new yorker" and harper's. she is not more than a thousand new stories and essays and criticism on cultural boundaries have been published by "the texas observer" sweeney is, and more. the first person on mars were both listed as notables in best american essay and i'm looking for them in english classes produced and i can tell you. she was a resentful at the herbert kennedy school of government. her debut book in the heartland, no more working hard and been broken the richest country on earth is a meditation on the realities of intergenerational poverty and as recently long listed for the national book award in the nonfiction category. i am honored to introduce sarah

smarsh. [applause] >> thank you, mary klayder. i'm sure she's a hero to many in this room, myself included. in thank you to all of you for being here. this is the sixth city had been in in seven days. and i'm still standing. but i say that because i wanted you to know that lauren has a very special baserunner for many reason and i've just been so looking forward to this event. i know i have a lot of old friends in the audience an old mentors and current friends for that matter. i'm just so honored by the turnout. thank you to lawrence public

library. in a credible institution you all know. to raven bookstore, which has long been kind of the envy of my heart. if you include my time as an undergraduate for about 15 years am even going from south-central kansas woman this is my chosen home for almost half of my life. the raven is so dear to me. thank you to liberty hall in what is it like we needed so much space. so, lawrence,, kansas, here we are. c-span is here, so -- [laughter] i want to talk to you a little bit about socioeconomic class and that's kind of what i do as a journalist. that intersects with a lot of aspects of american identity.

race, gender. also an aspect of human experience i think it's kind of under discussed in our 21st century digital seemingly post moments and manages raw geography. for that reason i thought i would tell you why lawrence is such a special place to me. along the way go clean some of the themes of my book i think. i grew up on the wheat and cattle farm about 30 miles west of wichita and i was raised largely by my grandparents who left school in sixth and ninth grade too late to work. i'm a first-generation college student in the first of my family to have the privilege really is being paid for my passion rather than breaking my body in labor -- with labor. i worked those sorts of jobs

before and just have the gratitude that somebody pays me to do what i have a sense i was sent here to do. that aspect of my upbringing is relevant to my first brush with lawrence because as a kid in a rural public high school, kingman high school, kingman county west of wichita. >> go eagles. >> go eagles. [laughter] in that school, i was a very ambitious kid by nature. public school was the only place that a kid like me who was from a family where education hadn't really been earnest, but because there wasn't even like the time or resources for harnessing that

public school for me was the only place that i was going to access the sort of opportunity that i craved and needed. in school i heard something through the counselor about the honors academy. you know at that age as a teenager, and this is like a pre-internet moment. rather russia's same 1995 or 1996. it was pre-internet for my people. i didn't have a computer until i was a sophomore in college and so just some of the technological touchstones from a 1980s childhood was more like the 1950s and the 2010 that has something to do with economic disadvantage. anyway, i heard about this honors academy and i've never been to a summer camp here this is not a thing that happens where i'm from. nonetheless, i applied for this honors academy and i got accepted. i was one of maybe 100 kid in

the state. that happened to be a ku. and you know, i think i was even the first time i was ever in war and. we were so grounded by our farm and also sort of stunted in our travels in our station that even this piece of the country so close theoretically in proximity was very exotic and far away in many ways. i remember thinking my gosh, all these beautiful trees and hills. i got to sit in college classrooms on the university of kansas campus than half my intelligence and worth validated by a super fancy professors who did fancy things. it was a transformative moment for me and i ended up perhaps in part because of that experience coming here for my undergrad.

whenever you see me doing us a journalist, much of that is owed to the university of kansas school where he graduated -- where he graduated -- [applause] >> in 2002. i was a member of the last class in that school to receive kind of just like an old-fashioned newspaper training. .. i double majored in english and that's where i got to know the delightful mary claytor. i went to new york for a few years and people in my industry are encouraged to do and when i got there, there was a sense i

had begun to develop as a student, but that really came to a point in the more rarefied spaces i encountered in new york city including columbia university where i went to graduate school, a powerful-- palpable sense of where i came from somehow in those places and maybe even in the american story that we tell ourselves, thinking like i'm looking around and there is no one from where i'm from. there is no one who, you know was in gaul-- involved in agriculture let alone rural life and so that was a formative experience in i think that in that moments-- maybe someone can help me i can't remember whose quote this is, but it's like they didn't become a kansas and until i went to new york. [laughter] i remember like-- i was like the

kid in school that as i said i was very ambitious, straight a kid, very bookish. i had goals and i was kind of on the warpath of the cobbler schmidt that if you read my book you will find how that relates to the class issues i explore, but so i was the kid that teachers thought she will leave the kingman and people might have predicted i was the kid that someone would say she got out, a free-- phrase i take issue with it i'll talk about that a little bit, but when i was in new york it was like i'm surrounded by kids from ohio version of me in west virginia version of me and when they got to new york some of them were like they became new yorkers and they breathe a sigh relief like this is where i was meant to be in for me it was the opposite. it fortified my sense of belonging to my home, which was

never a place i thought to escape or leave so to speak, but the economic realities of the country and in particular my industry required that i leave to come push the things i wanted to do, but i finished grad school in the second i did that i moved back to lawrence, kansas i lived here happily as a freelance journalist, a professor for some years, also a grant writer for some area of social service agencies that have everything to do about the issues i talk about in my book, what about which is van gogh and i bet there are some van gogh people here-- [applause]. i was fortunate to write grant proposals and to development work for them, also kansas legal services in topeka, where i learned in helping apply for federal grants for low income kansas to have fair legal representation in our judicial system.

i learned a lot and lessons that made their way into this book in indirect way about things like violence against women act. this is very much a book about women, by the way. you will find my dad and grandpa construction workers and farmers in it and that's kind of like the vision of the working class specifically the white working class maybe, but women are really the stars of the show. my mother and grandmother and for that reason the policies that so keenly affect women, my education, when i was in the nonprofit sector was huge. so,-- i'm going to read a little bit from this book. i always feel like when writers hold forth for too long or like to read themselves it's a little offputting even for me as a fellow writer and so i'm not going to do that, but i've got a few more points i'm going to read from the book and i'm looking forward to your

questions, also. so, i talked a little bit about my relationship to this place of kansas and lawrence, within the broader context of kansas. lawrence a specifically-- now i'm from south-central kansas. lawrence, actually, has a special place in my heart for having-- i was pondering this on my way here in my travels. i bet some of you may feel this way and that's probably why you are here. in this town, i kind of feel like that lawrence in my work or lawrence and i have some particular things in common, so i have always been someone who is interested in history and reverence to the past and that's a theme in this book. they are calling it a memoir, but it's a really story about my family. i worked on it for 15 years with

a lot of research and some of it was just piecing together the story of my family from the chaos that poverty tends to get so i was a kid i was aware of the legacies into which i was born, many of which are negative and dangerous, even. i feel like lawrence is a place that like in braces and is always aware of its history which, of course, is so crucial, not just to kansas, but to the whole country.o also a place in this is particularly relevant to my journalism as many of you read my essays in what i do, lawrence is a place like me i think that defies the political and cultural expectations d of this so-called red state. heartland-- [applause].

while heartland is not a political book nor is an argument of any sort i, the wayi see it, anyway, it is a challenge to readers who might stereotype our place in her people as a cultural or political monolith to consider the complexity and nuance of the people on the ground and i don't have to convince you of all of that because you already know it lawrence and i-- also as i recall you like beer a lot. i think you have that in common. so, heartland-- "heartland"'s about class, but it's also about place, where i'm from. right now there is kind of buzzword in national discourse. raise your hand if you've heard the phrase which like if it's not new it's at least newly

fixed-- fixated on or it fixated upon the rural urban divide. most people raised their hand. i mentioned before noting as a kid that grip on a farm in kansas and i did things like attend an ivy league school for graduate school even in the context of the wonderful university of kansas i found myself an outlier in many ways, so where i'm from would seem to be a rare and peculiar place in the modern postindustrial, highly urbanized american story. i'm going to read a little bit about that divide and where-- and went to to say that i have this new vantage in the past week. for several years i've been receiving messages from people all over the country in the world.

so few people write about class and look at these issues specifically in particular from -- with the ownership of a particular place i come from that there is just no one else or someone to feel like they are recognize their own story, so i don't think it's necessarily even about me or my work-- i mean, i do work hard and i hope there something good about it, but there's a real dearth of people who have an experience similar to mine in the particulars who have a platform in national discussion. i hear from a lot of people and that's been true for several years, but this past week when this book came out september 18, and it has been incredible and so humbling and mind blowing and gratifying, also validating of what i suspected that yeah, i come from a farm, but this idea of a divide or it's like

innately different kind of people occupying different regions of this country. that's a real fallacy and a dangerous one at that and people from all walks of life, different skin colors, different backgrounds, every corner of this country come through the line sensate our stories are different and yet they are the same and i think that might have something to do with the subtitle of the book which is "heartland: a memoir of working hard and-- i do read read and then i went you to raise your hand-- no, went you to clap if you feel me on this "a memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on earth". [applause]. so, that unison of the sound is you knowing that we have a little bit of a problem in the stories we tell ourselves or have been telling ourselves for centuries about this place, that there's this american dream that

involves hard work and you get what you work for and really ultimately this is a meritocracy what we have going on here turns out many not so much and i think that is what's really speaking to people and folks are yearning to have validated-- the rural peace r is a kind of special nie within that, but i wanted to point that out. so, this is a real moment of division, isn't it in the way we perceive as ourselves as a nation? categorizing we do and there is real value in like something essential in discussing and parsing the ways that our identities differ in how that comes with particular privileges and disadvantages. that's an essential conversation, but i think also along the way we should make

sure that we are talking about what we all have in w common, also. for the sick of progress and unity. i'm not talking about like seeking empathy or compassion for someone who wishes harm upon you or your group or demographic i happen to believe and i've been a reporter for long enough that i think i have some authority to form this theory. those folks are really like way fewer of the american population than one would think from watching cable news and if you just like the living room room and like turn off whatever it is msnbc, cnn, fox and look your neighbors in the eye and have a conversation it turns out it's not just like a bunch of hateful bad guys out therest. oh, they are out there, but i think-- and i happen to be a

member of the industry that's it may be guilty of this, of citation on conflicts which drives up ratings, self paper, it's essential to address this and we are in a crisis situation in many ways as a country. i think we are sort of perverting our understanding of ourselves if along the way we are notif talking about how we e also mostly all in this together and decent people whom i to disagree on how to get to the same outcomes.ut i'm going to read you a little bit about the people i come from dispersed passages from 1987. i was f six years old. i was living in a house that my construction worker father and fourth-generation wheat farmer father built with his own hands, west of wichita and i hung out with my maternal grandma a lot who was scandalously young for a

grandma. she was 34 when she became a grandma for me and for that reason in some way she was more like a second mom to me than a grandma and in some ways my mom was more like a sister that a mother, but here i'm hanging out with grandma betty and by the way when i read-- i can't remember for sure if this comes up in this passage, but if i shifted to the second person and i say youpa-- this has everythig to do with that he being 34 when she became a grandma, by the way , so i'm a fifth-generation farm kid on my dad's side. on my moms side of my family, they were not such a rural lot. they were more like a lot of single mothers in poverty with mostly female children roving the midwestern highways working in diners and having a very

transient experience in escaping abusive man in my grandma met a farmer and that's how my mom that's my dad who was a farmer boy in the area and end up like these two very different groups convene, but on the maternal side of my family i am the inheritor of a legacy of teen pregnancy, so when i was researching a book i found thatg as far back as i can find in any records kept we are talking like back to times of corsets on the first woman female in my direct maternal line who did not have a baby before age 20 and so when you hear me say you in this passage i am speaking to the would-be child or baby that i might have had as a teenager, which i had a very keen awareness of at a very young age , younger than any young

woman or child really even that should have to be mindful and even fearful of such a thing or such a family pattern. so, this book is actually while of course you might see this as a metaphor for myriad of things, it's described as kind of an entity or imagined child that i intending to avoid having. okay. by early 1987, grandma betty had tired of the long drive between the courthouse in wichita and at the farm in the middle of nowhere. she was a-- after young life of working on factory floors and as a diner waitress and just the very few opportunities available to women in the workforce as a

female in poverty in the 1960s was my grandma's era. by the time i came along, she had benefited from a federal grants by way of title ix legislation that allowed her to attend with a call business school and said she learned how to type, file things in this kind of run office and she ended up landing a gig as a secretary in that county courthouse in downtown wichita and it she worked her way up and ended up as a probation officer, so the fact that she would like put on high heels from kmart and click through the lobby was very like glamorous in our family. okay. so, she had that tired of the long commute she had between her job at downtown wichita and she had married this farmer way out west. grandpa already said she could quit her job, but she didn't want to quit.

when had she not worked? she was proud of what she did at the courthouse.t plus, she said, i got used it to the big money-- [laughter] she received a meager salary accepted without negotiation as were most women's salaries, but living at the farm she paid no rent or mortgage. a lot of what she earned went into savings for the first time in her life or to bailouts a friend who needed help the way betty herself had needed it so long ago. she was tired of the long daily commute from the farm, but it made more sense, she thought, to keep her job and find a house in wichita, which could be a long-term property investment anyhowldg-. for all of the moving in her past, and even her many years on the farm wichita was still her homeme. i went along as she visited open houses.

i liked the brown brick house with the glass coffee table. they want $60000 for it, grandma betty said. that's it too high. back home, i told mom we went to a house that cost-- cost $60000. that's not much, she said. some houses even cost a hundred thousand dollars. i spent the next week reporting this to anyone who would listen. [laughter] grandma found a tiny square house on second street near downtown wichitata, near both hr childhood home in the mexican-american neighborhood where her lifelong best friend had grown up. grandma's new place was just a five-minute drivefe from her job at the courthouse. she would stay at the house during and i spend a weekend that the farm with grandpa. he agreed to drive to wichita on weeknights after his chores unless the farm tim tied up

right into the evening. grandma bought a house for $25000 through an owner carry mortgage with balloon payments. a good trick in which the seller makes the monthly payment for the first couple of years until the buyer's payments kick in an increase in amount over time. it's like being carried by jesus on a sandy beach and paying him for interest for every footprint the yellow orange brick house was built around the time that he was born, 1945, and had a concrete porch in four rooms, a small bedroom and living room w with the wood floors and an eating kitchen with a small bathroom connected to it. to turn the unfinished basement into more space, dad and grandpa are swung sledgehammers at a wall and matt and i picked up the pieces to put in the garbage bag. we jumped on the mattress covered in pottery plaster on

the cement floor until dad started the circle saw to cut studs and the noise drove us outside. second street was busy with cars and i kept matt at a safe distance. i held his hand as we wandered a few blocks towards the old heidi brick general store with the seven@that read: georges. it was one of the last family run groceries in town and grandma had to walk there is a kid herself. george was a thousand years old get us candy out of a jar on the counter about as. after supper at the new house, matt went back to the country with her parents. grandpa arnie went back to his farm so he would be there for early morning chores. i stayed in wichita with grandma betty to help her paint her new house. this is a place were you clean your own house. we scrubbed the kitchen floor, the counters, the stove and refrigeratoror.

grandma couldn't believe how filthy someone left the place. we scraped out the wallpaper and grandma could not believe how manynd sloppy layers of wallpapr someone left on the wall. i pride staples in packs and nails from the drywall. then dictate trowel in a plastic cup full of wet plaster to smear cross holes. we had a tiny black-and-white television going and when the 10:00 o'clock news came on grandma was ready to hang it up. we were hungry, but the new house was emptymp. for supper, we had eaten bologna sandwiches and potatoes shoestrings from a greasy metal can. grandma drove us to mcdonald's and told me to get whatever i wanted. she often told me to get whatever he wanted when we went to fast food restaurants and i understood that her generosity was because of the hard life she had liveder.

i ordered a hot fudge sundae. back at the new house, we dragged a mattress and sheets into the living room and she removed the television to the corner next to us. she fiddled with the tall antenna until i saw donny carson. it felt like a great adventure to eat ice cream on a bare mattress on the hardwood floor of an empty at the wheat house while watching the tonight show. grandma betty switched off the tv and the lights. you done good work today, sarah smarsh. my nickname in the 80s. i had forgotten the darkness and quiet were not the same in wichita as they were in the country. the cars seemed bright and loud driving by just past the front door. which opened in two the room where we lay. i thought and thought and thought like i did every night until i wished my mind had a switch i could flip. i fell grandma get up in the

almost a darkness. she said she was going to go p and what i like a glass of water she turned on the kitchen light and screamed. oh, god. sarah, get top. hundreds of cockroaches ran across the kitchen linoleum in a big dark swarm. hit by sudden light some of them ran to the bathroomo. others scurried around the bottom of the refrigerator. some ran towards the dark dining room and are mattress. i stood up on the mattress and took a step back. a line of roaches and started ur the side of the mattress. grandma was a searching for her sandals. those filthy bastards, she said. get your stuff, we are blowing this joint. it was after midnight and we were rolling down the familiar

strip of highway 54. stars, cattle, wheatfields that were wild prairie grass back when the same route west was called cannonball stagecoach road. grandma was cursing the cockroaches wishing for spiders or june bugs, but by god anything but a filthy cockroach because she hated that bastards. less than an hour later we were back in the country climbing out of grandma's car to the sound of locusts and the smell of the pigs and cows that lay sleeping somewhere in the darkness. grandma quieted sasha the german shepherd as we walked through the warm night to the front door of the farmhouse. we went up the familiar creaky old wood steps covered in debbie blue carpet. if i lived to be an old woman, and of the trends of my early life continue by the time i die half the kansas population will live in only five of 105

counties. people consolidated like seed companies. there is a strength in that, environmentalists and economists might stressed. this sort of moment of the city that we are having, but president dwight eisenhower, a native of rural kansas said whatever america hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of america. the country-- countryside is no more our nation's heart that our cities and rural people aren't more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields, but to devalue in our social investment and our language the people who tend crops and livestock or to refer to their place as flyover countries is to

forget not just the country's foundation but its connection to the earth to cycles of life scarcely witnessed in the understood in concrete landscape. for wendell berry's vision of sustainable world and i talk about him previously in this chapter, a kentucky farmer and beautiful writer some of you may know. wendell berry's vision of a sustainable world month-- one must balance the american heart neither strong, well supported, well-respected chamber outside its metropolis. the life force that ultimately flows back into it, those places that we here are dwindling and where farms are going over and economic despair has said it the life force that flows back into those places will likely be from other places. the meatpacking towns of western kansas, for instance, have

become some of the most ethnically diverse place in the country as immigrants stream in from mexico, the middle east and central america to take factory jobs amid industrial i were culture, statewide according to the 2010 census t many rural counties have declined and more than eight out of 10 kansans were white, but the hispanic population had grown by 60% in the last 10 years. that's a demographic shift not without tensions, but one that has been in braced by some small town life who knew their home must change to survive. of all the gifts and challenges of bullet life one of its most wonderful paradoxes is that closeness born of our biggest spaces, a deep intimacy force not by the front-- proximity of apartments, but by having only one neighbor within 3 miles to help put you are, when your

tractor is down and you needhe a ride, when the snow starts drifting so you check on the old woman with the mean dog regardless of whether you like her. when i was a teenager in 1996, i went to new york city for the first time to compete in the national communications contest i qualified for from my tiny rural high school. we visited the statue of liberty i was excited to climb inside. as i neared the crown, eight-- a sending a narrow winding staircase with hundreds of people parked in front of me and behind me i suddenly had trouble breathing. i wasn't afraid of heights, but terror rose up in me as i looked around and realized i could not get out of my i head to. i didn't know it, but i was having a panic attack, maybe not an altogether irrational one, utgbut resulting from claustrophobia i had never been

anywhere crowded enough to know that i had. while the small space echoed with many voices, i close my eyes and took deep breaths. i turned to the stranger behind me and it looked him in the eyes like we were the only two people on earth. he was from boston, as i recall. i asked if he wanted to take a psychological quids and. [laughter]r] panic was coursing through me making my lungs and muscles feel tight and clenchedng, but i must have hidden it well enough. my voice sounded steady. the man laughed and said okay. i told him a long story about him on a journey by foot through a forest and meadows. i paused to ask him questions, what animal is on the other side si the wall of fines.

what do you see in the water when you kneel next to the pond and looked down? the concept was something i had heard somewhere i'm a person leading someone else through a mental maze, but mostly i made it all up. the crowd around us had gotten quiet to listen. he answered and i told him what i thought his mind said about who he was. [laughter] just like how did i-- [laughter] like that kid was so much braver than i am. i just can't even-- i can't even okay. he and others nodded along in amazement or at least amusement. as for me, i had something to focus my mind on as we inched one suspended metal step at a timeh towards the crown of the statue of liberty. i had harnessed an inner calm that can be found anywhere, but that for me had been called and

they did in under a state flag that bore the latin phrase. to the stars, through difficulties, when we got to the top wasn't scared anymore. someone took my picture, a relieved a smile with a view of new york harbor behind me through the little windows that at night: as jewels in her crown. that's how i had come to resolve the tensions of my childhood. of my family members lives m abt country and city. i craved the opportunity that cities contain and i pursue it, but most essential to my well-being was unobstructed freedom of a flat wide horizon. when i was well into adulthood the united states developed at the notion that a dividing line of class and geography separated

to essentially different kinds of people. i knew that wasn't right because both sides existed in me. where i was from and what i hoped to do in life, the places that best sustained me in the places i needed to go for the things i meant to do. straddling that supposedly nine as i did i knew it was about a difference of experience, not of humanity. you would have been born on one side of that perceived divide, but that wouldn't have predicted anything about the core of you. not your politics and most definitely not your character. it would have predicted the things he saw and they did to and one defining psychological tensionne guarantd by your country's economy. every day you would decide whether to stay, go or try to

go. if you went, no matter where you ended up like every immigrant you would still kill the invisible dirt of your motherland on the soles of your feet. [applause]. >> thank you so much and i wanted to talk to all of you now. i understand someone will have a microphone or maybe it's set up. yes? >> observations, we have a large audience in a short amount of

time, so please be mindful and only questions. >> thank you for coming. is this on? thank you. a few days ago in my mailbox came the alumni magazine with your photo on the front. >> yes, that was quite an honor. >> my question is, in that article it mentions he said you don't want to bring a child into poverty and i don't think you are in poverty now. the other party is about your family, your grandparents, your family and kingman and elsewhere , i assume they were w part of your writing process that they knew what you were writing and will they get residuals?s [laughter] >> they would might also like to know the answer to that question yes, my family was-- they are kind of different school of

thought about writing memoirs or stories about one's family. one school of thought is sort of you write whatever you think and someone else sees the difference and they can write their own damn book if they don't like it or whatever and that's not how i work. as a journalist or as a memoirist, i thinkrn to handle someone-- to handle someone's life and do this clunky thing of transforming the infinite human experience into ultimately inadequate character is-- that's quite a gift to receive, to have someone's blessing to do that and i always seek their blessing andd it's something that i and y approach, different artists would have difference opinions on this, but i was checking in with them at every step of the way and many of the passages in the book are written about

events where i was not even born yet or present and those are constructed from many hours of interviews with close members of my family over the years. and they also like said they did not want to read it until hee came out. i was offering a lot-- i should say, by the way other than my mother i'm like the only book person in my familyer, so i thik they didn't read it because they were like it's probably boring. [laughter] you think i'm joking, but like i'm serious. but, this is so moving to me that i have to share with me. my grandma's kind of the star of the show that i was talking about, as far as i'm concerned. she is just kind of like a very vivacious and sharp-witted salty broad from the hard left life

and just has the most generous spirit and this is how you know if anyone had a right to feel shorted somehow by this book even though i made every attempt to get everything right, ultimately one perhaps never can in thiste subjective thing we cl reality, she read it and she texted me, i laughed, cried and then the first thing she said had nothing to do with how she was represented. i mean, there is like the darkest moments of her life in this book. let's sayn, one of her husband's breaking her jaw. as they call that back then, back alley abortion in a pre-roe v wade e rhett and she was try to escape that husband, so she very generously let me tell those stories and hear her text to me the only thing she said was, i am so sorry that you had so much sorrow and strife as a child.

didn't know it, so that you are the people to come from. questions by any chance did that picnic have any impact on your life work clinic did what? >> of the iconic film picnic. >> no, i don't think so. >> hey, sarah. i'm wondering, the themes of your book, class and this perceived divide, how do you see those reflected in other popular culture now, films and novels, perhaps another's? >> think you. excellent question. much of what i don. as a journalist, which is talk about class requires that i simultaneously operate as immediate critic and not because

i take great issue with the way these narratives are passed usually by upper class white people who maybe have the best of intentions, but nonetheless don't bad and i about suggesting that that entire working class is white or male or conservative none of those things are true, of course. where i come from its no more monolith than any other group and so i feel like most of the trails that we see right now, the news media portrayal is very much politicized one and has to do with repeated moment we are in as a country politically, but even going back to my childhood i felt like any time i saw where i was from represented in a movie it was a stereotype or caricature and don't think that-- a sometimes there is some clashes involved in that and it's done with a hateful spirit,

but i think more often than that i think it's well-intentioned storytellerse who don't know any better. that's why we need diversification of our k college campuses, newsrooms and 70 spaces that hold the power in this society. wepo often consider diversity as we absolutely should a long lines of race and gender and other aspects of identity, but it's only fairly recently i think that we had knowledge class as an affect out rights that intersects with all of the above, but also is a particular conundrum in i moments of histoc wealth inequality, so i think most of the stories right now don't get it right and it's because there is no one from those x leases or experiences that conduct with the privilege of telling them. tyes? >> hello, sarah.

so nice to read your book and i wanted to ask you something about the writing process. it feels so much like you took 15 years to write this because it's so authentic and i loved the approach that you take writing it to an unborn daughter and so i'm wondering out what point in your writing process did you choose to do that? >> that is such a great question and i love talking about craft. i'm a former english professor so the writers among us. might particularly enjoy this question. so, i knew believe it or not and if you read the book i think you will believe me when i say i will shoot you straight and it wouldn't say if it wasn't true. i knew when i was a child that i was going to write this book took of course, i didn't know what it would look like or what relevance of greyhound, but i would say specifically to my grandma, grandma someday i'm

going to write a book about our family took i strategically made decisions along the way for it to become a reality so i was the editor of my rural high school newspaper, double majored in newspaper and journalism. the integration of the core of this book, so that's a long way of saying that it was finally during my years as a journalist, which funny enough for in some part served to pay the bills. i like had to get by. i didn't have to pennies to rub together and things like per-- creative pursuit takes time and resources and when you have to wait tables, which i did and tended bar read a freelancer journalist that inherently slow

down the process, but the beauty and that in it is it forced me on the way to gain a broader awareness of and a language for articulating why my-- why i sense my families story might matter which, of course, is these issues about class and policy and even politics in place that i never could have articulated as a young person aen i was trying to get this going. those pieces of the puzzle because that happened over so many years i have these personal passages, some of which there are many pages in this which are almost for bait them of something i wrote up my senior year of k you. the passages that are a bit more of a big picture kind of cultural commentary or social analysis came later and in that it was like they weren't quite gelling and i could sense that like okay, i've published some

essays and people of the journal that got a lot of attention around the world and i found this correlation in the process. the more i felt like i was going to throw up the night before they came out-- [laughter] the more people appreciated it. that of course has to do with vulnerability and opening up a wounded that many people carried for different reasons called shame and i was thinking to myself like i got these books were things aren't quite clicking together and if it were published tomorrow i would not feel like i need to throw up and about must be a problem. so, i was kind of like keeping the reader at arms length with some sort of formality self protecting and then it was like my god, this aspect of my psyche that's been likeke so deep thati almost never even consciously

think about it, which is very true dialogue that i had growing up with this would be daughter. i used it to say to myself when i was like a teenager and i had to make some difficult decision that maybe in some other family parents would come in and help with, i would say to myself what would i want for my daughter, what would i tell my daughter to do and that was a weight-- well, i was in the context of a world where my own value was so unacknowledged in this capitalist society that my family appeared to be on the losing end up and for meritocracy that suggest we are losers, doesn't it? i'd read that as as a sensitive childer and so this conversatioi would have with the daughter was my way of like i knew that she would be so sacred that i would do anything to do right by her and i could write to that challenge more reliably than i

could rise to the challenge of doing right by myself and that guided me for many years and that ended up as the framework for the book and then i felt like, yes, i would throw up if people read this. [laughter] mission accomplished. any other questions? >> hello, sarah. i'm about a hundred pages into your book right now and it's definitely moving. you clearly right-- you clearly have some much sympathy for the suffering yourin family and peoe who grew up in your situation have been through.m i'm curious if you have any sense of like survivor guilt? >> whatr' an interesting questin and important one because really

what i describe here-- i think i'm hearing from so many people aboutng even though the particular's are so different that our stories are the same. since we absolutely are living in a class a structure, many millions of people in this country have an experience of more than one long about ladder whether it's upward mobility or downward mobility and of course these things are not static and so i hear from a lot of people who do have precisely that survivor guilt as she called it, and for like escaping as we say the same outcomes that their beloved family members experienced, you know i think that when maybe when i was like

a student at ku it was like the defining moment that first my path as having a different life experience and my family. those whereas i described in the book for some kids supposedly that is like the wildest and most fun years of abandoned and they were the hardest years of my life, i mean, i loved being a student and i love academia and i love to school, but as i say in the book there is a reason so few peoplek make this sort of like cross this perceived divide and any lasting way and it's because it's a very painful crossing. it means that you are accomplishing the goals that are essential to your own survival , goodness, but then by definition you are no longer the same as that people you love the most in the world in some-- in terms of experience and just maybe even just language like i tell people i

speak to versions of english, country and the ansi. [laughter] tonight i'm mostly using fancy. that was painful for me because i was-- like i said earlier i was never a car kid that went to to get out. i love my home and i love my family and yet there is something about my path, there was a good path that one of the painful aspects of that means that i and people who share my story in their own ways never completely belong from that point on in any group, so i'm sort of odd within my professional industry for where i come from and i'm awed where i come from for what i do for a living. i'm-- no, as far as like if i carry that as a weight now, now. maybe in part because my family is so lovely and happy for me and i'm honestly like amazed and

delighted that i get to do this for a living and i don't feel guilty about nothing. [laughter] [applause]. >> we do have time for one more question. >> yeah, i was kind of wondering maybe for a moment if you can take off your memorized pad and put on your journalist hat and you mentioned your grandma betty how she benefited from legislative efforts to improve her economic life etc. we are at a time where that is really depending on how you look we nowhere beyond that live in a common you know, racism doesn't exist anymore--

>> you mean what some people say >> right timing we have our chief justice of the supreme court famously said racism doesn't exist anymore-- i'm paraphrasing so we did you would reflect on that sort of place we are and along that line. >> in relation to like policy? >> yeah, exactly. your grandma benefited. we are not really be on that, maybe. >> i think we are absolutely not in the gains made by women and people of color and other historically marginalized groups were made in part because the federal government said if we leave this up to local communities the job ain't going to get done so we will just say these schools must integrate and these women must be allowed to work in these places and if so i do sense that we are at a moments where there is a story

about our country that maybe a short-term memory that like the gains we have made our because of those programs and so therefore they should remain or be even more robust as opposed to claiming we are post race or post gender in terms of a social hierarchy and therefore terror down public programs. when i was an undergraduate at the university of kansas, i was a straight a student and meeting people like me are clear and on that l-- at that moment that i s excelling as a kid on that college campus i literally did not know what the term graduate school meant, so poor kid to come from places like i do just like the language of talking about things taken for granted by the middle or upper middle class people was a so foreign to me that i couldn't-- i was like living the biggest dream i could

dream for myself and there was a federally funded program on the ku campus that i believe is still there and somehow they found me or i found them in my senior year of college. they encouraged me to apply to graduate school. now, i will confess that i had no intention of going to graduate school once they explained to me what it was. [laughter] but, it came with a summer research stipend to spend a summer where like i wouldn't have to like break my back at the grain elevator in kingman county during the wheat harvest or like the objective five as a female server in the service industry all summer. instead i could use that stipend to researchst this book and i ao got an undergraduate research award that i can't remember if he goes to the college of

liberal arts and sciences or what, so that was a federal program that played a pivotal role in my life that i like to point out like some people would've loved to look at my story and state see, you work harde, all good. the way i look at it is i'm not here to talk about some individual triumph. i'm here as someone who really represents the exception to the rule in terms of just the odds if you are born poor you will probably stay poor no matter how hard you work and so my job now is to shine a light on that fact for all those people that don't have the privilege of being at this podium. [applause]. >> thank you.

>> so, like i read that advanced copyea. it really just came out last week. how many people have read this book so far? there are so many books to be sold tonight. seriously i am native from intopeka. i been a few other places and i don't think even as kansans a lot of kansas people know the story. i don't think that and so this is such a powerful and timely story. i is for you to sell out the raven tonight for sarah. what you say about that? [applause]. thank you so much for coming and thank you for sharing. >> thank you. thank you. thank you. [applause].