My last thing, On Top of Slag Mountain, started out as a status update on Facebook. I wanted to write something small as well as I could without overthinking it. One line I did rework several times was when I mentioned the other kids at the mall buying whatever they wanted while my shoes were being held together by duct tape. Originally the line was while my family was too poor for me to do likewise. Then it was while my family couldn’t afford for me to do likewise. That changed to we weren’t rich and so on. It kept going like that, with me watering the line down, until I used an image to allude to the thing. And while that’s probably the more writerly thing to do, it’s also the furthest away from what I wanted to say: my family was poor as shit.
Even with all that reworking, it was less than an hour before my mother texted to ask me about the line. She didn’t seem upset necessarily, but I understand it’s hard to read something like that and not take it personally. You take it that way because it assumes a certain norm within society, that being poor is bad. It’s something to be ashamed of. If the line in my last piece implied that, it was a failing on my part. Even as a kid I understood my family was poor. I accept that this was different from many other kids I knew, but different doesn’t have to equal bad. The fact that other kids thought my duct-taped boots were…
