When I walk into a room full of writers, I’m often struck by the sense that I don’t belong. I’m an immigrant, first-generation to college; my father was a welder. Swearing was the third language we spoke at home—after English and Greek—and my grandmother’s favorite word rhymed with “swat.” I don’t, per se, have a literary inheritance—the only people I knew with professional degrees were teachers. I went to a state school, started out teaching high school in Newark, NJ, and was lucky to attend a funded MFA program. But the sense of fraudulence never quite left me.Article continues after advertisement
Once, to prepare for a job interview with an English department, I watched an episode of Lives of the Rich and Famous; I barely understood what a Medievalist was at the time, and I knew I would not have the cultural capital to sit through a lunch with the search committee (and the Medievalist) without doing my homework. Yet even after a bad writing day, I tell myself, You are not your grandfather with a fourth-grade education working the grape vines, you are not your sisters waking up at 6am to serve coffee. You are a white American who gets to write.
While many in the lit community come from predominantly white households with professional pedigrees—financial privilege and connections, access to culture—there are countless writers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, grappling with what it means to be an outsider and striving to make a life in the arts as first-gen writers. It’s an invisible path, one marked by doubt; simultaneously, it is an imaginative act of self-determination.
