From “trailer trash” to “the one percent,” the language of class tends to evoke divisions both stark and simplistic. It’s easy to discern the outward differences between a single mother living in squalor and a socialite in her Park Avenue penthouse. But the lived experience of class takes place on far more fractured terrain. The way we understand our own class—and determine the class of others—is as much about yesterday’s legacy as today’s money, as much about perception as reality.
In this special issue of Guernica, the second of four made possible through your generous support to our Kickstarter campaign, we offer stories beyond the sleeping beast that is the Occupy Movement. As with our previous theme issues, we hope to start conversations, not end them, exploring how class lives in our minds and manifests in imperceptible and unexpected ways. Class lines are fault lines: politically fraught and personally subjective, actual and imagined.
In this issue:
Features:
Margo Jefferson: Scenes From a Life in Negroland
Luis Alberto Urrea: Ghosts in the Land of Plenty
Rachel Riederer: The Teaching Class
Ann Neumann: How the Other Half Dies
Jessica Pishko: The Price of Freedom
Lauren Quinn: Which Side Are You On, Girl?
Interviews:
Servings of Small Change: Meara Sharma interviews Jane Black and Brent Cunningham
Going Through Customs: Hillary Brenhouse interviews Cristina Ibarra
Talking Clean and Acting Dirty: Katherine Rowland interviews Robert Bullard
Art:
Alex Zafiris: Sight Lines
Fiction:
Tracy O’Neill: Who Can Shave Thirteen Times a Day
Tracey Rose Peyton: More Than This
Poetry:
Abigail Carl-Klassen: Temporary People
Tommy Pico: Thems
Via Guernica. Read this Special Issue HERE
WANDERLUST 