This past week a new literary magazine called The Bee launched. I’m not a huge fan of literary magazines (a conversation for another time), but this one caught my eye. It’s a magazine for working class literature and working-class writers. On the About page on the website, it describes itself as having grown “out of A Writing Chance, a programme co-founded in 2021 by the actor Michael Sheen, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, New Writing North and Northumbria University. A Writing Chance opens access to the writing industries for new writers from working-class and lower-income backgrounds.”
I am working class, and my love of studying literature really ignited when I discovered there was such a thing as working class literature in my third year at university. Finally, I could see my feelings and experiences and thoughts reflected in the books that I was reading and studying. But it’s so far and few between, and class remains an aspect of identity that isn’t always talked about, let alone considered as something that can hold you back. So I was really excited to see The Bee launch. You can read their introductory posts here. There’s some fantastic stuff on there, including some opening podcast episodes. I’m really curious to follow they will publish next.
The first article I read on The Bee was about buses in Birmingham, by Lynsey Hanley. It reminded me of one of my weekly workshops during my creative writing MA. One member of my group wrote personal essays about local folklore and his adventures investigating the legends and myths that are known in our local area. One story he told included his adventure getting to a small place via the bus, and I commented it was so nice to read something about buses, because I so rarely come across anyone writing about them.
Buses are a mode of transport taken by three groups of people: young people too young to drive, older people who have free bus passes, and the poor. The working class. I have heard several times from people around me that no one takes the bus unless you don’t have another choice. Sadly, I think that’s true. Buses are inconvenient, unreliable (this only gets worse), and sometimes downright unpleasant. Sometimes there are people on them you’d rather not meet, crowds of noisy, sometimes drunk, people, screaming children, the visibly poor. But they are also a symbol of working class culture, a place where you can meet and observe the most interesting people, where you can glimpse fractions of lives lived in motion. Buses are communal, versus the individual privacy of the car. They are a symbol of a world before capitalism reached its tentacles into every square inch of our lives.
Literature is so full of the ideal of middle class life. When do we get to read about characters who live, or grew up, on council estates, who travel by bus, who work in insecure jobs in the local shops? When do we working-class people get to read about characters like us? Not often enough. And when we do, they’re stories of abuse, or trauma, or the aspirational poor. Finding stories that show ordinary life as it is, just like middle class fiction does, is exceedingly rare. We are expected to want to ‘escape’ our pasts, to rise through the social classes. We aren’t supposed to be happy with the lives we lead, our place in society. We aren’t supposed to be proud of traveling on the bus, working in a shop, living in a council house. We are supposed to want ‘more’.
Is this part of the reason we don’t see stories about us? I don’t know. But I am excited to see an outlet actively publishing, and pushing for, more working class literature. I’m also excited to explore my passion for working class literature in this newsletter. I'll look at how literature and society interact, with a focus on working class literature, because that’s the type of literature I care the most about. That’s my literature. It’s what I write, it’s what I love to read. Books and stories about people like me.
Though I say I want stories about working-class characters that don’t fit into the ‘aspirational’ model, I also love to read about characters striving to be the best they can, regardless of class background. I love reading stories like The Favourites by Lynne Fargo, which I finished this past weekend.
The Favourites follows Katarina, an ice dancer who had a tough childhood, and made her way into the elite sport of ice dancing with no real financial backing. She works to put herself through an academy to train, and she relies on the kindness of those around her to give her a chance to prove herself. And she succeeds. Through luck, timing, but also a lot of hard work. The book reminded me a lot of Tiny Pretty Things, which is a book (by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton), but also a Netflix show. It’s rare that I will ever say this, but I actually preferred the show. It’s about a black ballerina entering an elite school to study ballet, and compete to be the best. There are so many layers to the show: the competitive nature of ballet, how the main character doesn’t fit the aesthetic and racial stereotype people expect when they think of ballet, and the tensions in friendships when you are also competing against each other.
I watched Tiny Pretty Things during my MA in Creative Writing, and it made me want to strive to be better, because I was watching characters who were dedicating their entire lives to the thing they were passionate about—the main character fighting to belong in a world that wasn’t made for someone like her. And I related to that, because I never felt that I belonged in my MA program. I never really got past feeling like, because of my background, trying to be anything more than a retail worker was hopeless—who was I to think I could be a writer? How could I ever believe that it was possible when the people I saw living that life were nothing like me? How could I ever belong in a world that was not made for people like me?
So I love consuming stories about characters who strive, especially characters who are striving to succeed when the odds are stacked against them, because they give me hope that it’s possible. That this fight will end somewhere positive. That I will succeed. I have to strive because of my background, because if I don’t, I can never compete against those who have the advantage. I strive because I’m working class, because I was born into a poor family, because I don’t have the advantage of a financial safety net or parents who know someone who knows someone.
I think that’s a big reason I’m drawn to stories like Tiny Pretty Things and The Favourites. There is something in me that resonates with the passion characters such as Katarina has, but also with the story of the underdog. Being working class makes you the underdog, and if you belong to another minority as well, then that adds additional layers of disadvantage. You are starting out any endeavor ten steps behind someone who comes from the (what feels like) standard middle-class, white, straight (etc) world.
So I love reading stories about characters fighting for success in a world that disadvantages them. But I also love reading stories about characters who are like me, stories about council estates, and buses, and insecure work, and interactions with the welfare state. Real stories about real lives, lives that actually aren’t that uncommon, lives that are ignored because they aren’t aspirational, lives that don’t reinforce the dominant narrative about the middle class and capitalism. Stories that are challenging because they’re about the people capitalism exploits so that so many can have access to convenience and services that make their lives easier.
It feels very much like those two things are in tension, like one contradicts the other. And I suppose they do. But it’s a contradiction, I think, that defines who I am in a lot of ways. I am a working-class person engaging with a middle class world. I cannot change who I am, how I was brought up, how that has impacted me, but I also want to explore my intellectual curiosity, have a stable home, and the freedom that financial security brings.
Those things shouldn’t be in tension. The desire for financial security and access to the world of academia shouldn’t feel as if they don’t belong to a working-class identity. I shouldn’t feel out of place in academic, or work, spaces. I shouldn’t feel out of place for wanting those things. We should live in a world where The Bee isn’t needed, where it doesn’t matter where you come from, only where you’re going.
But we don’t live in that world. So I will continue to strive, to pursue my passions despite all the ways my life makes that difficult.
I will keep travelling on the bus (because it’s cheaper) and living in a working-class area. But I will also strive for more, to live the life of a writer and an intellectual.
And I hope you’ll join me along the way.