“I saw that stories could have an impact”
“I saw that stories could have an impact”
A conversation with Joan DeMartin of "The Poverty Trap" newsletter
Appears in this episode
Welcome to Pen-in-Fist, and to the second in the new series of activist-writer conversations. This month I’m talking to
, author of the newsletter.As ever, please remember to share, comment, like and subscribe. All content is free. To support independent activist writing, you can get a paid subscription for the price of a vegan latte/month.
Thanks for listening.
Carrie Hi everyone. Welcome to the second in this new series of activist-writer conversations at the Pen in Fist newsletter.
Today I'm really excited to talk to a fellow Substacker, Joan DeMartin. Joan is a freelance writer based in Columbus, Ohio. She trained and practiced as an environ-mental lawyer for 15 years, a career she describes as “a cause, not just a job”. More recently, she's also worked as a teacher and a writing tutor - and we might hear a bit more about those career experiences in this interview.
Joan is the author of one of my favorite activist newsletters,
. She describes “The Poverty Trap”, which she's been writing for a couple of years now, as “a newsletter for all those who want to better understand how our system is rigged against the poor working class and middle class, and in favour of the mostly white and wealthy. Most importantly, it's for those who want to help change our system just enough so every American can thrive.”Hi, Joan. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining me.
Joan DeMartin Well hello, and thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be part of this interview series.
Carrie Me too. To get us started, can you please tell us a bit about how you got interested in problems of social and economic equality – I think when you were quite young?
Joan Yes, I did. I have one older sibling and she's the only sibling that I have, and she's 12 years older, which is an interesting age gap from a lot of perspectives. But she went to college when I went into first grade. And she's an artist and brought home a lot of reading material. And a lot of that reading material involved the Black experience in the United States, the Native American experience in the United States. And I sort of naturally gravitated to those at a very young age, and it sparked my interest.
I saw then that words can really have an impact. Stories could have an impact.
Carrie Do you remember any of the particular books or any of the authors you read as a kid? Or any conversations you had with your sister about the material she was studying?
Joan I don't really remember conversations with my sister. She was always busy, busy, busy. She had moved out of the house and sort of stayed that way. She came back, for holidays and things. But there were a number of authors. One, and I don't remember actually the author's name, but it's Black Like Me. I'm not sure how well regarded it is with age, but it really made an impact on me, about a white man who colours his skin and goes into the deep South to see what it's like. And I thought it was wonderful. And then there's Richard Wright. He wrote, we had at least his novel, Black Boy, which was astounding. Another favourite became Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and I learned a lot from that book. And you know I agreed with him, and he was, you might say pretty radical for his time, not for that time, but radical. I loved it.
Carrie So this is the period of the civil rights movement, moving into the student demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and all that stuff. So that’s the period when you were learning about radical politics. So you've got this background in civil rights, and it sounds like Black liberation, Black power, Native American social justice, and so on. And then you go on and you get a bit older, and you end up doing a law degree and working for 15 years as an environmental lawyer. And I want to hear a bit more about how that was a cause for you, how that career choice related to your activist or your political convictions, and your commitment to change.
Joan Well, I absolutely wanted to literally protect the environment. And I thought that's what I was going to do, working as an attorney for the EPA, the Ohio EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency. So in the United States, there's the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and every state has its own version of an EPA of some sort. It may not be called that exactly, but in Ohio it was called the Environmental Protection Agency. And I started at a very early age caring about the environment too, caring about animals and the environment and wildlife. And it sort of all fit together and that was my choice. And I really cared. And the reason I separated the idea of it wasn't a job, it was a cause, is because I knew a number of people, including some of my friends who, it was more of a job. They had other areas of interest and they ended up getting a job for the state of Ohio. And that was their ticket to a comfortable – not extraordinarily, not anything wealthy, but a comfortable life and retirement. And I never looked at it that way. Maybe that’s an unfortunate perspective of mine.
Carrie That leads us well into the next question. I know that you left that job eventually and you turned to education, you became a teacher. And you became a freelance writer as well. And you've said that through that experience, you lived poverty before you began writing about it. And that part of this experience of living poverty was discovering that being a teacher, being an educator, being a freelance writer, these are not well-paid professions, even if they're highly skilled professions. And I want to hear a bit more about that, about how this career change led you into a situation where you found out first-hand what it is like to be poor in America.
Joan Well, I think with hindsight, a lot of hindsight, that I was a bit cavalier about my future. And I just didn't think the way – I will just use this term loosely – normal people think about retirement and planning for that. And when I left my job after, I think I had a little over 15 years of service in with the state, I had another 15 to go. And I was 40, I think just about 41 when I left about a week from being 41. And my friends there at the EPA asked me if I was going to get mental health counselling. It was such an abrupt sort of idea to not keep your retirement, to not choose to retire with the state of Ohio. From their perspective. And I just was, again, a little bit cavalier and thought I could wing it. And I did for quite a while because I had a home. And when I left that job I did have a good amount of equity in it. So that helped me. And I unfortunately cashed in my retirement. So I thought everything was going to work out. I did not keep that retirement. But the idea of just following my passion and moving on to something else. And the Ohio EPA at the time I left was changing rather drastically because of the political forces. When the administration changed, the politics at the office changed. And it came to the point where I felt, from my perspective, I was not really protecting the environment anymore.
Carrie So the cause wasn't a cause anymore. It had become a job and it wasn’t a cause.
Joan Yes, absolutely. The first 5 years we had a governor and an attorney general who were really pro-environment. And they appointed good people. And they didn’t interfere with decisions by the Agency. And after that, unfortunately, the next 10 years, it turned quite – I don't want to, well I will, use the word conservative – and a different perspective, more pro-business and it just wasn't like that before. And it was very difficult for me. But I stuck with it another 10 years, which wasn't particularly good for my health. It was quite stressful.
Carrie It's interesting, because I think you're speaking to something that a lot of people who go into careers that they're passionate about, not just in terms of interest and earning a living, but also politically, do experience, particularly in what we call this era of the neoliberalisation of everything. So that public sector jobs are increasingly also tied in with the profit motive and the corporatization and the greater conservativeness that we used to associate only with the private sector.
Joan
I agree with that.
Carrie
And maybe, interestingly, people more of our generation, a bit older than the younger freelance crowd, who, for better or worse, who come out of university, if they have a university degree, and get thrown into these ad-hoc jobs because there just aren’t any full-time jobs. So I think there’s that interesting generational shift as well. I notice how much, to use perhaps an unfair word, but I think it's an apt description, how much younger people are much more used to hustling, and they assume they'll have to hustle. And they don't have pensions and they don't have the prospect of a permanent position and so on. So I think what you're describing is, and I know this is one part of the interest of your newsletter, is the changes in the job market, and changes in how that effects people’s wellbeing.
So along those lines I’d like you to tell us a bit more about how it is that you started “The Poverty Trap”, which used to be called “Crime and Punishment”, “How the Poor Stay Poor in America”. How you got started. And tell us a bit about the process of researching and writing your posts, which really cover a wide range of topics from work to housing to environmental issues as well related to poverty. So how did how does it all work?
Joan Well, when I was working for the EPA, I wasn't making a fortune, I was making a very modest salary. And so I figured, well, I can make at least that much or close. And I just started learning the hard way that part-time work was not going to cover my expenses. And it took a long time to discover that. 10 years. And I borrowed from my home and eventually you have to keep refinancing and refinancing and refinancing and it's a trap. And it is indeed a poverty trap – if you don't have a backup like a spouse or family money. And I didn't have either of those things. So that's where, with hindsight, I say again, I was a bit cavalier. But it was a slow process, and I just kept thinking, “Oh, I'll get hired at this four-year college that I love full time.” And even though that pay was not good, I knew that even the starting salary would allow me to pay my bills, including my mortgage. So at some point I really got into some trouble, and I learned at that point that the system works against you. If you need money and cannot get money easily from friends, relatives, spouse, you're in trouble. We're all sort of one accident away, or most of us, many of us, are one accident away from not having a home. Or having a home and just scraping by, not being able to purchase anything at all.
Carrie And when you say one accident away, of course, you mean in the American context, literally. Because you're looking at a country where you don't have universal public health care. And that's one of the –.
Joan
It’s huge
Carrie
- major causes of wealth discrepancy and poverty in the US, isn’t it?
Joan
Oh, it most certainly is. And I think they’re working to – they meaning the current administration – is working to amend the bankruptcies laws, I believe. Such that – I think you can discharge medical debt at this time, but it doesn't go on your credit report to ruin your credit score. And it does at the moment, I believe. So there are millions of Americans who have declared bankruptcy because they couldn't pay their medical bills. What was left over from insurance or just not having insurance.
Carrie
There was that great Michael Moore film, wasn't there, about 20 years ago. I can't remember, “Sicko” or something was that what it was called?
Joan
“Sicko”. It was called “Sicko”.
Carrie
Yeah. I grew up in Canada and I now live in the UK, so I've had the great fortune of living in countries that have public health. Of course we have in the UK the NHS. So it’s always very sobering to, especially since our National Health Service is also in crisis and perennially underfunded. We’ve had a lot of doctors and nurses strikes recently. But it's still standing. It's on its knees some of the time. But I think for a lot of us living in in Europe and Canada, for example, it's hard to get our heads around the reality of people not only having no access to health care, but health care being the one thing that you're always afraid, as you say, that even a minor accident could make you broke.
So tell me a bit about how you research, how you go about doing the research for and writing your newsletter. You publish a couple of times a month, don’t you?
Joan Well I try and publish once a week. And I come very close to that. Sometimes not 100%. But I come very close to that. And at some point very soon I want to publish four times a month major posts, and then intersperse a couple of other shorter reading posts during that same month. So I'm trying to amp up my schedule or get it back to where it was.
May I just say one thing about my inspiration for starting this newsletter. And that is when Senator Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016. And that was sort of at the height of my own financial crisis. And he laid things out like I had never heard before. The economic system and how unfair it was. And the idea of corporate subsidies. Now that was new to me. And I'm fascinated with that. And it's a hundred percent correct. We give money to companies to keep doing business. As if they need it! And it's incentive after incentive, tax break after tax break. And it was shocking to me. And as a matter of fact, NPR [National Public Radio], I believe, had a documentary called “Corporate Subsidies, Where's the Outrage?” And it was really a gamechanger, for laying out what happens. And a lot of people don't think about that. And I want people to think about how our system works. And God forbid you should apply for food stamps. And the rigmarole you have to go through. It's practically torture. I was applying at that time, I was applying for aid. And the whole time I was working part time as a tutor I was on aid. Because the salary was outrageous and they wanted – this tutoring was at college level and they wanted Masters degrees. And you can’t get paid more than $18 an hour and never got a raise. So that’s a college. This happened to be a two-year community college. But that was the going rate and that was high. Even part-time, you can't get by on that. So it all came together, and I think it was Sanders’s campaign in ’16. And then I saw the contrast, between Senator Clinton and Senator Sanders, that was glaringly obvious to me. And that fuelled my fire. Plus going through what I was going through. Financially.
Carrie
I think Bernie Sanders has have a bit impact. For one thing, the idea that, he’s put the cards on the table that there’s a possibility that there could be a socialist in the White House [laughter]. Which I think for many outsiders seems like a bit of a pipe dream. But I think you're absolutely right, even from the outside, that having Bernie, let's call him by his first name, around has shifted the debate in the US. And I'm noticing a bit how Cornel West, who's now running, I guess, as an independent, is doing a kind of similar thing. To talk in a very blunt way about social justice issues, poverty, racism, and so on. In a very real way that I guess most Americans can relate to.
I noticed that, staying with this sphere of politics and policy, I know that in your two-year anniversary post, you wrote: “The key takeaway from my exploration of poverty in the United States is that its continued existence despite nearly a century trying to fight it is directly related to a series of policy choices made by our elected officials through the laws they write.” So I'd like you to tell us a bit more about how you see your writing about these policies as a way of trying to change them, and to encourage your readers. And how that choice to focus on policy in particular feeds into your writing and the kind of readership that you have, or aspire to have.
Joan Well, I've always been enamoured of the phrase, “the political is the personal”. I don't know if Gloria Steinem was the first to say that, but she certainly...
Carrie It's certainly a 70s feminist phrase, for sure.
Joan Yes. And I believe that. And I think it just hits the nail on the head. I guess the first step to change is knowledge. And I have a lot of wonderful friends who just don't think about even there even being a possibility of change. And they've said that to me. And I remember making some comment to a very intelligent attorney friend of mine, and I said, “The banks do this, this and this.” And she said, “Well that’s just the way it is.” Well no. That’s not the way it is. They have to be regulated. They have to understand what the consequences would be, and that there will be consequences. And… may I say that I might have gotten a little off track with your question here?
Carrie No, not at all. Because you actually mention something that I think is key and that I spend a lot of my time thinking about as well, which is how to convince people who maybe have a certain stake in the existing system, or don't particularly feel themselves immediately prejudiced by, it negatively affected by it, to get them to see that the system is not just how it is. That it's made that way. And that their way of being in the world, a kind of privileged comfortable way, is actually part of the problem.
Joan Exactly.
Carrie So it’s interesting that you have these conversations with your friends who maybe don’t have so much of a stake in change. And I often ask myself, how do we convince people … You can see how convincing people who are in poverty that we need change. They don't need convincing. They need support and solidarity. But convincing people who are doing reasonably well out of the current system, that's a different issue, isn't it?
Joan Yes. And I also make clear in my newsletter, in my about page, and I try to make clear in the posts, what I think what there should be is a much more robust support system. And I think that – well, I don't think, I know – that comes through policy change and laws. When laws are in place, the action can happen. But without those laws, they can't happen. And I go back to environmental law and all the people who were anti-regulation: “Ah, we're going to go out of business. We can't close our landfill while we're making these repairs to the liner because we'll go out of business. We have to keep making money. So we're just going to keep taking the waste and try and repair it as we can.” No, you can't do that. You can't keep violating the law.
And if we didn't have those laws, we would be living in a sewage dump. All of us.
Companies are not going to do it voluntarily, I apologise in advance for saying that, but they're just not going to voluntarily choose to make things right. And for a century or more, 150 years before environmental laws, everything was just dumped until the rivers caught fire and it was just a disaster. And I honestly think we would still be there and even worse if we didn't have environmental laws and they were enforced.
So that's where the activism part comes in. You have to have knowledge. My newsletter is about education. I would say that generally it's about education. So that more people understand why they can't get financial aid when they need it. Or they make a thousand dollars too much and they're cut off from any financial aid at all. I believe it's 17,000 or 18,000 for a single person in Ohio. And you make $18,500, you're not going to get a penny. And try living on $18,500 with food, rent. It's impossible. But that's the standard they set. And that's set by law. That has to change. The only way it can change is to vote in people. Vote out people who think it should be 18, and vote in people who think it should be a lot more.
Carrie That's interesting. It's partly your experience of working as an environmental attorney that made you recognise the possibility for change. And not only possibility, the necessity, but the role of good laws, in protecting the environment. And now it seems like to a certain extent, out of necessity, your newsletter has to focus to a large extent on the bad laws that need to be changed at the moment.
I wanted to ask you about another interesting observation that you and others have made, about the changing nature of I guess the kind of social structure in the US. In your post “The Incredible Shrinking Middle Class” you write about how more and more middle-class Americans have been thrown into poverty through these bad laws, as well as the rising cost of living, how this became a particularly acute problem after the pandemic, where those kinds of subsidies and support that had been in place for people during the pandemic were removed. And I wondered, given this increased impoverishment of middle-class Americans, whether you think the terms, like working class, middle class, in particular. Are these terms adequate to understand and describe the labour market and the class system in the United States today?
Joan Probably not. Because the definitions that we cling to are based on economies that were established in the 1950s. That’s how I see it. I am not trained as an economist, but I read a lot of very smart economists. And it’s just like with politics. There are certain economists I agree with and certain ones I don’t. And I can clearly see the difference. And I got some interesting comments on that particular post. And some were saying that I shouldn't be talking about classes at all because it was a misnomer and “Isn't the United States supposed to be a classless society?” And I thought that was a great comment. And that's true, in theory. But ask anyone who's without a college education and who's working in the steel mill about class, and about who's considered working class and middle class.
I grew up in Steubenville, Ohio. I wasn't born there, but I spent my entire life, well, first 18 years in Steubenville. A steel town. My father was born there. His family worked in the mill. Part of it, part of the time worked in the mill. That was the job of choice. If you didn't have an aspiration for what in theory is supposed to be something better, then you got a job in the mill and you were able to have a middle-class life from that. And by that I mean you had a good income. You didn't have to worry about food. You didn't have to worry – you could buy a home. And my father, he chose not to do that. He chose to get a college education and some graduate work. But he ended up coming back to Steubenville and basically to support his family and was a Nationwide insurance agent. But that meant middle class. An insurance agent meant middle class at the time. He wore a suit. He wore a suit and tie to the office. Some of my friends’ families didn't. And it was a small town, and we were all very close. And my particular family was different in that regard, than many of the people there.
Carrie One of the things that really struck me about that post is that you talk about the importance of hope. Of giving people hope. One of the examples you gave is trade unions, the importance of trade unions. I'd like to hear a bit more about this, the importance of hope when we think about eradicating poverty and wealth disparities.
Joan Well, I am enamoured of that idea because we all… I read a few quotes from someone, a worker who was interviewed in probably a New York Times article that, middle class didn't just mean the money. It meant something you aspired to, to feel good about yourself. Now, whether that's a good thing or not is a whole other question. But you achieve a certain quote-unquote “status” and you feel like you're leading a comfortable life. Like you've done right for yourself. And I personally think that having someone or an organisation, I should say, like a union to back you. You're part of a larger effort when you're part of a union. And that effort is to raise your standard of living, and that gives you hope, doesn't it? I think that to have that support system and aspiring for something better in your life. And if that means more money, more time off, sick benefits, you know, on and on. That is a reason for hope. And I think we all need that to thrive, to care.
How do we participate in politics if we have no hope?
If our nose is to the grindstone all the time, where do we have the energy? To come home and think about who we should vote for. And what those people are doing. It just revives you. And I think it’s directly connected to unions. Or at least can be. They provide a support system.
Carrie They provide a support system, and they provide a sense of collectivity. One of the things that you were describing earlier is people's ignorance, a kind of taught ignorance, of how the system works. From reading your newsletter and from listening to you speak, and I've read this in examples of anti-poverty activism in the UK as well and elsewhere. It's that people get into this situation where they feel like it's them alone against the system. And there's nothing, there's not a sense of kind of collective struggle and solidarity. And you're absolutely right that unions provided that. It's not just, to use the old expression, “each man to himself”. It's like all the men and the women and the everyone together fighting for a common cause, and that sense of support and community which is missing for all sorts of reasons, with the demise of trade unions. That's a symptom, certainly, or a cause; both a symptom and a cause.
And related to that, in a recent post on environmentalism, you write about the importance of what you call upbeat writing. And I think, at the moment I'm finding it very difficult to imagine writing in an upbeat way about politics. And yet I totally agree with you. It can't just always be doomsday and the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. So I want to ask you a bit about how you think about trying to present hope and write with hope and bring a skip to your step as it were. To the page. That’s a strange mixed metaphor. Sorry!
Joan I wrote that post, I believe it was sort of a roundup of good environmental news, positive environmental news. And I got some good feedback on it, and people suggested that I do it once a month. I proffered that idea of doing a roundup once a month. And then I didn't quite follow through with that, but I intend to bring that back. So one of the extra posts that I'm going to do each month is a roundup of good news, whether it's environmental news or progress in the political area or something. And I think that's important, because it goes with that idea of hope. If you keep talking with every single piece of writing of what needs to be changed, it's important to bring that knowledge forth. But I think you have to celebrate victories, even if it's a small one. And in my research, I have found, and I believe that our current federal administration, President Biden, he's actually doing a lot of positive work, almost behind the scenes. And you see blurbs here and there. And I just added that into a post that I wrote today, that I published today. It's unfortunate that I can't remember what I wrote earlier today!
Carrie That's fine. We'll all go and read it afterwards!
Joan Oh! It's a new project, I think headed by the Department of Transportation, that is converting buildings in downtown areas that are vacant, vacant downtown buildings because of more people working from home remotely. There's quite a few vacancies in those commercial buildings. And they want to reconstitute them into affordable housing. And I personally think that's a great idea. And for a number of reasons, you're building up what used to be called downtown. It used to be a bustling place and now it's offices and empty of great department stores. But the most important thing is that it provides housing where there is none. And we need more housing. Affordable housing, I should say.
Carrie I think you're absolutely right. The idea of victories. Okay, gosh, we've been talking for getting on to 45 minutes, which is fantastic. I feel like we've barely started. But I wanted to close by staying with the theme of hope and victories and inspiration. I know you've said you've written a bit about some of the authors who have influenced you. Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring is probably the kind of landmark contemporary American environmental book. And the work of Ralph Nader. And I wonder if we can close by asking you if there are any other perhaps more contemporary writers out there at the moment who inspire you? Whether they be other newsletter writers or journalists, or if there are any other people writing on poverty who you find particularly that you'd like to recommend to us.
Joan Well, yes. There are a number of people writing about poverty, for example, on Substack. And I follow, and hopefully, and I believe he follows me,
He writes . And his angle is to use charts and graphs, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting him, that he creates himself based on data. He was a researcher for MIT and a few other illustrious places like that. And he just does a good job of literally putting it in black and white. I differ from that because, while I do insert charts and graphs, I want to make it more personal stories. Creative nonfiction. I don't think I've made that leap yet in my writing, but I hope to. And that personal story thing really illustrates a point. So that's my angle on it versus his. But I love his Substack. And then I'm influenced by people who write fiction and poetry. I happen to really love , who's a Native American writer. And he's just fascinating to read and talk with, because he really engages with his readers in comments. And I met him.Carrie It's interesting how many big-name contemporary novelists, for example, are writing newsletters. And I completely agree with you. I think even those of us who are non-fiction writers, some of the best ideas and inspiration we get come from the novelists and the poets. Who help us to open our imaginations.
Joan Oh absolutely. And even Cornel West, well not even, but I love it when he gets into these digressive conversations with the people who interview him and he starts talking about William Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury, and he just goes on and on and I struggle to make sense of how he's relating it but I think that's fascinating. I'm not sure I'm able to do that, but you can learn from lots of different places; and it doesn't have to be a linear path. And my very first post on Substack was about trees and how trees communicate. And there are researchers out there, ones that have been made quite famous from their books that they've written. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. I have that as a resource on my homepage of my Substack, as well as Suzanne Simard, who wrote Finding the Mother Tree. And their research converges, and it’s 40 years or more of research that says trees communicate underground, with an underground system, and they have an underground support system. I think we need a system like that in our government. It's just not there yet. We patchworked it, but it needs to be cohesive and more robust. And that research literally talks about how that support system helps other trees not just survive, but thrive. And that's the key for me. We can make it here. We're barely getting along. You got food stamps, you got, assistance otherwise, but you're not thriving. You're just making it day to day. And that's not good enough.
Carrie No, it's not good enough. And thank you. I think that's a wonderful image to end on. The idea of human societies being more like trees, having deeper roots, closer connections, being more intertwined, being more ambitious in everything we do and not settling just for living or getting by and, and insisting on thriving.
Joan Yes. That's really the theme of my newsletter.
Carrie Thank you so much, Joan. It's been a real joy. And to everyone who's listening or reading the transcript, I will include links to Joan's wonderful newsletter,
And hopefully we'll be able to also link directly to your newsletter so your readers can also read this wonderful interview, learn a bit more about where your newsletter and you are coming from.And to readers of Pen in Fist, I want to say thank you very much again for listening. Stay tuned. We'll take a bit of a break in December over Christmas and New Year. But I'll be back in January with another interview. And meanwhile, I might take a page out of Joan's book and post some hopeful, upbeat political reading for the end of year season. Thanks very much and look forward to speaking to people again soon.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. You can support my writing further by getting a paid subscription to this newsletter, buying my book or getting me a virtual coffee.