- Kit, welcome to Waterstones - Thank you very much
Common People is an anthology
of working-class writers and I guess the first thing to do, because class is such
a weird, slippery topic or theme or idea; should we start by talking about what
does working-class mean? Particularly I suppose in 2019.
It's extremely difficult
to quantify or isolate and I've had more questions over the past six months about
do I qualify for working-class, you know my mom did this but my dad did that.
Or we started here and we ended there. And people don't, you know, I leave it up
to people to decide for themselves. I would never be someone that says oh well you
definitely aren't. Myself, if anyone looks at my lifestyle, they would say I was not
working class. But I was born into an extremely working-class family, if not
underclass family. And I would say, in fact I think Chris McCrudden in the book
says once upon a time working-class people used to make things. That doesn't
happen anymore. Although not only make things because if you think about miners
they extracted things; so they worked with their hands I think.
Now, working-class people sell things or serve you but even that isn't a complete
makeup of the working classes. And of course contained within working class
people, or the phrase working class, are people that haven't worked. Generations
of families sometimes that don't work, you know, unemployment has been a facet
of family life. I would still say they're working class even though they don't
work. So it's a very, very wide, loose, furry, weird expression these days.
In that case I suppose what was the catalyst or the sort of the spark that
made you want to put this collection together?
Well I wanted to do something
that was going to showcase working class writing as well as showcase existing
working-class writers perhaps that people didn't know about. And basically
we stole the idea from Nikesh Shukla's The Good Immigrant. You know, if it works, just copy
it, is my view. So using that model of having lots of different stories from
lots of different people all together in one anthology is what we decided in the end.
As you say, you've got some established writers like
Malorie Blackman and Jill Dawson, Cathy Rentzenbrink, yourself. And then you
have some brand new writers that we won't have heard of. How did you go about
finding them and, I suppose more difficult, how did you decide which ones to include?
Fortunately I had nothing to do with that so the writer
development agencies, there are six of them that cover the six geographical areas
of the UK; we contacted those and said could you with your existing networks
put out a call and say we have got this opportunity, would you like to apply to
be one of the working-class writers? They were inundated with people who wanted to
be in an anthology and they narrowed it down to a very, very short shortlist that
I chose from. It was fabulous, you know, a lot of hard work that I
didn't do and they came up with just outstanding writing from each... because I
wanted to make sure it covered every geographical area. Sometimes if you
have a competition, for whatever reason, it doesn't cover the margins of the UK
and I really wanted to make sure that this was countrywide as opposed to being
London-centric, which so much of publishing is.
You lead on to a good point there which is that the publishing itself is London-
centric, it's very white and middle-class and of course a lot of publishing
tends to reflect that. So part of the purpose of this book presumably is
is to counter that, to hopefully find some new writers to be published by
those sort of established publishing houses?
Absolutely. I mean it's very important to me that not only did it cover the breadth of the UK and the
different, diverse communities within it, but also that it showcased the
different types of working-class lives that there are. So you have, there are
stories in there of a girl that was brought up in a brothel,
there's a story there of a guy who is the child of two parents who took heroin.
The other end of the scale is the, in inverted commas, 'respectable'
working-class families and the book showcases all those different types of
lives. Working-class lives does not equate with poverty and
hardship, it's a a different way of living your life, it's
got different expectations, it's got a different ethos about life.
It's a different understanding of what it is, of class in this country.
It's a very varied collection of stories but I noticed a common theme often was
people's pride in their working-class roots or within their community or
family; the strength of those bonds.
Completely. I mean overwhelmingly what I didn't want this to turn into was the 4 Yorkshiremen
in Monty Python. Where we're all talking yeah but it was worse for me.
And we didn't have that, oh yeah but we didn't have that. But I really
wanted the book to be a celebration of what it is to be working-class, not an
apology or the 4 Yorkshiremen. Look at the humour, look at the solidarity, look
at the resilience, look how we stuck up for each other, look how we covered for
each other. And very much no shame. You know the people that have written
those stories have been extremely brave. They've put out there some difficult
information but they're not ashamed of it, they've said this is where I started,
this is where I am now. I may have exactly the same amount materially but I
am the person I am because of my upbringing, because of that start in life.
There's obviously a huge benefit for anybody who is from the working classes
to read a book like this, to see their stories being told or their communities
represented. And of course there is a benefit to middle-class or upper-class
readers to read these stories and realise that fiction or nonfiction can
be more than just what they're used to reading. Who is the book really for and
who do you think will benefit most from it?
Such a good question. The book is, I would say, for us, for working-class people.
But not entirely. It's also, and I do remember having a similar conversation with Unbound when
we were working out who the audience is for the book, it's also for people to say...
In fact I'll give you an example: when I first announced the book on Twitter I
had some guy (I won't swear) contact me and say if they were any good they'd be published already.
And this is an answer to that. They are good,
the unpublished writers and they're not published. And a lot of that is to do
with the structural inequality in publishing. Not to do with a lack of
talent, not to do with a lack of commitment, not to do with any kind of lack other
than opportunity and access to the industry. So it's very much an answer to
the people that think the cream rises to the top always. Because the cream doesn't
rise to the top always. Sometimes there's loads of things in the way of you rising
to the top and sometimes the cream's at the bottom.
I think that's a very good place for us to finish, Kit. It's great to see these writers in print.
Not only for them and their careers but also for any other working-class writers
reading this book and realising that they could do it too because they've
seen it here. So thank you very much.
Great, thank you.