Writing Advice from Sarah Smarsh

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You know that feeling when you get to the end of a really great book and you just don’t want it to end and you have to close it?

And you go to the library website and see if there’s another book in the series.

Yeah, by the same author.

Or you go to Goodreads and say, what else have they written?

I need it all now.

Grant, I’m at that moment.

And I think you’ll appreciate this.

I just had that experience with the book Heartland.

It’s subtitled A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.

It’s by Sarah Smarsh, and she comes from a long line of Kansas wheat farmers on her paternal side and a long line of teen mothers on her maternal side.

And the book is a beautifully written meditation on class, identity, and living below the poverty line in the heartland of this country.

One of the things that she writes about in the book is her experience of language and learning words.

And she talks about the word august.

And she had the experience that we’ve talked about before on the show.

Both she and her mother were the ones who read books in the family.

And she writes, people where I’m from don’t use adjectives like august.

They don’t use many adjectives at all.

They speak a firm sort of poetry made of things and actions.

Once I learned what august means, it was quite a few more years before I knew how to pronounce it.

Like so much of my vocabulary, I learned it alone with a book, but didn’t hear it spoken aloud.

In my head, I said it like the month.

It would be unwise for me to claim I know how much growing up in a poor family shaped my words.

My mother’s strong vocabulary, itself learned alone from books, probably has more to do with my language than any college degree I got.

And in fact, she went on to college and became a professor of creative writing and journalism.

And on her Twitter feed, she gave some writing advice, which I really related to, and I think you will too.

She wrote, reliable writing advice is to read, read, read.

I agree.

And yet, I come from a culture not big on books.

My mom and I were outliers as readers.

What I did even more was listen, listen, listen.

And I thought that was such a great bit of advice.

I agree, yeah.

And that book again was?

That book again is Heartland by Sarah Smarsh.