Managed to hear your interview today (at the library.) I’ve left a comment regarding all this on your other page about your new book.

Congratulations to you.

I’m a 50-year old man who is alone; no children, no wife or partner. I’m well-educated, but am as poor as the people described by your book. Poverty strikes the most “capable.” Capability is linked to mental health. Stability crushes like a tin can under the stressors that you enumerate in your book. I attest to this. We’re left with “luck” to cling to.

You mention how shaming it is to slide and slide downward and eventually wind up in the literal poor house. It is. It is shaming beyond what I thought was possible. The shame is crippling to me, I’ll tell you that. Scrounging for food becomes a cloud, an atmosphere.

When I was young, I went to art school. I managed to keep jobs for about 15 years. Now-a-days, it’s numbingly difficult, and finally became too much to handle. I had no idea that my talents and abilities would just atrophy under relentless stresses of grinding poverty. It causes unending depression and anxiety. The US is a dream. It is very hard anymore to believe in possibility. I believed, I have come to realize, that the energies of the universe would just be all right. But, maintaining faith got weaker and weaker as the crippling recurring depressions I have suffered through ate away at not only my self confidence but literally my ability to be capable. What education does to people is fill them with hope; at first it feeds (I do not believe that it is by definition anything actually nourishing); pretty soon, we become blinder and blinder to real existence. We live inside of our minds. We build up mental sand castles over time. That is what happened to me. Poverty in the face of plenty is precisely the most debilitating thing: grind after grind of disappointment, then loss of faith, and finally simple resignation to what only seems inevitable. This is what happens along the trajectory of low wages, falling into food banks, and finally succumbing into needing welfare. I certainly don’t have any answers except one: tell one’s story. As luck would have it, reading about your book (on Truthdig) stimulated me to write this comment, which is also a way of saying thank you to you for having written your book about my kind of story. I hope to be able to find your book at my library. I only wish I had the few dollars needed to buy it. (I do still believe, at least, in the rightness of supporting fellow artists through buying their work.) We soldier on.

Bill