Author Julia Dinsmore on Homelessness (Part 3)

This is the closing portion of an interview with Julia Dinsmore, author of My Name is Child of God... Not "Those People": A First Person Look a Poverty.

E: One of the problems that I think we have here in America, is that people who are middle class, the majority, have too much to lose to want to overthrow the system. They can see the injustice, they can see the wrongs, but they fear risking their livelihood, their all, for something like that. It's unfortunate. So part of your fight is to eliminate poverty but the reality is, do you ever see it happening? Because I feel like our politicians don't have the gumption or they're too afraid to do whatever it takes.

Julia: Yeah. They're handcuffed to their constituencies. But so often they're handcuffed to big corporate wealth, and to this ridiculous idea of the free market job. We have chosen an economic system that doesn't even work, by definition, at full employment. When I learned that I thought, “Oh my gosh, the poor have been doing the world a great service in our poverty, for a very long time. You'd think they would have been treating us better. You know? So that someone's kid can get fat and lay by a swimming pool. When you really want to break it down, I'm amazed. I never ever learned that for it to work right, it starts going haywire any time we reach full employment.

E: Some economists have said that a healthy economy is 5% unemployment. Well 5% is 5 million out of every 100 million so you've got 5 million people who are struggling to find meaningful work for their lives and a place to fit in that doesn't exist, and right now unemployment is 10%.

Julia: I know! And in our economy it's so important and so valuable and that goes back to my storytelling and midwifing others’ stories from generational poverty. I have felt called to do that. And that's why I work with the kids and the poets and always encourage other people who have not been completely destroyed by this experience to learn how to tell their stories, because there's so much value to this world that we can bring.

E: Well I appreciate the time that you gave me here, I will email you when I go ahead and blog it. I'll transcribe some of what we talked about and maybe I'll even ask more questions later.

Julia: Yes, because we're just scratching the surface.

E: Yes, we're just scratching the surface. I'm just trying to draw some attention to your book.

Julia: I love that, thank you. Could you mention, to0, the Give Us Your Poor CD?

E: Is that available on Amazon.com?

Julia: Yes it is. Give us your Poor. We've got Bon Jovi, we've got Bruce Springsteen, we’ve got Natalie Merchant… she chose a song by a girl from Duluth, my son's ex-girlfriend. She was only 14 when she wrote her song. I had just gotten home from Washington DC at the national coalition for the homeless conference, and I said, “Can you write a song?” because she had experienced a lot of homelessness, and she wrote this song, and we recorded it and sent it in. Natalie Merchant picked it and it is a hot track. And then Danny Glover does two of my pieces that are on that CD as well. There's a beautiful, beautiful 19 tracks. There's a cut called Land of 10,000 Homeless that is interviews with men women and children on the streets of the Twin Cities set to music.

E: I see that Pete Seeger's on it, as well as Tim Robbins, John Sebastian…

Julia: I think that it's so valuable to look at progress like this because it shows what we can do. This is a CD to end homelessness, and to let people who are experiencing homelessness get together with rich famous people to collaborate and do something. When we had our world release party in Boston, we raised 20,000 dollars to send little Kyra Middleton, who sang Boll Weevil on it, to college. And her family is permanently housed now. It's my dream to have a Give us Your Poor concert in the Twin Cities with Bon Jovi and Natalie Merchant and local musicians. It’s important to see what we can do.

E: Thank you.

The rest of the interview involved off topic discussions about my upcoming art show and other things. Julia has a good spirit, is thoughtful and perceptive. But as I post the last piece this morning, it feels as if the task she has set before us -- eliminating homelessness -- is truly insurmountable. The problems are so entrenched, the systems so broken. But this is an essential first step... being aware of the extent of the problem, and the need to keep it in front of us, not swept into a corner or under the rug. Be sure to check out the CD Give us your Poor. And have a reflective Fourth of July weekend.

A Discussion On Poverty with Author Julia Dinsmore (Part 2)

This is a continuation of yesterday's post from a recent interview with Julia Dinsmore. Much to think about.

Julia: We continue to blame individuals who have been trapped of the underbelly of America generationally. It does a great disservice to everyone really, all of us. We don't look at the structural issues. I like that woman who coins the term affluenza, a spiritual disease of wealth and resources being hoarded by a few, causing a great imbalance upon the planet. And that to your question about why I wrote my book, my poem, My Name Is Not “Those People,” which is world famous -- it’s studied in universities all over the world and it’s been translated into a bazillion different languages. Crazy. At one point my son said, "Momma, why do you have a world famous poem and we're still on food stamps? It’s just crazy. I even found it in a sociology textbook that was selling for 33 dollars a pop, while I was losing my home.

What happened is after that poem I began getting in to speak at colleges and different groups who are seeking to understand socioeconomic disparity. And you’ve got to remember, I've been functionally illiterate my whole life so to write a poem the first thing that I ever wrote that was longer than a song, that went around the world that was read into the floor of the United States Congress by Paul Wellstone, I got a golden box copy of the congressional record with my poem in it. The power of the poem, I mean I have so many stories about those poems. I have a whole chapter in my next book, The Not Those People Chronicles, dedicated to telling stories of my baby, my poem. But anyway what happened was I discovered every time I went speaking, especially in educational places, people kept remarking that they had learned more about poverty in the short time that we had together than all their studying. And that told me something pretty big, that it's very valuable for us from the silent underbelly, America's permanent underclass, to tell our stories, that our stories are sacred, number one, and number two that I decided to start valuing my experiences, learning how to share them with a creative voice in a useful way because people get so confused about class and they flip into their things.

We go to all kinds of crazy places when we start talking about the distribution of wealth and resources. And when we start talking about poverty, we get stuck in stupid places because we have a lot of baggage around that issue. So I kept hearing, “You know, if you would write a book, you need to write a book!” And I struggled for years, like how do I do that? I'm functionally illiterate? How do I translate my stories into this language that I don't even know? I was bilingual, I could speak bad English and I eventually learned how to speak good English.

E: So through this experience, I'm sure you've known and met a lot of people whose stories would be worth telling. What does it take? How do they share their stories or what are the challenges to sharing your story?

Julia: Well, that's kind of a two way street. Historically, Americans have drifted into this social divide, the haves and the have nots. And that gulf has grown so large that people became socialized like the rich people who experience social economic privilege have been socialized to not recognize the gift and the talent and the worth and the value and the brilliance and the spiritual fortitude and the wisdom of people from generational poverty. And they think because there's a lens that people have looked through of seeing us as deficient, incapable, useless, lazy, you know, all those words that I used in my poem that we are not. So then eventually, you know, a lot of us begin to believe the lies that are told about us and start acting them out.

What happened before people in America is the poverty industry taught us to take on the identity of victim. So that's how people were socialized to relate to us. What will save you, or will give you a few crumbs, you learn to take on this yolk of victim.

E: You start to see yourself the way you're being portrayed rather than the way you are.

Julia: Right. And we had to do that in order to qualify for our crumbs in the poverty industry, for our food stamps, our section 8 or whatever, our welfare. And because those systems have been practiced to living in an unnatural way, like for example the new immigrant people groups who have come into the neighborhood year after year, they have their whole intact extended family and they practice economics together, and they share their resources and they help one another and practice mutual assistance. But if you're trapped in the poverty industry, you're penalized for living in those kinds of ways and helping each other. So we had to unlearn all the creative survival tactics that poor people have always employed, like the underground economy of generosity. Even though we still practice generosity, it's illegal when we take in our homeless relatives. We could commit a felony.

E: Explain that.

Julia: The strings that are attached from getting one iota of any assistance program are first and foremost that you can't go against practicing mutual assistance. Doubling up. Pooling resources. There are systemic barriers built into the qualifications for obtaining assistance in America.

E: How did that happen?

Julia: It's criminalized. The practices that poor people have always done because the industrial complex, which is part of the poverty industry, said so and it has criminalized us. And it's horrible. It's horrible. And we're supposed to subsist on way below the poverty level type of maintenance income yet you will do what you have to do to feed your kids, so it creates this awful thing to have to provide in, it wears on you.

E: Is part of the stress just from the fear that they create because you're so vulnerable?

Julia: I don't understand that question.

E: If you're a recipient on the receiving end of government “kindness” or whatever they give you, the safety net, is there stress from always living in fear of begin cut off because you don't make the rules?

Julia: Right, and not only making the rules but inadvertently breaking the rules. Like for example, I cannot tell you how many people I know in the last 10 years -- this is really for background information only -- but I know who have been charged. It’s been kind of broad because either they don't fill out their paperwork right or, and this is happening more and more, but the poor workers, who get new guidelines don't do their jobs right and they blame the clients and they can easily lose paperwork out of their flies believe me. And the poor people end up getting charged because the workers need to keep their jobs. We have become...

E: You're telling me I can't write that?

Julia: Well, go ahead.

E: I feel like that's important. I mean we're not naming any names.

Julia: It's a dicey territory because people are so into blaming and scamming and scapegoating poor people out of their own fear of becoming poor. They've been socialized to do that, and it's a particular kind of hating. I can’t deal with it, it’s so disgusting, so abhorrent to me. it makes me sick to my core. Trying to dissect what is really going on… sometimes it feels like people don't really want to know. I always thought this horrible system we created, this safety net that's really more like a trap, would change if we ever had a big economic downturn a big crisis and middle class people were subjected to the same things we had been all along, that their outrage would cause a lot of social transformation but I'm not seeing that happen yet.

PART 3 is tentatively scheduled for tomorrow. Click to hear Danny Glover perform Not "Those People" and learn more about the movement to end homelessness.

Excerpts from an Hour with Author Julia Dinsmore

Her Twitter profile reads: I am a Grandma, Edu-Performace Artist, Author, Singer, Poet, Public Speaker, Humorist, and Story Teller. My talents are used to end homelessness and poverty.

After she commented on one of my recent blog entries, we exchanged a few notes and I learned that she was author of My Name is Child of God… Not “Those People”: A First Person Look at Poverty which I wrote about here here, sharing her Danny Glover-narrated poem, a centerpiece of the book.

A week later we were able to schedule a time for this interview which took place late morning on Saturday, June 24.

Ennyman: So what are you up to today?

Julia: I'm trying to get the hang of this Twitter stuff and trying to learn how to market my book. My publishers closed down shortly after my book was published! So I have this huge, huge, huge market, and it's hard to bring it to market to my audience when you don't have money.

E: Yes, that's what the publisher can help with. Who published your book?

Julia: Augsburg Fortress Press.

E: Oh really? In 1985 I went to a writers conference at Mankato and met with one of the editors there. I later could have gotten a job there but it was so minimal wage I couldn't afford it.

Julia: They took a big hit in this economy.

E: Yeah, a lot of publishers have. A lot of magazines have gone out of business, too.

Julia: It's the wild, wild West in the publishing world.

E: What's your background then? You started in Duluth or were you born somewhere else?

Julia: I was born in South Minneapolis.

E: In the Hennepin area?

Julia: In the Phillips neighborhood in the heart of the city. Phillips originally extended from Hiawatha to Nicollet Avenue before the freeway came through. My grandfather fought that freeway, too, along with his neighbors. Now Phillips extends from the freeway to Hiawatha from Franklin Avenue to Lake Street. It’s traditionally been an immigrant neighborhood and very low wealth monetarily. What about you?

E: So when you were living up here and when did you leave Duluth??

Julia: I left Duluth in 2005. I was here for 6 or 7 years.

E: Were you living in the Central Hillside then?

Julia: Mostly in the Central Hillside and then or a short time in was in the East End for a couple years

E: So which part of your life led you to write this book, My Name is Child of God… Not “Those People”?

Julia: Well, my whole life. Coming from the roots of generational poverty, I think my mother was the original welfare mother in Minnesota. So growing up poor and ending up following in my mother's footsteps.

E: And at one point you were homeless?

Julia: I've been homeless several times. As a matter of fact, I was getting ready to move into my van two years ago because I can't afford housing. I came out with my book and a CD to end homelessness called “Give Us Your Poor” which is a collaborative collection of 19 tracks with people experiencing homelessness and big famous names, and thought that I was going to be able to make enough money you know, once again making those bootstraps again to have them crash. Anyways, ended up, I was going to move into my van and a young man who I had mentored through college and through law school and then through his legal aid career, his parents heard that I was moving into my van and offered me a house to live in. Out in a wealthy suburban neighborhood… so it’s culture shock. I've been camping out in the living room for 2 years now, I thought it would be a few months but the waiting lists to get into subsidized housing are 7 to 10 years long. I became disabled in 2001, and have tried to be self employed, trying to lift myself out of poverty, like I have so many other times. But it hasn't happened yet.

E: Yeah it's easier said than done. So what are some of the things you've learned through your experience? How much of poverty is due to circumstances that seem temporary that go on, how much is due to just a lack of experience, or not understanding how the job market works?

Julia: What job market? The truth is there has never been enough jobs for every citizen in America.

TO BE CONTINUED

Follow Julia Dinsmore on Twitter @nothosepeople