Stephanie Land on ‘Class’ and writing her college years – Missoulian

Her new book, “Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education,” fills readers in on what happened after she arrived in Missoula to earn an English degree at the University of Montana, where as an undergrad, she began writing an essay that eventually became “Maid.” 

“Class” is her follow-up to an all-in memoir that became a surprise hit. Her ground-level view of poverty and the difficulties that working single mothers face found an audience with President Barack Obama and then Netflix viewers through a season-long adaptation.

In her new book, she focuses on her senior year, which she says was one of the most difficult of her life. She describes the “relentless” energy (a criticism she reclaims as a point of pride) required as she was finishing her degree and her daughter was starting kindergarten.

Continuing the social criticism of “Maid” and her personal essays, she lays out the tenuous existence of a low-income single parent going back to school, and the costs of trying to improve your life (enduring social judgments and signing up for $50,000 in student loan debt).  

As she refines a long personal essay that would eventually become “Maid,” and begins taking steps toward graduate school and the master’s degree required to pull a teacher’s salary, Land becomes pregnant with her second child and faces yet more questions about her choices as a single mother.

Land answered some questions via email ahead of her hometown reading at 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19, at the Missoula Public Library’s Cooper Room. She’ll discuss her work with local novelist and vlogger Hank Green. Land will be in Helena 6-8 p.m. Nov. 20 at an event co-sponsored by the Montana Book Co. and the Montana Budget and Policy Center at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 512 Logan St.

Q: In the acknowledgments, you say this book, about “your hungriest year,” was the one you always wanted to write. When did you start work on it? And how did the response to “Maid,” including conversations with everyday readers about the issues it covers, inform the way you approached “Class”?

A: I’m not sure if I’ll ever fully process how or why “Maid” took off and was read so widely. I think it possibly spoke to a lot of people who live in the margins of society and sat with them in a space where they normally feel invisible, so they no longer felt so isolated and alone.

That was always my biggest hope for the book but I never imagined it would reach such a large amount of readers all over the world. With that, though, there is a lot of “feedback” that comes from people who will possibly never believe that poor people deserve — or even can have for a fleeting moment — nice things.

Unfortunately, those people are the most vocal on the internet and otherwise.

My biggest concern with both books is my children’s experience with it all. My teenager gets recognized by people who work in local coffee shops and rather loudly identify her, and people approach us whenever I’m out with them in public. It’s hard knowing I have brought them into the story that so many people have read and now recognize them from.

I don’t think I ever in my wildest imagination thought that could happen, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment for all of us. As for writing the second book, yeah, it’s scary writing about people you will probably run into at the grocery store someday.

Q: You discuss the Catch-22 you found yourself in, where you’re trying to create a better life for yourself by getting a degree, but the roadblocks make it seemingly impossible. What are some services universities could offer to help parents get a college education?

A: Statistics aren’t usually something I bring up in conversation a lot, but I think it’s important for people to know that in every undergraduate classroom, 23% of your students are likely hungry, one in 10 are parents, one in five are single parents, and about 8% are homeless.

The more people can change the type of person they imagine when they hear the word “college student” to something that is more realistic, I think services will sprout sort of organically.

Things that would have helped me, beyond daycare that’s not itemized by the hour and goes beyond 9 a.m.-5 p.m., would have been a textbook lending library, a food and clothing pantry, counselors who are resourceful about scholarships, and professors who are open about their availability during office hours and whether or not it’s okay for people to bring children to class.

Some kind of mentor would have helped me immensely, too. Like a grad student I could meet with or email to ask questions or could walk me around campus. That would have been immensely helpful.

Q: You mention that you got to see the last few years before gentrification began rapidly changing Missoula. In the book, you capture a lot of the city’s culture, particularly from the vantage of someone who doesn’t have a lot of money. Did you think of the book as a time capsule while writing it? And did the rapid changes happening in Missoula in the past few years, such as the spike in unhoused people, inform your approach to telling your story?

A: Yeah, I really wanted to capture the community from that time. It has changed a lot, and we’ve lost a lot of really good people due to unaffordable housing costs. I wanted to honor that time when people could mostly manage living and working here at the same time.

Q: The introduction notes the research and records you relied on, such as interviews, notes, essays, social media posts, emails, documents, direct messages and the day planner. How did you go about reconstructing this very busy, eventful, stressful year in your life?

A: Well, like any writer who procrastinates, I did it partially with office supplies. First I had this idea that I would print out everything I wrote in school and for submission, after I logged into my Submittable account and saw how many times I’d been rejected that year.

It was a stack of papers that was two inches thick, and I stared at it for an entire day in awe and gratitude for that version of myself who did all of that work while being deeply food and housing insecure.

Then I started to go through my filing cabinet and pulled all the paperwork I had to do during that time for food stamps, the child support case I had with my kid’s dad, and all the other day-to-day paperwork for my school and my daughter’s school, and decided to file it by month. It took up an entire drawer in my desk.

The book is pretty chronological, so I would pull the month’s file that I was writing about, and surrounded myself with my notebooks, day planner, and photos from that time while I was writing.

I also made a playlist of music I listened to that year, and actually went through and copy/pasted Facebook posts and comments into a big Word document and printed that out. I used to post funny things my daughter said, so I got a lot of really great quotes from my kid that way.

Q: You describe the struggle of trying to find time to read and write between raising Emilia, work and classes. How has your relationship to writing (and reading) changed since it became a full-time endeavor?

A: It’s been a really long time since I have written something purely for myself. Like, something that is just for me.

Since I started freelancing, almost everything I wrote could possibly be sold as an essay, so it felt like if I was going to put any energy toward writing it should at least be something I could get paid for. I probably need to find some balance with that.

I also don’t usually read anything that is not work-related in some way. It’s funny: When I started freelancing I never felt like I actually was working because everything I did was what I did for fun. Now I feel like I am always working.

Q: Not all writers who’ve hit the bestseller list discuss their finances, and not a lot of name writers in general talk about how they make a living. Why did you decide to talk about yours?

A: Well, when the New York Times offers to do a profile you don’t really turn them down. When Ron Lieber approached me about writing one about me, I agreed because I trusted him, but I also learned that people assumed I had been paid millions and that wasn’t the case at all and I wanted to correct that.

In light of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and learning that those writers and artists and creators also aren’t paid as much as people assumed, I thought it led into a larger conversation about how we all consume art but we’re not willing to truly support it.

Q: The question about who gets to make art runs through the book. What advice do you give to emerging writers about pursuing a career if they don’t come from a place of privilege?

A: People really seemed to look down their noses at me for wanting to make money, and I never understood that, so I tried to ignore them. To me, the stories from people who have lived experience in the margins of society are the ones we need the most.

A few things: Learn how to write a really good op-ed. Find a niche. The more you can think of yourself as a business, the better. Many (if not most) writers do not look at themselves as first an expert, then a brand, and a business that needs to be marketed and promoted.

It’s hard to find people who teach the actual business of writing, but it’s vital information to anyone trying to turn it into a career. 70% of freelance writing is administrative work.

What you end up writing is up to you, but you will write a lot of content you’re not all that passionate about when you’re starting out. Try your best to never write for exposure.