M.L. Liebler

Editor M. L. Liebler is a poet, literary arts activist, and community organizer who teaches at Wayne State University. His many awards include a Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence and the 2010 Barnes & Noble Poets & Writers Writers for Writers Award, an honor he shared with Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz.

Interview

M. L. Liebler in conversation with Lolita Hernandez

Lolita Hernandez: My mind is in a swirl as I recall all of your efforts to represent the working class in literature and to offer space for working-class people to find themselves in print. I myself have benefitted mightily from your connections: beginning with my first poetry chapbook through Wayne State University, when you were facilitating the Wayne Review, then my chapbook with Ridgeway Press. Then Labor Pains: Poetry from South East Michigan Workers came out through Ridgeway. So you’ve been ahead of the game all along. In your poetic lifetime you’ve also provided many live performance and book venues for poets and writers in the “D” and across the nation—heck, by this time the world. But let me hit you in the gut right off the bat: why this collection of worker writing, why now?

M. L. Liebler: Good question. I have had this anthology in mind for nearly twenty years. I started teaching in the Labor Studies program at Wayne State in 1990. The class was subtitled “Labor through the Arts.” Every semester I had to Xerox stories, poems, and other pieces of creative writing because there was no such anthology available. There was an occasional anthology from the great Bottom Dog Press in Ohio, but they would often sell out, then go out of print. There was one okay poetry anthology from University of Illinois Press, but I needed the whole package (stories, poems, and so on). So I approached a university press to put out such an anthology. They originally were eager to do so. After the whole project was put together and permissions signed (everyone contributed gratis through friendship and an overwhelming support for such a unique project) the university decided to drop the book. Coffee House Press quickly came onboard and saved the project. The good news is that there still, after twenty years, is no such anthology available for people to pick up and read or students to use for classes. The project has remained as fresh today as it was when I first envisioned it in 1990.

Lolita Hernandez: My next question is twofold. You know that I come from an industrial background; after over thirty-three years in the auto industry, I can properly be classified as proletarian in the classic sense. You’ve approached your collection with a broader stroke, that of “worker.” How do you define “worker” and how has that affected your choices of writers to be represented in this collection?

M. L. Liebler: On the one hand, I wanted to include work that was about work itself, or about working-class issues by as many working-class writers as possible. However, I wanted to place writers who were known by readers and students alongside writers who would be new discoveries. Also, I wanted the book to be done in the right spirit. So I asked all the authors I had in mind if they would contribute in the spirit of the working class, to make this affordable for a nonprofit small press to publish. This is what makes me the proudest of this collection. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Eminem to Michael Moore to Diane di Prima and on and on said “Hell yes M. L.—we’re in.” It is a beautiful story of collaboration and collective creative energy. It is a book full of the heart and soul of what work is and about the working-class experience in America, but more importantly, this is a genuine book of love. Even the blurbers, from Michael Moore and Peter Coyote to Joe Henry and Anne Feeney, happily agreed to endorse the anthology.

Lolita Hernandez: Given your all-inclusive style, how on earth did you make a final decision on what to include? I could easily imagine thousands of pages (actually, I know it was pretty close to that originally). How did you make the final cuts? Did you leave out material you really wanted to include, but couldn’t? I know it had to be gut-wrenching.

M. L. Liebler: Actually, I went after the pieces I used in my classes. I wanted the anthology to have poetry, stories, creative nonfiction, memoir, and plays. Coffee House, with help and blessings from Allan Kornblum and Chris Fishbach, was very supportive and pretty much left it to me. So in the end, we decided to only cut the plays (and there were some solid pieces) and trim a couple of stories and nonfiction pieces just a little. There was no pain or let-down for any of the writers, essentially, and the book retained its integrity and excellent literature.

Lolita Hernandez: Worker writing has not captured much space in the literary mainstream; the academy doesn’t recognize us. We are a curiosity still. Do you think this collection will change that and how? Even in the non-academic world, auto workers, for example, have been “kicked to the curb.” I feel as if we’ve been blamed for many problems in the industry and in the economy: high union wages, “Cadillac” insurance policies, and so on. How does literature, particularly a collection like this, help our cause? How can the culture that belongs to workers, industrial and otherwise, help us? Because even in Detroit, I’m not always feeling the love for worker issues.

M. L. Liebler: I think a collection like this helps our cause in two ways. First, it allows readers to get at the heart of what the working-class experience really is by allowing people to read about, and hopefully empathize with and understand, the daily struggles to keep one’s head above water in an environment hostile to labor. For those who have the heart to see, they will come to know what it is like to make a living in a “nickel-and-dimed” world. In addition to this, many of these writings show the side effects of the struggle to “make a living.”

Second—and the best part—readers won’t need a PhD to read and understand this type of literature. It is written by and for the people. While there is much to discuss, à la Peter Maurin’s Catholic Workers’ round-table discussion sessions, working-class literature “is what it is.” So while there are all the ingredients that intellectuals need and require to delve into the work, it is also work created so regular working-class folk can read and enjoy it and feel as welcomed as the academy to partake and participate.

Lolita Hernandez: Where does the title Working Words come from? If I remember correctly, it comes from a solid tradition of workers learning to express themselves on paper in the Wayne State University Labor School.

M. L. Liebler: Essentially, your memory is correct on the title, but the dimensional history and impact of art and labor in the working class is explained and traced in my “brilliant” introduction—the one the university press didn’t think was academic enough. I know, Lolita, you wouldn’t want me to give that away here. HA!

Lolita Hernandez: Well let’s not let go of this point just yet, I mean the one about academia and the nuts and bolts of Working Words. I feel the differences in language as referenced in your introductory statement about the accessibility of the work. For example, the late Mick Vranich’s meditation in “Window Repair,” “we can only look at the sky / we can’t be in it.” Isn’t that the lament of every worker? That was mine on the line and on the tools. This is deep stuff. It strikes at the heart of what it means to be human. It’s the real deal for real people who don’t own the sky, contrary to the owners of the means of production and the means of finance, who think they own the universe.

M. L. Liebler: I was just talking about this with young Palestinian high school students in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem this week. We read and discussed Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred.” In both situations, the discussion switched to our working-class backgrounds, our traditions, our hopes, our dreams, and how there are some people in power in our lives who would love to hold us back and keep us down. I told them those in power want us not to succeed, not to go to school, not to rise above our histories and our socio-economic class. They enthusiastically agreed, and by the end of our workshop we all decided that we had important dreams and that our lives were just as important as those in power and all those smarty-pants intellectuals.

Lolita Hernandez: Despite ruling-class wishes to quiet working-class voices, and maybe with complicity from academic towers, do you think more working-class writers are finding ways to see print, to make their voices heard?

M. L. Liebler: Yes. I think things have changed a lot (and a little) since I first started pulling this anthology together. Remember, I first had this idea almost twenty years ago. Since then, only one major collection of working-class poems has come out.

By way of example, I also wanted to do a Vietnam War literary anthology almost twenty years ago. I pushed various presses to do it, and they were slow to respond. Within a year or two after my idea, the market was flooded with Vietnam anthologies and books. Now I don’t take any credit for that, but it shows how some ideas really blossom and others not so much. As of 2010, I still haven’t seen this happen with working-class literature. Working Words is one anthology of such writing amongst very few. That is good for Coffee House Press. However, I think there has been increased visibility for working-class literature and art in small-press magazines, newsletters, union newspapers, worker writer festivals, and even the Annual Great Labor Arts Exchange (traditionally a singer/songwriter/muralist art conference) has become more conscious of including creative writers. So, yes, there has been some degree of acceptance, but rarely is this type of literature taught in public schools, universities, and colleges. There are pockets here and there, but how many English departments have a working-class lit class? I suspect this anthology will start to open doors just a little to let the light come into academia. I know this will work because some of those included in the book have told me they plan to use the text in classes they teach at colleges, universities, and schools across the country. Who knows, maybe down the road Working Words will be thought of as “the little book that could”—the one that cracked academia’s doors open for other working-class books to slip into the classrooms of America. Again, those in power would hate a labor-aware public, because that just might get people talking “UNION” again.

Lolita Hernandez: So M. L., what is this really all about for you?

M. L. Liebler: That’s just it, Lo. This book, this project, and my life, are not about me. Never has been. Never will be. I just happen to be a guy who can write a few lines and teach some classes. God is good, but this project and my life’s purpose is all about helping and empowering others to tell their stories. I am on a mission to encourage, urge, and nurture the voices of the working class of all ages to tell all who will hear of their unique perspectives, truths, and dreams, and to show their connectedness throughout the history of this nation. As the great working-class Chicago poet and old friend Marc Kelly Smith says in his poem “Pull the Next One Up”:

When you get to the top of the mountain
Pull the next one up.
Then there’ll be two of you
Roped together at the waist
Tired and proud, knowing the mountain,
Knowing the human force it took
To bring both of you there.
And when the second one has finished
Taking in the view,
Satisfied by the heat and perspiration under the wool,
Let her pull the next one up;
Man or woman, climber of mountains.
Pull the next hand over
The last jagged rock
To become three.

I want us to keep pulling the next one up and the next one and the next one. This anthology is another one of the steps in this process of helping each other to realize our power and our potentials. I want to let everyone see our joys, live our sadness, feel our desires, and know our strengths through our working words. These writings are our stories, warts and all, and we ain’t afraid to be who we are and “kick out the jams.”

A Detroit native and Working Words contributor, Lolita Hernandez is the author of Autopsy of an Engine: and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award. Her writing is greatly influenced by the rhythms and language of her Trinidad and St. Vincent family and is tempered by over thirty years as a UAW worker, twenty-one of them at the Cadillac Plant in Detroit. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and is working on a novel.