American Dream

Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home

andrea — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

I’m sharing this book with everyone I know. Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home is a strong memoir about a young couple going broke in the recession and it gives readers the satisfying feeling of walking around someone else’s shoes for 250 pages. We’re all connected by some basic humanity and a good memoir reinforces this connection as we don the cloak of another with ease.

Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me doesn’t simply resonate for us at the level of humanity. It is us. Within the first few pages I learned we are the same age and as she discussed her career moves, life plans and even the love of her pets, I felt we were kindred spirits. Though this may be true, I must attribute this to Shetterly’s writing style more so than the potential that we are long lost siblings. One key element she mentions after a few lengthy tales of her family pets is that writers often neglect the importance of pets in a tale, or even in a life. She refuses to subscribe to this and keeps her promise throughout the tale by consistently accounting for the pets’ needs and whereabouts at every step of their journey.

The pets aren’t the whole story, however. Caitlin Shetterly and her husband Dan Davis struggle through mid-thirties job searches, the want for something more, and the need for some basic success amid an economic recession that brings it all to a screeching halt. The pair is an example of the hidden layers beneath the CNN-drafted economic tag lines and phrases pundits regurgitate at us daily. They are the living, breathing case that represents us.

What’s so endearing about this book is that not only do you recognize the story and eagerly peel back its layers, but you also come to feel the very real emotional stresses that television news stories are leaving out. Particularly moving in Shetterly’s storytelling is her ability to frame her husband through the nuanced lens of gender expectations. These two critically educated people know that they’re held to ideological gender standards and in many places in their lives seem to balk at the hegemonic practices that secure them. Yet, Shetterly’s descriptions of her husband’s transformation strikes at the very core of how masculinity is a powerful framing force that deeply impacts the psyche of men and women alike.

You feel for both of them, but what’s moving the story is the way her gentle, honest tone captures the nuance we need to see in order to understand this is us, this is how we plan our lives, this is what we want for ourselves.

Shetterly frames the story around my childhood favorite, the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, Little House on the Prairie. Little House’s Manifest Destiny, coupled with the lyrics of “This Land is Your Land,” act as a critique woven throughout the story of their financial struggle, and her tale becomes a memoir with more take-away meaning than most. The mirror she holds up to us reminds us that the American Dream is complex, and that the drive within you has as much potential as a Horatio Alger success story as well as the potential to break you with exhaustion, crisis, trepidation and economics. It is this paradox that is particularly comforting and engaging about Shetterly’s story. Her recession tale sheds light on more than just a tough economy. We often argue that the ideology of capitalism and the American Dream have been disrupted, and we do not live in the world, economic or otherwise, that our parents or grandparents did. Shetterly’s work shows us that the resulting reality is complex and dynamic and many of us are struggling within it.

Basic ideas about family, support, goals, ambitions, and working hard are surely themes across the surface of Caitlin Shetterly’s Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke and Finding Home. But Shetterly also takes those themes and moves them from trite assumptions about how we are to live and packs them full of the struggle they cause us, inside and out, when we’re simply fighting for survival.

Written by: Dr. Julie E. Ferris, March 8th 2011

Take It From Me

andrea — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by Emily Abt

Pureland Pictures

Take It From Me makes an emotional statement even more than a political one. This documentary film chronicles the time period after the passing of the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act, which placed a five-year limit on public assistance. Emily Abt, the producer and director, is a former social caseworker in New York City. She offers us the daily lives of four women who are struggling against great odds to raise themselves and their children up out of poverty.

Abby is a nineteen-year-old mother of three who has been turned down for public assistance six times due to reasons varying from her age to her parents making too much money to qualify. Her sons have been placed in foster care until she can get an apartment. Yet without public and housing assistance, she cannot pay for it with her paltry earnings. It is heartbreaking to watch as her sons suffer physical and emotional abuse in foster homes, while Abby’s case continues to get delayed by the courts. She is a loving mother, easy to root for, and it is frustrating to watch her being dragged around by a heartless system.

Iyoka and Louie Riveria are a young married couple with a young daughter, who have suffered a house fire which left them temporarily homeless in a shelter. They are cut off from welfare during the film as Iyoka chooses between public assistance and completing her college degree. Her strength, pride, and desire to offer her daughter a better life is admirable. Iyoka worries about not being able to afford health insurance or daycare for her daughter. Louie shares it is difficult to feel like a man while they are experiencing that “no one is on their side.” By the end of the film, they are separated as the strain of their financial situation is too much for their relationship.

Teresa has been out of work for three years and has gone on multiple job interviews in that time. She is facing the threat of having her very small public assistance funds taken away from her at any moment. Her nineteen-year-old son lives with her and suffers from an undiagnosed mental illness. Teresa’s life is consumed with frugality, stretching the amount she gets as far as she can when most of it “only goes to cover the phone and electric bill.” The filmmakers lose touch with Teresa as she refuses to talk to them anymore after her son has an extreme reaction to their presence. In her last interview, Teresa candidly tells the camera that without the welfare money, she is sure that she and her son will die.

Valentina is a recovered alcoholic and drug abuser and mother to at least four children. She has been on welfare for twenty-eight years and offers an inspirational story of recovery and perseverance. Raised in foster care, abandoned by a drug addicted mother, Valentina is proud to have kept her promise to her own children that she would never leave them. She works cleaning pots for $5.50 an hour, yet she also dreams of getting her GED and a better job. She is ready to get off of welfare and is also realistic that even working full-time, it is only with the help of her local church that she is able to make it. One of the most inspirational scenes in the movie is when she encourages other recovering addicted mothers to take it one day at a time, and think of their children first.

The film effectively makes a point about the shadow side of the American dream and how public assistance creates dependency without empowerment. It also shows the tragic impact of our inability to provide for all of our citizens by meeting their needs, nourishing and taking care of their children, and supporting the empowerment of women, especially single mothers.

Written by: Jillian Vriend, October 31st 2010

Trailer Girl: And Other Stories

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Terese Svoboda

University of Nebraska Press

One of my favorite short story collections of all time is Black Tickets, a masterpiece written by Jayne Anne Phillips in the 1970s. So hauntingly poetic and impressive were these stories written about rootless misfits by a young and relatively unknown writer that a giant of the short story genre, Raymond Carver, contributed a blurb to the book’s back cover. He wrote: “These stories of America’s disenfranchised are unlike any in our literature. She is an original, and this book of hers is a crooked beauty.”

A ‘crooked beauty’ is also what the sixteen mostly short-short stories in Svoboda’s Trailer Girl conjure up in word pictures. Written in the style of dreamy prose poems about the alienated and edgy lives of the walking wounded, these stories shimmer and dazzle with an intensity that sometimes creates the feeling of the world as a floating, melting cloud of illusion.

In the title novella, a woman is obsessed with the idea there’s a wild child living in the gully near the trailer park where she lives but nobody believes her. Is the wild child a figment of her imagination to help her deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child? The other trailer residents ignore her—until there is a murder.

In “Psychic” a clairvoyant suddenly discovers her client is a murderer and then proceeds to exploit him. In “Lost the Baby,” an alcoholic couple black out and can’t remember where they dropped off their child. In “Sundress” two kicked out foster children move into a house while the owners are away on vacation and pose as house-sitting relatives. For a little while, they pretend they have a home to call their own and are blissfully happy.

Models of compression, these short stories are each skillful dramas about the lives of those on the dark side of the American dream. The style is a searing and cutting edge exploration of the long lasting effects of abuse and loss. For those who like elegantly poetic stories, Svoboda’s the real deal: a writer’s writer who unflinchingly makes us see with an almost hallucinogenic double-quick timing. Her brilliance will leave you breathless.

Written by: Cheryl Reeves, February 8th 2010