Not That Cruel, and Not That Unusual
On: Another bummer Supreme Court decision / Art meets shabby / An Opinion piece / Last Call to apply for the Atheneum
Truth & Dare is a monthly post that offers one Truth (a writing prompt) and one Dare (an artistic gesture in the world). You might also find: thoughts on writing, art, books and paying attention. You won’t find: a paywall or a thicket of hyperlinks taking you someplace else. Just a clean read, a cup of herbal tea poured over your frontal lobe. No noise. No distraction. Thanks for being here.
Once upon a time in 1863, at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the painter Jean-François Millet unveiled his painting “The Man With the Hoe” to a hail of rotten tomatoes and old cabbage. Actually, there may not have been real vegetables in the mix, but it’s safe to say he received a strongly negative reception to the painting, largely because it depicted a grubby laborer pausing to rest from his work. About a decade later, Edgar Degas got the same kind of outraged reception for his painting, L’Absinthe. In both cases, the paintings feature humans shown in states of weariness — a rumpled couple after a night of absinthe-drinking and an exhausted man leaning on his hoe to rest. The art-going public cried foul, as though to say: “We are here to see fine art! We shouldn’t have to see this evidence of labor, of poverty or degradation. All of that needs to happen someplace else. Just not here.” I thought about this after the Supreme Court’s ruling last month that it’s okay to arrest and fine people if they don’t have any place to go. Another example of “Someplace else / Just not here,” and if followed to its logical conclusion, we will effectively create a class of people pushed from one place to another, criminalized for being poor. I wrote a piece1 in Sunday’s Oregonian about it, (see below).
During the summer of 2011, a man named Ben “Hodge” Hodgson lived on the streets of Portland, and we first met at the Street Books bicycle library I started that summer. He showed up in the shabby coat he always wore, no matter the season, and observed dryly that I had no P.G. Wodehouse in the library – what kind of self-respecting librarian didn’t stock Wodehouse?
Over the years, Hodge has struggled with the mental illness that landed him on the streets in the first place, an experience he writes about in the book we co-authored, Loaners: The Making of a Street Library. After three and a half years outside, he got into a housing program for veterans, and Hodge has been in an apartment ever since. He also serves on the board of directors of Street Books, and works as a street librarian, lending books on the same streets where he used to sleep.
Some months after we met, when Hodge still lived outdoors, he gave a tour of Old Town to a group of my students from Lewis & Clark College where I was teaching a “Writing in the City” class. As we circled up to thank him and say goodbye, he surprised us by spontaneously reciting a poem:
He drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle that took him in
The poem is “Outwitted,” by Edwin Markham,2 an Oregonian who served as Poet Laureate of our state from 1923 to 1931. It offers a vision of what might be possible if instead of labeling people and shutting them out, we insist on including and taking them in.
Accompanying Hodge around the city that day rearranged what my students thought they knew about people living outside. One student later shared that he kept thinking about Hodge and what a funny, deep thinker he was. Now when he sees someone walking along with a shopping cart or carrying their earthly possessions in a garbage bag, he wonders, “What if they are just like Hodge?” As funny and as bright and as human?
Of course, they are like Hodge. They may not produce puns as legendary as his, but among the people outside are the doctor who had a breakdown and the waitress who didn’t have health insurance after a cancer diagnosis. They are the kid who aged out of the foster care system, and the person born and raised in Portland, who simply can no longer afford the rent.
In the Grants Pass v. Johnson case, Supreme Court justices declared last month that it is okay to arrest and fine people for living outside, even when they have no other place to go. This latest ruling can be filed alongside the many sit-lie ordinances, camping bans, and, if you live in Grants Pass, the criminalization of a pillow or a blanket. But to focus on crafting laws or ordinances about who gets to use this square of sidewalk or that park bench is to miss the larger, more urgent question, and one we cannot legislate our way out of. The biggest predictor of homelessness in the United States is a lack of affordable housing. Until we have places people can afford to live, we must decide how we treat those of us who have nothing at all.
In a piece for The New Republic, Tracy Rosenthal writes “research shows that criminalization perpetuates rather than discourages homelessness, disqualifying unhoused people from the support they need, including federal housing benefits. A criminal record and credit scores wrecked by civil debt mean fewer employers or landlords willing to give them a chance. In the short term, arrests and sweeps interrupt the efforts of service providers. Unhoused people lose medication, critical documents, survival gear, and fragile support networks, losses that compound the physical and emotional toll of living outdoors.”
In the fourteen years Street Books has operated, we have rarely encountered anyone who lives outdoors by choice. It’s why we joined a coalition of community partners to submit an amicus brief to the Grants Pass v. Johnson case, arguing that homelessness is an involuntary state of being, made far worse when treated with arrest and citation. Everyone deserves a safe place to sleep, and we are a better community when we ensure that each person has a place to belong and call home.
Some years after I first met Hodge, I received a letter from his niece, Natalie, who had read an article we’d published together. She wrote that during the time Hodge lived outside, her family had no idea whether he was alive or dead. She thanked the Street Books crew for seeing beyond his living situation and recognizing him as the smart, dear person they knew. By then Hodge was our family too. And it wasn’t difficult. We simply drew a circle that took him in, (from The Oregonian, July 7, 2024).
As I mentioned last month, I am delighted to be on the faculty of the Attic Institute’s Atheneum3 program this fall, (a non-traditional alternative to the low-residency MFA). Applications are open until July 15th.
I will be working with the nonfiction cohort alongside Brian Benson, a friend and writing colleague who I think of as the person who kept his head when everyone else was freaking out about the pandemic, back in the spring of 2020. He announced that he’d be hosting a zoom writing hour4 every day at high noon, and over the course of two months, hundreds of writers from different U.S. states (and some other countries) took him up on it. Brian even published an anthology, which I’m lucky to be included in.5
Brian was actually part of an Atheneum back in the day, where he wrote most of his first book and he’s now been teaching there for three years. He has this to say about the program: “I love so many things about the Atheneum—the casual vibe; the salons during which we drink mid-shelf wine and talk at length about the most vexing writerly questions; the feeling of being a part of a literary community that keeps growing and growing; the gift of getting to spend a whole year immersed in the work of a half-dozen incredible writers—and we’re brewing some plans to make next year’s program even better.”
Please get in touch if you have any questions.
And now (whew and finally) it’s time for our Truth & Dare:
Truth: Find a painting (in a book in a free box, a mural on a wall in the city, at a gallery, etc. Spend some time finding the right one for you). Respond to that painting (in any direction you like: write purely descriptive detail, a letter to the subject of the piece, a poem, or however you are moved to respond)
Dare: Consider where you may have drawn a circle in your life, and who may be located outside it. This month find somebody you wouldn’t normally talk to and say something you don’t have to (compliment / good day / etc.) If it happens to be somebody living outside or at the margins, take the opportunity to ask them if there’s anything you can bring them. Report back - I’d love to hear how it goes.
Thank you for reading this far. I love you like crazy. Throw your cell phone over your left shoulder and don’t look where it lands. One deep breath, then another.
Brian Benson’s Daily Write
It’s a weird little piece called “Finding the Baby” with an apt drawing of William Barr by my kid Sylvie