Zibby Mag

By Bobbi Dempsey

The old adage about writing says you should “write what you know.” If there was one thing I knew a lot about, it was being poor. But for many years after I had started my writing career, I didn’t write about that at all. In fact, I actively avoided it.

I grew up in a poor, dysfunctional environment. My family (barely) survived on public assistance programs for my entire childhood—from the day I was born until the day I graduated high school, and beyond. During that period, we also moved roughly 70 times, with stints of homelessness scattered in between.

In my early 20s, I managed to get a job as an obit clerk at a local newspaper, even though I had no college degree. My youngest child was three, and I was earning minimum wage, but I was simply happy to be paid to write. Eventually I worked my way up to a reporter role. After that job ended, I started working as a freelance writer for magazines, newspapers, and online outlets.

For the next 15 years, I wrote consumer-service pieces and human-interest features highlighting people with inspiring stories, and went out of my way to avoid writing anything about myself. The job of a reporter greatly appealed to me; I always liked to be the one doing the observing as opposed to being observed.

I had spent most of my life obscuring the fact that I lived in poverty. As a child and teenager, I would sometimes go through elaborate maneuvers to hide my living conditions from classmates. Inviting friends over was never a remote possibility. Thus, even as an adult, baring my soul—and the history that had been the cause of so much shame for so long—just seemed terrifying.

I grew up in a poor, dysfunctional environment. My family (barely) survived on public assistance programs for my entire childhood—from the day I was born until the day I graduated high school, and beyond.

After nearly twenty years of working as a writer and reporter, I heard about the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP). Founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, the organization’s mission is to support journalists who write about poverty through their own lived experience. With their encouragement, I wrote an essay about how I couldn’t apply for a grant writer position at our local school district because my inability to document my long list of former addresses prevented me from passing one of the mandatory background checks. That essay was accepted and published by Curbed.

Around the same time, I was enlisted to serve as an economic justice fellow for an organization called Community Change, which was seeking people who could write about income equality and safety net programs from personal experience. (I have since also become a reporting fellow at EHRP.)

Even though I had successfully survived the milestone of writing about my own experiences with poverty, I still felt uncomfortable and loath to share too much of my own story. But then my former editor and mentor at Community Change, a terrific writer named Melissa whom I trust implicitly, urged me to “do it for all the other Bobbis out there” who need to hear a story like theirs to know they aren’t alone—particularly the children and teens.

That’s when the floodgates opened. Since I began openly and frequently telling my personal story, I feel as though I’ve been representing so many others who have similar experiences. Editors have become much more open to publishing stories like mine, and I’ve noticed that many journalistic outlets have incorporated a more diverse range of stories and voices, including those from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.

I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely comfortable with talking (or writing) about myself. That said, I seize every opportunity to write articles about income inequality and social justice when I can share other people’s stories. Either way, I feel honored to give a voice to those who are often silenced or ignored. This is a true privilege and a responsibility I don’t take lightly. If I’ve played a small role in promoting dialogue about important issues like poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and the lack of affordable healthcare, then I know I’ve made the right choice.

As a child who felt great shame about being poor, I never would have imagined that one day I’d become known as “the poverty writer,” a title I embrace with pride. I hope to promote greater compassion, understanding, and empathy for those who desperately need and deserve it.

I can’t think of anything more rewarding than that.

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Bobbi Dempsey is a freelance writer, a communications fellow at Community Change, and a reporting fellow at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She’s the author of a dozen nonfiction books, including Degrees of Desperation: The Working-Class Struggle to Pay for College.