This is starting to look a lot like work!

I finally completed my book. For as long as I can remember, I have been a writer. When I wrote hate letters to my big sister, not knowing about the silent e, I wrote "I hat you!". I got called into the principal's office in third grade for writing poison pen letters to a classmate who pushed my best friend on the bus. Proud of my abilities, I signed those letters. Tracing the letters on the old refrigerator, Co-Op was my first word. Reading anything I could get my hands on; my first poem was about the Thousand Islands.

I have destroyed, given away, or forgotten ninety-nine percent of my writings. I write poems in a notebook, then put the half-finished notebook on the bookshelf to be tossed away later. If you have crossed my path, there was something written about you, if only in my head while I was stuck in traffic.

When my baby girl was born, my relationship with words underwent a profound change. My world was no longer about me. Instead, this tiny scrap of humanity became and continues to be my entire world. I sang songs to her that I created on the spot. "Beautiful, beautiful baby, beautiful, beautiful girl, made out of magic and sunshine, you are your Mama's whole world." Each day, each moment of the first three months of her life, I sang to her, recited to her, and told her the stories I had learned. As she fought for life, born four months early, words were all that I could give to her. Words were my gifts to her.

Now an adult, she rolls her eyes and sighs when I make up silly songs in the kitchen. Or interrupts me to finish the stories she has heard a hundred times. Born too late to know the world I grew up in, Lilly will never know the people and times that loom so large in my memories. The book I just finished is for Lilly.

White Trash Rising is a memoir. A story of humor, love, laughter, poverty, trauma, and misogyny. It is the story of the pain of poverty and the power of generational trauma. It is the story of DNA and the family of the heart. This book is a warning not to let my past become America's future. White Trash Rising is a love letter to my daughter.