Background Briefly

My most basic background is working class. I began at the poor end of working class (17 years old parents, natives of eastern Kentucky, migrated to North Carolina to work in furniture factories) and made it up to the middle of working class - my dad was a coal miner with a good union mining job from 1972 until 1992. I went to college on a scholarship in 1982. I kept at that for the next 12 years (BS in English and Psychology, MA in English, most of an MFA in creative writing, ABD on a PhD in English lit/Creative writing. So I was well on my way to an academic career until that derailed in 1996. Since then, it's been 13 years working in the business world for a marketing research company.

So I've logged at least a decade in the working class, academic class, and now business class (if you can call them classes). And I've never been quite comfortable in either one of them.