Matt Ferrence On How Stories Offer A Way Forward In Politics
At first glance, Matt Ferrence might not strike you as your typical political candidate. He’s a mustachioed creative writing professor as likely to discuss the works of Mary Ruefle as he is policy reform. Yet in 2020 he was motivated to run for State Representative, an experience that gave him a profound new insight to the community in which he lives. Ferrence’s memoir, I Hate It Here, Please Vote For Me: Essays On Rural Political Decay, details his ill-fated campaign while examining the complexity of political life in rural spaces, the issues that confront these communities, and how the various needs of the community are (and are not) being met by their representatives. The result is a fascinating exploration of a Quixotic political campaign that also perceptively investigates the role geography plays in one’s identity. Ferrence spoke with us about lessons learned on his campaign and how stories offer a better way to achieve a more effective governance.
Can you talk about what motivated you to run both in 2018, as a write in candidate, and then in 2020?
So the first part is the petty, personal incentive (laughs). That’s when the person who is still the state representative said that he didn’t think the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania should provide financial aid for college students studying, in his words, “poetry or other pre-Walmart majors.” That made me angry first as a professor of creative writing, and then secondarily angry because the sentiment that’s reflected in that statement is one that people who don’t have the means, who don’t have a lot of money, should have limited horizons. That’s what he’s saying, that the state shouldn’t help out people who want to study the arts. He’s continued to use that phrase. He apologized to Walmart when people heard what he said—not to students—and he’s decided that this is a fantastic gotcha.
But like any great story, there’s character motivation. The more I thought about it, the more I was thinking about those horizons. Then thinking about places like Crawford County, Pennsylvania—or Indiana County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up—have suffered for a long time from industrial abandonment, high unemployment, high poverty rates. At the same time, they’ve also supported a steady stream of politicians who aren’t interested in any of the issues that might help real recovery in those areas. Then it became a really policy-focused motivation to run. I thought, and I still think, that at the state level there’s an opportunity for politics to make a big difference. If we can just get people to recognize how important paying attention to state politics is and that we often wind up voting for stories instead of policy. So we need to have new stories.
Your love of poetry shines throughout the memoir. The book starts with a quote from Mary Ruefle and different poets show up throughout. Why was it important to highlight these various poets?
Part of that is my entire life has been surrounded by a love and respect for storytelling and literature in general. My mom was a reading teacher and a big reader, so that’s always been part and parcel of who I am. As a professor, I’m always going to the dark place. What we’re seeing right now is just a rapid acceleration of something we call the decline of the humanities—this belief, it’s the same as that pre-Walmart quote, that there’s no economic value in people studying things like creative writing or literature or art. I actually find that being able to carefully and intelligently read stories is a huge civic skill. I remember when Donald Trump was elected the first time, which was a bit of a shock, and students in my creative writing classes were particularly shocked. A lot of them felt themselves at risk with that moment. In talking about how plain the narrative motivations are when you look at a candidate like that—and he’s not exclusive in that plainness—some of our failure to see through people like him, in my opinion, is our failure to read carefully. There’s such importance to being able to see story around us and recognize that most human beings are built by stories. That’s how we learn, it’s how everything is shared. We seem to be hardwired to respond to narratives in lots of different forms. For me, knowing that actual policy positions don’t sway people very much, stories are a better way forward to achieve a politics that’s more effective for everybody.
You write about your fascination with the intersection of identity and geography. Both Crawford County, where you currently live, and Indiana County, where you grew up, play huge roles in the book. Can you talk about those two places and how they’ve influenced your own identity?
I’m going to be harkening back to my previous book a little bit here. It was a memoir about growing up in Pennsylvania and not realizing you’re Appalachian, because Pennsylvania people tend not to think about that, and then realizing as a grown up that you were and recognizing the relationship of place to sense of identity. That’s part and parcel of everything. In the context of the new book, Crawford County, where I live now, is a former industrial county and has suffered the loss of that kind of production industry. The county where I grew up, Indiana County, was a coal town, so it suffered the loss of the extractive industry. I kind of quip a little bit, though I think it’s true, that it feels really different depending on which loss is the foundation for what you are. I grew up in the loss of things that were drawn from the land, and up here it was things that were built on the land. But the commonality is that for fifty years in both places, people have lived in a place that matters to them, where the departure of the industries still, from a story perspective, define the places. It’s harmful, because coal mines are not coming back in any meaningful way, whether people want them or not. It’s doubtful that the kind of manufacturing that used to hold sway here in Crawford County is going to come back either. So there’s that disconnect between loving where you’re from and valuing the history of that place and seeing around you geographic signs of that departure. Where I grew up, it was red-stained rocks in streams and black, bony piles in the forest where plants still can’t grow because the coal slag is too hot when it reflects from the sun for seeds to germinate. Up here it’s weed-choked old manufacturing facilities. You’re living with physical signs of what’s been taken away, and I think that matters a lot to people,
That seems to play into the theme of abandonment which recurs throughout.
The example up here—what people still talk about a lot and they’re proud of—is the zipper. The American zipper industry and the perfection of the zipper literally happened here. But that industry was declining, kind of from the seventies on, and it went through the usual Rust Belt sequence of going into a holding company and then being offshored. In fact, before we moved up here, one of our friends who was from Meadville originally, told us her father was the last person in the zipper plant who turned the lights out on their way out. People still talk about the zipper and are proud of the zipper. That’s cool, but it’s also painful. It was just a few years ago that they finally knocked down the old headquarters of that zipper factory. Now it’s low-cost senior apartments that have their own political issues.
You write about that in the book, how residents of that center have their rents raised by thirty percent.
Exactly, right. That was a place where it was vacant, and then if I remember it accurately, the county wound up taking control of the property. The county then had to pay the remediation of the property, sold it with huge tax incentives to this company that built the senior housing, and then there was a huge rate hike. I think that’s the story we need to piece together, because there’s an abandonment and the people that are left behind have to pay for the cleanup. The development winds up being a financial incentive to a company that exploits the people who are supposed to be helped by the development. That’s not a positive narrative cycle. It’s just a reassertion of the kind of exploitation that I see as consistent through the decades.
In getting back to your campaign, without spoiling the book, what were your main takeaways after your defeat in 2020?
That I lost is no spoiler, because I think that’s on page one of the book. (laughs) The main takeaways—one is the story stuff we’re talking about, and how we need to think about how stories are affecting us politically. But then more on the ground, it was the recognition that going in, I was sure that the Republican Party had a bad faith political relationship to rural America. They get the votes easily, but they’re not really doing anything to help. But what I came to realize is that the Democratic Party also is absent in a remarkable way in rural spaces, because they function strategically, even though that’s not what we talk about very much. They weren’t trying to win in places like here, and that makes total sense if you’re trying to win elections, which is a funny way to put it, because I suppose that’s what politics is. But the recognition on the ground is that politics actually won’t help us. Because if you’re like me and think the Democratic Party would do better for a place like Crawford County, they’re not actually trying that hard to be influential. The Republican Party doesn’t have an incentive to change because they have what they want. That was kind of a recognition that turning back to poets and other writers talking about how artists are more effective change makers in the world because they move—in politics people they call it the Overton Window—but they move our hearts and minds. Politics cannot ever do anything other than follow the wind that’s blowing. There’s a lot more progress to be made by paying attention to the dreamers and the poets than the politicians.
I feel like this book is so much about telling one’s story. I was struck how in your chapter entitled “Violence,” you end with a writing exercise that I think readers will get a lot out of. Why did you choose to put that writing exercise in basically the midway point of the book?
I knew as I was working on [the book], in a certain way, there’s nothing interesting about telling the story of losing an election that you’re supposed to lose. As a memoirist, I’m always more interested in the way Scott Russell Sanders talks about it, that he tells stories about himself not because he’s interesting, but because he hopes it’s something that opens up a window into the reader’s own life. That was what I was most interested in, the emotional conflict of deeply loving being from Western Pennsylvania and feeling like the place does not love me back. How do you reconcile the place that is you, when so much of what’s happening around you is not reflective of the values you have?
The last chapter of the book had been written before I wrote that writing exercise. As I was trying to figure out [the book], I wanted to end on that dream of being with yourself as a child and what could you tell them then about a hopeful future? How could I get there in the book? As I was working on the “Violence” chapter, it just struck me that in some ways, that’s the wound against it and how you write out of that wound. That’s where the actual exercise came from, partly a mechanical answer to “How do you connect this book?,” but also an answer to that emotional problem of “How do you actually use writing as a way to seek solutions that are emotional instead of political?”
You end the book with a political reading list. I was interested in hearing you talk about why it was meaningful for you to include that in the memoir.
This connects, in some ways, to something I do more and more as I’m teaching writing in a lot of my workshop classes. I make them suffer through an exercise where they catalog their narrative influences. The idea is that whatever you’re absorbing, that story is going to come back out in the books that you’re writing. If you’re trying to develop your aesthetic as a writer, you need to make sure you’re pushing your aesthetic through the material you absorb.
I was thinking very much in the same ways about my own influences and how did I wind up as who I am—other than the life I’ve lived, my family, and the significant impact they’ve had on me. Books have been—it sounds like a cliche, but it’s true for people who love and find meaning in books—teachers for almost every aspect of my life. I’ve taught myself how to do a lot of things through books, and a lot of that is how to live. I wanted to create a catalog of books I felt were influential to my growing sense of self as a political animal. I cite several different books throughout, so I wanted to give proper credit to the full texts of those, but a bibliography felt way too sterile for the sort of project this was. So thinking about, what if we could give reading lists to everybody before elections? That’s kind of what that final reading list is. I wish everybody would read these books and that would help them understand where I’m coming from. I’m sure there’s other books that people would have me read that would be very helpful as well.
Finally, what role has the library played in your life?
A tremendous role. We are frequent users. My older son just pulled off the greatest coup in the history of the world—maybe I shouldn’t use that word when we’re talking about politics. (laughs) The library was getting rid of one of their manga series, and he was able to buy, like, sixty copies of these manga books at twenty-five cents apiece. It was an amazing moment. But the libraries, both at school when I was a kid and as academic and public libraries [later], have been a central part of our daily experience. In every location, they’ve been so important to community. In rural, conservative places like where I ran my campaign, public libraries are the sorts of things that get smacked a lot through conservative austerity politics. Yet the public libraries are offering such a huge spectrum of service to the community here, obviously books, but also access to computers so people can apply for jobs, apply for unemployment benefits. We live in a place where the opioid epidemic is a thing, so librarians are first responders to overdoses. There’s all of this fabric of life, good and struggling, that happens at the public library. I think they’re one of the greatest things America ever did. Just the notion that anybody can get basically any book they want by going to their public library, and if it’s not on the shelves, that librarian will find a way to get it to them. That alone is just an amazing service to humanity that I’m in awe of every day.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Tags: Matt Ferrence, political activism, political recommendations
