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February 8, 2020 - 7:00am
Reading Safety Meeting at The Point magazine, an extract from Bud Smith’s 2017 book Work, brought home to me just how little we see of manual work in the contemporary world of letters.
Smith works at an oil refinery in New Jersey. He is also a writer, working on a smartphone during his lunch breaks. His writing is economical, rooted in concrete events rather than abstract reflection, shifting between his childhood, his workplace and his thoughts about art and class and writing. His descriptions of his work environment have a conversational lightness that contrast with the scale, dirt, noise and omnipresent danger of industrial work:
Smith is alive to the division between the social class that writes, and the class that does manual work. He addresses this with the same lightness as he does the materiality of heavy industry, not by theorising but storytelling:
Both manual workers and the world of letters idealises the other, Smith suggests, situating “realness” somehow where they themselves are not:
The people he meets in the world of letters may be surprised that he never went to college, but, he points out, the people he works with are storytellers too: “They are a lot like poets, short-story humorists, novelists, and they don’t even know it.” From this emerges his rationale for creating – a vision at once playful and profound:
Bud Smith is a rare voice from outside the navel-gazing world of the creative writing masters’ degree. Whatever you do for a living, get lost in his world for a few minutes this weekend.
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