The folks at Flavorwire have a column for debut authors and it’s a little different from what you might expect from me. For example, you get to learn about how I hate Hemingway (seriously–I like to think that I too would have covered the Spanish civil war but there the similarities most definitely end) and what music I listen to when writing.

Excerpt, read the whole thing at Flavorwire:

What’s your approach: writing it all out in one big messy draft and then editing, or perfecting as you go (or something in between)?

Something in between. Teaching myself to write something imperfect and edit it later has been hard, especially since most of my career has been writing for the web with minimal editing. But as I go along I have built relationships with a few great magazine editors and a wonderful book editor whom I trust to really read closely and help me make something better. So I’ve learned to get something on the page and then clean it up, but it still makes me twitch to write something that I don’t love.

I am used to calling Jacob Swenson-Lengyel, of People’s Action, when I need to know what kind of trouble is being stirred up across the country. Their work is featured across Necessary Trouble, and so it was great fun to let Jacob turn the tables and interview me about the book for the Campaign for America’s Future blog. 

An excerpt, but you should read the whole thing:

You write in the book that “Class is not simply one of a list of possible identity categories. It is a relation of power that is shaped in part by race; in part by gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity; and by immigration status, education and even region.” Can you say more about the importance of this intersectional understanding of class and why it’s important for social movements today?

One of the things that annoyed me this election season was this tendency to talk about economic issues as if they only affect white people. In fact, it’s quite often the opposite. . . . If you’re a woman, you make less money. We talk about women making 77 cents on dollar, but actually Latinas make 55 cents to every white man’s dollar and black women make 60 cents. These are in fact things that are shaped by your race and your gender.

We can’t talk about class as an identity that only white people have. There’s this weird perception that if you like NASCAR and wear a trucker hat, then that makes you working class. And if you are a mother of three who works cleaning hotel rooms every night and is trying to get your kids through school and feed them, that you’re not somehow working class.

These are the things that shape your class position, because class is not a baseball cap. It’s power.

Nation Intern Emilio Leanza interviewed me about my time as a Nation intern and more.

2. When did you realize you wanted to cover labor, specifically?

I had a lot of lousy jobs and listened to a lot of punk rock. Seriously! I grew up outside of Boston and the Boston punk scene has a lot of proudly working-class bands that sing about unions, the Dropkick Murphys being the most famous. And I worked in the service industry and occasionally staged one-woman revolts over things like scraping gum from underneath tables when we had no customers and I was making $2.13 an hour.

And then when I was in graduate school, the financial crisis happened and everything was moving so quickly, I thought, “Well, I have to figure this stuff out.” When unemployment was through the roof, it wasn’t a great time to want to cover the labor movement, but Max Fraser (then-internship director) and Esther Kaplan and Laura of course gave me early encouragement. And then the Wisconsin protests kicked off in 2011 and suddenly publications wanted labor writers again!

Read the rest at the Nation Institute