Class

I'm writing a fantasy book. A series, hopefully. Well, I've been writing it off and on for 20 years. At some point you just have to commit, right? I don't think my 14-year-old self would have imbued the story with much about class. But that's what it's getting imbued with now. 

My story has five castes. Probably sounds familiar, but don't worry, it also steals from a number of other ideas and cultures. Equal opportunity theft. I wonder if my focus on class, and my choice to write the majority of perspectives from the lower classes, comes from my time in LA? 

Yesterday I spent some time with a homeless vet (I guess I'll take his word for it) looking at his artwork. He said he'd been drawing for 15 years. He's just okay. He needed money for a motel room that night. I didn't give him enough for a motel room. But as I was driving home, I thought about a listing in the neighborhood next to mine: a 2 bed, 1 bath, 885 square foot piece of shit, not much bigger than a motel room, listed for just over $1,000,000. 

There are many other homes in my neighborhood much bigger and nicer than that one. Homes worth millions of dollars, supposedly. I work alongside kids and families who live in those homes. Millionaires. If not the people we watch doing coke in penthouses, not so far away from that. These are people who appear normal, who are generally kind, and who understand how lucky they are to be in that high class. So too are the Risen and Wreathen in my story. But what I'm most interested in is this: what's beneath that outer layer of humanity? What do they really think? And what would they be willing to do if their status was threatened? I'm intrigued by the answers to those questions, mostly because I know how I--a middle class person with limited mobility--would answer them. 

My fantasy book is much more than an exploration of class, I hope. But if that's all it's about, it makes sense. Let me put it one more way.

In 2014, I was teaching some of the poorest kids in the country in East Garfield Park, Chicago. The next year, I was teaching a student who drove to school in a Maserati. 

We let this happen. We know why, too. What I'm curious to know, though, is if change is only possible in fantasy stories.  

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