Not Working

I stumbled across this project via A Public Space today called Not Working, a project intended to capture America during The Great Recession in the same way Studs Terkel did in his 1972 book Working. DW Gibson, the creator of the project, will travel the country this summer, interviewing people who’ve lost their jobs and taking photos and videos. The site also features quite a few haikus.

So far, his most notable account was that of Empire, Nevada, the “last company town in America,” which recently shut down entirely. “Everyone has left, except for one family. Last October, Tammy and Dana Sparks purchased the roadside general store in Empire, just weeks before (the United States Gypsum Company) announced the plant was closing. They have decided to stick it out.”

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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