My parents divorced when I was three, and my mother and I moved into a tiny rental house two doors down from a windowless tavern. Though I had my own room, it was at the back of the house, and just beyond the small backyard was a gravel alleyway. Some nights, drunk men would use that alley. Shufflers, pissers, ranters. I would lie still and listen, gripping my blankets, waiting until the sounds faded.

My mother, a beloved schoolteacher, worked hard and always paid the bills on time, but many months were tight. She clipped coupons, and we ate what she could afford. Parmesan cheese came as powder in a can. I didn’t know it at the time, but we inhabited the murky territory at poverty’s edge that many families know well. Others had it worse off, but we were one emergency away from real struggle.

When I was in the third grade, my mother remarried, and we moved four miles away to a bungalow where the previous owner, a soft-spoken widower, left an upright piano. I was astonished that someone would leave a piano with a house. What kind of new world was this? A world where fences were made of wood and not metal, where the nearest windowless tavern was four miles away.

But it was a wonderful world — outside of our house. Inside, it was almost always tense. My stepfather was a war veteran who suffered from PTSD, and his anger and silences both terrified and intrigued me. I tried to spend as much time outside as I could, usually playing soccer in the street.

When we moved in, I noticed that the neighbors across the street had a large brick wall that bordered part of their backyard. I was a shy kid at times, but after a few weeks I gathered the courage to knock on their door and ask if I could please use their wall to practice my soccer kicks. To their eventual piercing regret, most likely, they
said yes.

I was out there in all kinds of weather, in each season, taking hard shots against that wall, and softer bending shots, left foot, right foot, from various distances. I also juggled the ball and dribbled up and down the street, for many hours over several years, and eventually found that my soccer skills had improved.

When it came time to go to high school, in the early ’80s, my stepfather urged that I attend Lincoln, which was all the way across the river in Downtown Portland. I would have to take a city bus each day, he said. Was I tough or not? Almost all of my friends from middle school would be going to the high school just down the hill, within walking distance, but this mattered not to my stepdad.

At Lincoln, I was one of a dozen kids from the east side of town. Certain westside parents, I soon learned, wouldn’t let their kid cross the river. Too much crime. Too much negative coverage on the local news stations.

And so, when I wasn’t studying or playing soccer and I wanted to socialize, I visited friends’ houses in the West Hills. And some of those houses were large. These were homes in which people had heard of colleges like Bowdoin and Swarthmore, where travel to the East Coast and even to Europe was common. Where, at family gatherings, they didn’t usually have a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a bowl of potato chips set out.

In other words, once again I felt the crash of worlds.

That’s not to say that I didn’t come to love many of my classmates who lived in the West Hills. I did love them, and we shared many interests. But in my own mind and body, deep within, I was still an Eastsider who had once lived in a tiny rental house. And when I did come across people at school who acted superior, I noted the instant chip on my shoulder.

To be clear, in my family we also ate homemade potato salad and casseroles, we shared stories of our lives as students, insurance salespeople, teachers, grocery store employees, secretaries. But no, most of us probably couldn’t locate Bowdoin or Swarthmore on a map, to say nothing of Bruges.

Yet I was one of the strange ones in my family. Perhaps the strangest. I ended up choosing a life of schooling, teaching, coaching, and budget travel to places like Nepal and Namibia. And then my path led me to writing, a craft I’d been practicing since eighth grade but never quite fully opened up to.

I enjoyed many parts of being a schoolteacher, but I knew I needed to devote my mornings to writing, so by my late twenties I arranged my day so that I could wake up and write for a few hours, then head out to teach and coach. I cobbled together several part-time teaching jobs, at one point I had five, centered on creative writing and soccer. In the afternoons I taught writing workshops in Portland Public Schools, then taught soccer classes in after-school programs all over the city.

Many of these gigs were in neighborhoods marked by poverty. Neighborhoods that don’t show up in hip magazines or TV shows. Ones a lot like where my mother and I lived before she remarried.

In the spring of 2011, I was the last writer-in-residence at Marshall High School in Lents, a neighborhood in outer Southeast. The previous fall, the school board had singled out Marshall for closure, citing low enrollment and budget issues. It was a brutal blow for a community that had, a few decades earlier, been cut in half by a freeway and was struggling to emerge from poverty and crime.

I worked in three classes of juniors and seniors, and in each class I met students who wrote about what it felt like to have their high school picked for closure. What it felt like to have those in power say, in effect, that Lents kids didn’t quite matter enough. The kids also wrote about their families, their neighborhood, their goals and their struggles. Some of them shared stories about evictions and relatives in prison, about drug addiction and going hungry. The kids were smart and authentic. And they came to trust me with their stories.

As with any residency, it’s about helping kids improve their writing skills, but it’s also about much more. Acknowledging their dignity. Helping them feel more supported and welcome in the world. Helping to expand their knowledge of options.

In my own extended family, and in myself at times too, I’ve noticed over the years a certain mentality that troubles me. It’s that sense of perhaps not being quite worldly enough to fully engage the wider society, the realm where people might have more college degrees and frequent flier miles.

Those who grow up living on poverty’s spectrum often don’t feel quite worthy of being part of the wider world, and this tendency of thought vexes many of them. Some work hard to correct it, while others succumb to feeling less-than or to directing their fear and anger at “elites.” There’s that instant chip on the shoulder whenever they come across those who act superior.

It’s this feeling — and that intriguing crash of worlds — that bloomed into fuller focus for me as I was working at Marshall. Characters began coming to life in my notebook, and I recorded setting details of Lents in 2011. The feel of the place. Its streets and businesses. The appearance of houses, yards, apartments, bus stops. Sounds and smells.

Before my first class, I would sit in the parking lot out in front of the school and take notes for a while, with my window cracked and the freeway noise filling my car. A story was emerging, yes. One that seemed to be tapping deep emotion from my upbringing, one that also honored Lents and Portland, and was true to the spirit of my experience at Marshall. One that had a soccer element as well.

Twelve years and sixty-some drafts later, my novel The Tigers of Lents arrived in its final form, and the crash of worlds is there in its pages. As is my aim to honor the characters’ dignity without romanticizing anyone. As is my experience as both an outsider and an insider.

Because, after all, as one of the characters in the novel puts it, it’s the same world. Some of us, from time to time, just need to remind ourselves of that.