Call for Submissions
Got a great story about working-class people doing cool shit to make their town better? We want to hear it.
It’s been a year since I launched Working Class Storytelling and it’s proven to me exactly what I felt like I knew: We really, truly are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Like, we say that all the time, right? It’s gonna have to be us. Be the change you want to see. We hold the answers. Or, as my neighbor Cadillac said as he helped me repair my furnace recently: Why do you keep calling the professionals when you’ve got a neighbor like me?
Over the past year, Working Class Storytelling has told real stories about real, working-class organizing being done all over the country. Why? Because I want us to know we can do this. I want people like me– a single mom living in a sleepy Southern city– to know we have what it takes to make the future we want.
To this end, we’ve told stories about communities working to create third places in towns where little public space exists, about a group of volunteers running a free EMS service, town residents fighting a millionaire from taking their tax dollars, and a neighborhood that organized to reopen a basketball court and, in the process, ending up electing a new mayor. From New Mexico to Colorado to Michigan to North Carolina, working-class people are stepping up to be the change.
Now it’s your turn. Working Class Storytelling is looking for story submissions about the cool organizing that working folks are doing.
Are you and your neighbors working together to build something big? Are you part of a group that is haunting your local city council about an issue that matters to working class people? Are you and your friends doing something to make your town better?We want to hear all about it.
Here’s some basic guidelines on what we are looking for:
Short stories, written as stories not as opinion pieces, about who, how and why people are organizing in your town
Stories about organizing success and wins, sure, but that are also honest about what didn’t work and what lessons were learned
Stories that focus on how your work is bringing in new people and growing a bigger we
Surprising stories about how people change, where people in your community overlap when maybe you thought they were different from you, and about how working together, not against each other, can bring bigger change
Submissions should be between 600 and 1200 words, give or take.
You don’t have to be a fancy writer-type to submit a piece to Working Class Storytelling! Plain and simple is the name of the game. I’m here to happily help you craft your story and get it to where you want it.
Got a submission or have an idea you want to toss around? Contact me at gfrisbiefulton@additionproject.org
I taught myself to build and deploy software and started making public-interest trackers and tools for people here in rural East Tennessee — opioid settlement money, environmental impact tracking, and small practical apps locals can use. I’ve also been building plain-language medical navigation and legal advocacy guides so people can actually understand systems that usually feel impossible to access.
It’s been a very working-class kind of “organizing” — not meetings or nonprofits, but trying to make complicated systems understandable and usable for regular people