Clutch: An Education at Work: Machete
Autor Linda Pawlentyen Limba Engleză Paperback – 2 sep 2025
Driving a concrete mixer throughout graduate school, Linda Pawlenty became accustomed to being the odd one out: as a working-class laborer in academia and as a woman and an academic in the construction industry. But from the moment she became a truck driver, Pawlenty loved the satisfaction of proving herself, the thrill of coaxing large machines into place with precision and care. Similarly, when beginning a PhD program in literature, she maneuvered her way through the strange territory of the university, proud to be the first in her family to attempt the degree. In Clutch, she recounts her time shuttling between worlds, delivering with bracing clarity a rare perspective on gender, class, labor, and whiteness—and how the implications of each shift according to context. From enduring sexual harassment at construction sites and classist comments from professors to the joys of driving a truck and finding academic fulfillment, Pawlenty takes stock of her disparate experiences to ask hard questions about power and acceptance, providing a beacon for those fighting for presence in places they are not expected—and not always welcome—to be.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259412
ISBN-10: 0814259413
Pagini: 228
Ilustrații: 1 b&w image
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.27 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria Machete
ISBN-10: 0814259413
Pagini: 228
Ilustrații: 1 b&w image
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.27 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria Machete
Recenzii
“Clutch is a book of such tenderness—and grit and generosity and moving passages. It is also a celebration of construction work, of truck drivers, of teachers and friends, and ultimately of honoring our own hearts even when the worlds we love do not speak to each other. I found myself charmed as I read Linda Pawlenty’s memoir, and I might have gone into truck driving myself if I had found this book when I was younger.” —Daisy Hernández, author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir
“This book is a tough haul, as Pawlenty steers between woman truck driver and college English teacher, between the colloquialisms of trucker talk and the conceptualizations of Marxist and feminist theory, between pouring concrete and managing the dangerous abstract curves of graduate school, between the joy of trucking and the shock of sexual harassment. But at the busy intersection of all this, Pawlenty comes through in the clutch.” —Thomas C. Gannon, author of Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir
Notă biografică
Linda Pawlentyis a truck driver and volunteers as an English language teacher for Spanish speakers. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Extras
A PhD and a truck driver walk into a bar.
Kidding. I’ll cut the jokes.
For each of these identities, the labor required of the mind is different, and the labor required of the body is different. The physical environment is different, the people that surround me, the norms governing behavior—different. I can, in some ways, leave being a truck driver at the door when I come home; on the other hand, the manual labor marks me in a way being an academic does not. As a graduate student, my work followed me every day, in the form of emails from students and my department and in the pressures to read, write, and question. My role as a student left no visible sign on my body (at least not to middle-class viewers), although it did wear it down from fatigue in a similar way that driving does. This is my story of going back and forth between these two selves. Although I am no longer a graduate student—I am now a PhD, una doctora, a writer—the distinction between two halves remains. This story is for those of us who cannot, or who choose not to, leave manual labor behind. For the children and partners of working people, whose family lives are marked by the work of parents and relatives, the firsts of generations who are navigating a sea uncharted and unknown by the people closest to them. Manual labor matters—and deserves a place in our everyday conversations—because it is a part of the lives of so many of the living, breathing humans sitting next to us or in front of us in the classroom, or in the line behind us at the grocery store, or cleaning our offices, or outside replacing our sidewalks. But maybe you know this already, because it’s a part of you, and you’re searching for others who know it too. Physical labor matters because people matter, because nothing we benefit from each day has been untouched by someone’s laboring hands.
What I also recognize, from this place in between that I inhabit, are the privileges I am afforded. I am an Anglo/white person living in Lincoln, Nebraska. I am a recently graduated PhD who held a fully funded graduate position at a research university. I have no debt. I am a native speaker of English, which in this country also grants me power. I identify as female: here my power or lack of it depends on the context. Regardless, I have a knapsack full of privileges free for the using. There are times, many times, when I encounter conflict, when my identity is challenged, when I am othered, when I am made to feel as though my voice, my body, my heart—none of it matters. I am othered because of my professions, my gender, my way of speaking. Yet I hold enough privilege to walk away from much of this if I choose, to hide from it maybe, which is a privilege not afforded to everyone.
I can’t answer the question of why I came to truck driving, but this was the driving force (pun not intended, but come on) behind the ways in which I orient myself here, now. My role as a driver has led me to people with economic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds different from mine, and these working roles have blended into personal relationships. Because of these, I now tread different waters than I ever imagined I would. My entry point into language was through work, my real entry point into my university studies was through work, and my consciousness about these things arose through the intersections of graduate school and work. I do not claim to speak for anyone other than myself, and at times, I am not even sure of what I want to say. I am thinking about my own place in the journey, constantly, about the journeys of others, and about what spaces we share and what spaces we will never be able to share.
*
When I was much younger and still in the beginnings of my trucking life, I had a job where my customers were farmers in the beef and dairy industries. I drove this heavy-ass semi-truck (almost 95,000 pounds) chock full of cattle food to feedlots and dairies across Nebraska and Kansas. Sir was a common word in my vocabulary, and I’d reflexively invoke it often whenever I talked to the men who owned and ran these places.
“It’s not ‘sir,’ don’t bother with that,” they’d say to me. “I work for a living.”
“Well, that’s all the more reason for me to call you that,” I’d reply, believing that sir was a term of respect. I never used the word for someone I disliked unless it was sarcastic.
It took me years to figure out that to these farmers sir meant something different than what I intended. Of course they worked for a living, most of us do, but they considered the work they did real work, and the work others did, the sirs of the world, something quite different. A sir, as best I could hypothesize, was a suit-and-tie guy who sat behind a desk all day, never getting his hands dirty. A farmer, as I think these customers saw it, had “dirty hands, clean money.” A sir had just the opposite.
The way work is defined depends mightily on who is doing the defining, and those definitions are laden with cultural—and often deeply personal—significance to those that use them. So defining work, like so many other things, isn’t straightforward: understanding what it is and what it means is like driving through a commercial construction site, absolutely rife with hazards: rebar poking out of the ground, ready to gouge a tire. People darting around the truck, careless and not watching. Cranes working overhead. Someone hitting a natural gas line. Holes in the ground, really big holes. Things falling. Obstacles everywhere. No matter how careful you are, safety is never guaranteed.
When I talk about work and labor here, I am thinking about specific things, although I know others use these terms differently. I use work here in the way Mike Rose defines it: “purposeful, remunerated effort that provides goods or services for another.” When the word labor slips into my vocabulary, I mean the same thing.
And when I talk about work and labor, I refer to what would, in most instances in English, be thought of as blue-collar jobs (another troubling term, because of its gendered nature): construction and truck driving, shift work, cleaning, waiting tables, and so on. I am thinking of work associated with physicality and/or with working-class status (this isn’t without problem, either, since working class also lacks a uniform definition).
I do this while acknowledging there are many other types of labor and work, both paid and unpaid, some of which overlap these professions: for example, there is the common term intellectual labor, which I believe is part and parcel of blue-collar work, although intellectual labor is often used, for example, to describe the work of an academic. And then there is emotional and spiritual labor, labor as in the act of giving birth, and so on. Because it would be, well, laborious to include such specificity each time I need to say labor or work, my use here assumes association with job, career, and class status for simplicity’s sake, not to ignore the many other types of labor that exist.
*
I saw my father working when I was a child, coming home in his Air Force fatigues, and later, after Air Force retirement, remember him being gone overnight driving that school bus, shuffling buses between cities. I saw my mother attend night school for her bachelor’s degree; my brother and I attended class with her once or twice—what else to do with us? I can still see the classroom, us sitting near the back, feel the specialness of being permitted to be there. Later, in her first years as a fifth-grade teacher, my hand cramping from so much time folded into a pair of scissors, carefully cutting construction paper shapes—round caterpillar bodies, wavy scoops of ice cream—to be used by my mother’s students.
These memories are flashes, images, a single scene, and so I think that’s how it was in childhood, the work of my parents cropping up now and then in flashes, present of course but subtly. Work was not in our faces, not rolled out as destiny.
But neither was college. For children whose parents don’t go to college, or who fight their way through a nontraditional route (whose tradition is it, anyway?), college is as much a mystery as anything else. I entered both college and work from a sort of limbo space and had to fake it ’til I made it once I got there. My parents had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what I was doing. Which is how I found mentors, or how they found me.
In trucking there was Dennis, almost old enough to be my grandfather, 5ʹ4ʺ and a fighter, no one imagining we’d bond. I followed him down so many highways in one of my first trucking jobs, especially in winter, learning from him how fast was just right, what the truck could handle, how not to be afraid.
Before Dennis there was Kat, my trainer at my very first trucking job, kind, generous, smart and strong and beyond patient, giving me every opportunity that she could to practice backing up a trailer, not angry when I missed a turn during a foggy night in Missouri and drove over an hour past the correct highway, buying me a meal when I’d help her unload our dollar-store freight. Dr. J and Dr. Darcy during my early English days, trying to get my bachelor’s. They let me be me and shaped the thinker I became.
But.
Everyone was in their separate spheres. No one crossed over. Dennis and Kat and my truckers there, my professors here.
And in those separate worlds, I’m never quite right, never the expert, always at least a little bit on the outside. I speak as a woman in a truck and am ignored, a man voices the same idea and is heralded as an experienced pro. I speak as a truck driver in the classroom and am a novelty, a peer voices the same idea but cites that famous French critic and is praised as a keen reader. Linda Hogan, a writer and member of the Chickasaw Nation, writes about the difficult and lonely process of “education”:
When I say that I spent my life in self-education, I want people to know that part of this was done even when I went to college. . . . There were no classes that made any connection to my own life experience or perception of the world. The closest I came to learning what I needed was in a course on labor literature, and the lesson there was in knowing that there were writers who lived similar lives to ours.
This is one of the ways that higher education perpetuates racism and classism. By ignoring our lives and work, by creating standards for only their work.
Hogan, I, and countless others find ourselves forced to justify our way of doing the work. Speaking with our unfiltered voices is labeled a radical action, and Hogan asks, “Why is it that telling our lives is a subversive thing to do?” Why do people demand corroboration before they buy the story, whether it’s in the form of a coworker’s agreement or the words of the ubiquitously cited theorists? So I am not using my own experience to support the theory, no. My experience is the theory. It is supported by what others have connected, contextualized, made clearer. But it also IS.
Let’s be subversive. Be fucking radical.
Let’s fight to be.
Kidding. I’ll cut the jokes.
For each of these identities, the labor required of the mind is different, and the labor required of the body is different. The physical environment is different, the people that surround me, the norms governing behavior—different. I can, in some ways, leave being a truck driver at the door when I come home; on the other hand, the manual labor marks me in a way being an academic does not. As a graduate student, my work followed me every day, in the form of emails from students and my department and in the pressures to read, write, and question. My role as a student left no visible sign on my body (at least not to middle-class viewers), although it did wear it down from fatigue in a similar way that driving does. This is my story of going back and forth between these two selves. Although I am no longer a graduate student—I am now a PhD, una doctora, a writer—the distinction between two halves remains. This story is for those of us who cannot, or who choose not to, leave manual labor behind. For the children and partners of working people, whose family lives are marked by the work of parents and relatives, the firsts of generations who are navigating a sea uncharted and unknown by the people closest to them. Manual labor matters—and deserves a place in our everyday conversations—because it is a part of the lives of so many of the living, breathing humans sitting next to us or in front of us in the classroom, or in the line behind us at the grocery store, or cleaning our offices, or outside replacing our sidewalks. But maybe you know this already, because it’s a part of you, and you’re searching for others who know it too. Physical labor matters because people matter, because nothing we benefit from each day has been untouched by someone’s laboring hands.
What I also recognize, from this place in between that I inhabit, are the privileges I am afforded. I am an Anglo/white person living in Lincoln, Nebraska. I am a recently graduated PhD who held a fully funded graduate position at a research university. I have no debt. I am a native speaker of English, which in this country also grants me power. I identify as female: here my power or lack of it depends on the context. Regardless, I have a knapsack full of privileges free for the using. There are times, many times, when I encounter conflict, when my identity is challenged, when I am othered, when I am made to feel as though my voice, my body, my heart—none of it matters. I am othered because of my professions, my gender, my way of speaking. Yet I hold enough privilege to walk away from much of this if I choose, to hide from it maybe, which is a privilege not afforded to everyone.
I can’t answer the question of why I came to truck driving, but this was the driving force (pun not intended, but come on) behind the ways in which I orient myself here, now. My role as a driver has led me to people with economic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds different from mine, and these working roles have blended into personal relationships. Because of these, I now tread different waters than I ever imagined I would. My entry point into language was through work, my real entry point into my university studies was through work, and my consciousness about these things arose through the intersections of graduate school and work. I do not claim to speak for anyone other than myself, and at times, I am not even sure of what I want to say. I am thinking about my own place in the journey, constantly, about the journeys of others, and about what spaces we share and what spaces we will never be able to share.
*
When I was much younger and still in the beginnings of my trucking life, I had a job where my customers were farmers in the beef and dairy industries. I drove this heavy-ass semi-truck (almost 95,000 pounds) chock full of cattle food to feedlots and dairies across Nebraska and Kansas. Sir was a common word in my vocabulary, and I’d reflexively invoke it often whenever I talked to the men who owned and ran these places.
“It’s not ‘sir,’ don’t bother with that,” they’d say to me. “I work for a living.”
“Well, that’s all the more reason for me to call you that,” I’d reply, believing that sir was a term of respect. I never used the word for someone I disliked unless it was sarcastic.
It took me years to figure out that to these farmers sir meant something different than what I intended. Of course they worked for a living, most of us do, but they considered the work they did real work, and the work others did, the sirs of the world, something quite different. A sir, as best I could hypothesize, was a suit-and-tie guy who sat behind a desk all day, never getting his hands dirty. A farmer, as I think these customers saw it, had “dirty hands, clean money.” A sir had just the opposite.
The way work is defined depends mightily on who is doing the defining, and those definitions are laden with cultural—and often deeply personal—significance to those that use them. So defining work, like so many other things, isn’t straightforward: understanding what it is and what it means is like driving through a commercial construction site, absolutely rife with hazards: rebar poking out of the ground, ready to gouge a tire. People darting around the truck, careless and not watching. Cranes working overhead. Someone hitting a natural gas line. Holes in the ground, really big holes. Things falling. Obstacles everywhere. No matter how careful you are, safety is never guaranteed.
When I talk about work and labor here, I am thinking about specific things, although I know others use these terms differently. I use work here in the way Mike Rose defines it: “purposeful, remunerated effort that provides goods or services for another.” When the word labor slips into my vocabulary, I mean the same thing.
And when I talk about work and labor, I refer to what would, in most instances in English, be thought of as blue-collar jobs (another troubling term, because of its gendered nature): construction and truck driving, shift work, cleaning, waiting tables, and so on. I am thinking of work associated with physicality and/or with working-class status (this isn’t without problem, either, since working class also lacks a uniform definition).
I do this while acknowledging there are many other types of labor and work, both paid and unpaid, some of which overlap these professions: for example, there is the common term intellectual labor, which I believe is part and parcel of blue-collar work, although intellectual labor is often used, for example, to describe the work of an academic. And then there is emotional and spiritual labor, labor as in the act of giving birth, and so on. Because it would be, well, laborious to include such specificity each time I need to say labor or work, my use here assumes association with job, career, and class status for simplicity’s sake, not to ignore the many other types of labor that exist.
*
I saw my father working when I was a child, coming home in his Air Force fatigues, and later, after Air Force retirement, remember him being gone overnight driving that school bus, shuffling buses between cities. I saw my mother attend night school for her bachelor’s degree; my brother and I attended class with her once or twice—what else to do with us? I can still see the classroom, us sitting near the back, feel the specialness of being permitted to be there. Later, in her first years as a fifth-grade teacher, my hand cramping from so much time folded into a pair of scissors, carefully cutting construction paper shapes—round caterpillar bodies, wavy scoops of ice cream—to be used by my mother’s students.
These memories are flashes, images, a single scene, and so I think that’s how it was in childhood, the work of my parents cropping up now and then in flashes, present of course but subtly. Work was not in our faces, not rolled out as destiny.
But neither was college. For children whose parents don’t go to college, or who fight their way through a nontraditional route (whose tradition is it, anyway?), college is as much a mystery as anything else. I entered both college and work from a sort of limbo space and had to fake it ’til I made it once I got there. My parents had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what I was doing. Which is how I found mentors, or how they found me.
In trucking there was Dennis, almost old enough to be my grandfather, 5ʹ4ʺ and a fighter, no one imagining we’d bond. I followed him down so many highways in one of my first trucking jobs, especially in winter, learning from him how fast was just right, what the truck could handle, how not to be afraid.
Before Dennis there was Kat, my trainer at my very first trucking job, kind, generous, smart and strong and beyond patient, giving me every opportunity that she could to practice backing up a trailer, not angry when I missed a turn during a foggy night in Missouri and drove over an hour past the correct highway, buying me a meal when I’d help her unload our dollar-store freight. Dr. J and Dr. Darcy during my early English days, trying to get my bachelor’s. They let me be me and shaped the thinker I became.
But.
Everyone was in their separate spheres. No one crossed over. Dennis and Kat and my truckers there, my professors here.
And in those separate worlds, I’m never quite right, never the expert, always at least a little bit on the outside. I speak as a woman in a truck and am ignored, a man voices the same idea and is heralded as an experienced pro. I speak as a truck driver in the classroom and am a novelty, a peer voices the same idea but cites that famous French critic and is praised as a keen reader. Linda Hogan, a writer and member of the Chickasaw Nation, writes about the difficult and lonely process of “education”:
When I say that I spent my life in self-education, I want people to know that part of this was done even when I went to college. . . . There were no classes that made any connection to my own life experience or perception of the world. The closest I came to learning what I needed was in a course on labor literature, and the lesson there was in knowing that there were writers who lived similar lives to ours.
This is one of the ways that higher education perpetuates racism and classism. By ignoring our lives and work, by creating standards for only their work.
Hogan, I, and countless others find ourselves forced to justify our way of doing the work. Speaking with our unfiltered voices is labeled a radical action, and Hogan asks, “Why is it that telling our lives is a subversive thing to do?” Why do people demand corroboration before they buy the story, whether it’s in the form of a coworker’s agreement or the words of the ubiquitously cited theorists? So I am not using my own experience to support the theory, no. My experience is the theory. It is supported by what others have connected, contextualized, made clearer. But it also IS.
Let’s be subversive. Be fucking radical.
Let’s fight to be.
Cuprins
Preface
Dawning
Some Crazy Tom Potter Shit
Essays
Navigating
Definitions
Cite Your Work
A Truck Driver Is Born
Feedback
Rules and Regs
Sharing
My Pretty Eyes
Truth and Beauty
Participation
And Yet Another Instance Where a Word Wields Its Power
Please
Legal Protection
I Was Talking to Bob and Said:
Assets
Conviviality
¿Pero dónde están los hispanos?
Refrain
Schooled
Not a Chick
Partnership
Craft
What We Might Do
Parts of Speech
Uniform
Mouse
Lacking
Talking Back
Blindside
Refuge
Epilogue
Why I Write
Acknowledgments
Notes
Further Reading
Dawning
Some Crazy Tom Potter Shit
Essays
Navigating
Definitions
Cite Your Work
A Truck Driver Is Born
Feedback
Rules and Regs
Sharing
My Pretty Eyes
Truth and Beauty
Participation
And Yet Another Instance Where a Word Wields Its Power
Please
Legal Protection
I Was Talking to Bob and Said:
Assets
Conviviality
¿Pero dónde están los hispanos?
Refrain
Schooled
Not a Chick
Partnership
Craft
What We Might Do
Parts of Speech
Uniform
Mouse
Lacking
Talking Back
Blindside
Refuge
Epilogue
Why I Write
Acknowledgments
Notes
Further Reading
Descriere
A memoir about gender, class, and labor from someone who was twice an odd one out: as a woman truck driver, and as a working-class laborer in academia.