New Federal Writers Project belongs in infrastructure bill

David Kipen is a book world spark plug.

Bay Area residents may remember him as The Chronicle’s book editor and critic from 1998 to 2005. From there, he went to the National Endowment for the Arts and was behind the Big Read, an initiative to promote reading via One City One Book programs all over the country. He returned to his native Los Angeles to found Libros Schmibros, a multicultural lending library in Boyle Heights, and to teach writing at UCLA.

His latest brainchild came while lying in bed one morning ruminating about the devastation wrought by COVID, the difficulty his students would have finding internships and jobs, the plight of laid-off newspaper workers and the increasing polarization of the country.

Why not resurrect the Federal Writers Project, part of the New Deal’s Works Project Administration in the 1930s that provided work for writers, historians, librarians, editors and teachers and employed more than 6,000 people nationwide?

Only 10% of the FWP was set aside for professional writers, Kipen said. The rest went to people with little or no writing experience who signed “pauper’s oaths,” swearing they were destitute. Among those who received FWP funding were writers John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Kenneth Rexroth, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.

Kipen quickly got to work. “I called everyone I knew in the book world,” he said. He also pitched a story on the idea to the Los Angeles Times. It was published in May 2020, and the proposal soon caught fire, garnering more coverage in the New York Times and the Nation, and enthusiasm from book lovers across the country.

The result is House Resolution 3054, the 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project Act, sponsored by Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County). It calls for $60 million in funding from the massive infrastructure bill called the American Jobs Plan to go to nonprofits, libraries, news outlets and communications unions to hire writers. All work produced under the reborn FWP would be housed in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

One of the best things to come out of the original Writers Project, says Kipen, was a series of collaboratively written, detailed and richly evocative guides, recounting the stories and histories of many of the country’s major cities. “San Francisco in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City by the Bay,” reissued in 2011 by UC Press with an introduction by none other than Kipen, relates the city’s Depression-era history, describing its culture, its best-known landmarks and historic buildings, with intimate portraits of the city’s distinct neighborhoods.

“This is an opportunity to once again tell the story of how the country suffered and how we’re recovering. … It can be a mirror held up to America,” says Kipen. “It’s a listening project. It may help Americans listen to each other and begin to reintroduce the country to itself.”

Here’s author Rebecca Solnit, who has produced reimagined atlases of three U.S. cities, including San Francisco, speaking in support of HR3054: “The idea of sending waves of writers out to connect to these stories and maybe preserve them, as the oral historians of the Federal Writers Project did, is gorgeous and would save innumerable stories from vanishing for good, the stories of who we really are.”

I wholeheartedly endorse Kipen’s call to action, urging all who care about our country’s writers and our literary life to contact our local congressional representatives and urge their support for the bill. (Bay Area Reps. Mark DeSaulnier, DConcord, and Jared Huffman, DSan Rafael, have already signed on.)

“The funds deserve a place in the infrastructure project,” Kipen says.

I’ve never before quoted President Biden in my book column, but his remarks following introduction of the broadly defined infrastructure bill are pertinent. “The idea of infrastructure has always evolved to meet the aspirations of the American people and their needs. … And it’s evolving again today,” Biden said, arguing that the country needs to view infrastructure “through its effect on the lives of working people in America.”

Biden hasn’t yet explicitly endorsed HR3054, but I think I know just the man to convince him.

“This is an opportunity to once again tell the story of how the country suffered and how we’re recovering.” David Kipen