CHAVISA WOODS
This Year End, Give the Gift of
TIME
TO WRITE
a New Class Narrative
All donations are fully tax-deductible. This fundraising campaign supports the completion of Woods’s forthcoming nonfiction book, a work that challenges dominant cultural narratives about class mobility and individual responsibility in the United States. Written in direct opposition to the theology laid out in Vice President J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Woods’s book offers a literary account of life and culture shaped by structural inequality. Funding will allow Woods to dedicate sustained time to finishing, revising, and preparing the manuscript for publication, ensuring that this project reaches readers with the depth, rigor, and care it demands.
A Gathering of the Tribes, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization, proudly serves as the fiscal sponsor for Chavisa Woods. Tax-deductible donations to support her work may be made through our organization
Message From the Author
I hope you will consider making a tax-deductible donation to allow me time to complete my next book.
Why I’m Asking for Support
Many of you have supported my work for years. This project emerges from the evolution of my writing which my patrons and readers have made possible.
Over the last two years, I have undergone three major surgeries, including a major spine surgery. I have also continued to work full-time through most of it, aside from periods of medical leave, while trying to complete my next book. Like many writers who do not come from wealth, I have never had the luxury of uninterrupted creative time. I have written after work, in the margins of exhaustion, between contracts, during recovery periods, and around physical pain.
But, after years of chronic pain and nearly two years of recovery from multiple surgeries, I am finally beginning to feel better. This campaign will allow me to take advantage of the time that recovery has finally made possible, to complete a book that is both timely and urgent.
I am working on a full-length work of nonfiction that will serve as an antithesis to the worldview advanced in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the grotesque theology it has helped popularize.
This campaign also addresses the irony that writing about first-hand experiences of poverty often requires an economic stability that a background in poverty makes nearly impossible. If time is money, then writing is a class privilege.
If you have benefited from my work and are able to support my book at this moment, I am asking you to do so now.
Why Time Matters
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that to write, a woman needs “a room of one’s own and five hundred a year.”
What Woolf was really naming was not luxury, but material conditions. She said that she would not have been able to write as she did if she had not received an inheritance that offered her time, privacy, and freedom from constant economic anxiety to focus soley on writing.
I have never had that time.
I was not born into wealth. I have supported myself through nonprofit management, grant writing, teaching, freelance labor, and cultural work—often holding multiple jobs at once, my entire adult life. Writing has always happened around work, never instead of it. Even at writing residencies, I had to pay my bills while away. And for the past two years, dealing with constant health issues, it has been even harder to make time to write.
I truly believe that if given the chance to focus entirely on writing, this book can make a huge impact and not only advance my career but also influence the larger cultural narrative around class in America, and the recent lack of basic human compassion that has come to define much of our public life.
About the Book
The book I am completing is a direct counter-narrative to Hillbilly Elegy.
Where that book offers a reductive explanation for poverty as the failure of individuals to lift themselves up, my work refuses the myth that hardship is a moral failure or that escape from the class one is born into in America is a simple act of will.This book, which illustrates the lives of people who are rarely granted depth, has been fully outlined and is halfway complete. What it needs now is time.
Fully Tax Deductible
Because this project has a fiscal sponsor (A Gathering of the Tribes), all contributions are fully tax-deductible, and this campaign and its output exists under the oversight of a nonprofit board.
If you are trying to decide where to direct your tax-deductible year-end giving, I respectfully ask that you consider funding the creation of my next book.All donors will receive information regarding tax deductions in the thank-you email after donating.
Gratitude & Accountability
Everyone who supports this project becomes part of the book’s material history. All patrons will be acknowledged in the final print publication (unless anonymity is requested). This book will exist because you believed it should.
Make it stand out
Chavisa Woods is an award-winning literary author whose work examines class, gender, sexuality, and survival in contemporary America. She is the author of multiple books, including 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism, Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country, The Albino Album, and Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind. Her writing has been widely published and reviewed in outlets such as The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Tin House, Electric Lit, and elsewhere, and her work has been presented at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Town Hall Seattle. Woods is a MacDowell Fellow and recipient of honors including the Shirley Jackson Award and the Kathy Acker Award in Writing. In addition to her writing, she has extensive experience as a lecturer, editor, workshop leader, and nonprofit arts organizer, and serves as Executive Director and Editor in Chief of A Gathering of the Tribes from 2019 to 2023.