One of the common things we hear about poverty—especially in the United States—is that it’s a choice. Our culture is full of stories of people who started out poor and ended up fabulously wealthy, and we tell ourselves that all it takes to have a better life is hard work and dedication. Nevertheless, we also know that lots and lots of people who grew up poor end up living lives very like their parents. Hard work and dedication don’t seem to be the best way to end up wealthy—rather, it seems like the most surefire way to end up rich is to be born rich. We might ask ourselves why it’s so hard to get out of poverty.

In Ghostbread, Sonja Livingston isn’t trying to convince us of anything, as such, but she does show, through her story, what she thinks makes poverty so hard to escape. She tells us about the world she grew up in, and how that world shaped her assumptions, especially about what was possible for her. We also know from the back of the book that now, Sonja has a Master’s Degree, and is teaching at UCLA—so we also know that, to say it simply, she got out. For whatever reason, she found her way to a life that was very different from the one she grew up in, and one that she may well have believed was impossible for her.

In this Writing Project, we’ll look at both parts of that puzzle: why it’s so hard for Sonja and the people around her to escape from this life, and how Sonja managed to get out, against the odds.