For Dr. Linda Pawlenty, an alumna of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s (UNO) English master’s program, driving a concrete mixer through postgraduate school was like straddling two worlds—one idealized and abstracted, the other material and tactile.
In her forthcoming work of creative nonfiction, Clutch: An Education at Work, Pawlenty recounts her experience moving between these two worlds, asking questions about the nature of power, identity, and what it means to belong.
Born into a military family in New York, Pawlenty moved around throughout her early childhood. She grew up in eastern Nebraska, in Papillion.
“My parents were in the Air Force,” she said, “and that brought us from New York to Nebraska, eventually.”
Feeling a sense of wanderlust after high school, Pawlenty enrolled in college in New York state.
“It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do,” she noted, “I went out of state, because I thought I needed to get away from Nebraska, but I figured out that, actually, I was pretty happy here.
“When I came back, I started working at an auto parts dealership.” she added. “Eventually, I decided that I should go back to school.”
Enrolling at UNO, Pawlenty initially had her sights set on a career in medicine. She credits Dr. Charles Johanningsmeier with helping her find her calling.
“It was while I was on [the premedical] track that Dr. Johanningsmeier suggested I might be a good fit for English,” she said.
Although she had always loved reading—particularly American authors like Jack London and Gloria Anzaldúa—the idea of English as a professional pursuit, “hadn’t occurred to me.”
It was while working towards her Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English that Pawlenty became interested in driving truck.
“Trucking was just something I was curious about,” the alumna said. “There’s something in me that just loves traveling, that loves moving about.
“I told Dr. Johanningsmeier that I wanted to spend one year trucking before going on to pursue a PhD.”
Degree in hand, Pawlenty immediately went to truck driving school in Omaha, attained certification, and started working as a long-haul driver.
“I started for an over-the-road trucking company, which led me to a local company—and I was there for three years.”
A few years later, she began taking night classes in pursuit of an advanced writing certificate, a move that forced her to leave trucking—temporarily—behind.
“I started taking night classes while working for an agricultural company, doing customer service for farmers, people who had feedlots in the area—a lot of the same people I had delivered to when I was driving truck,” she noted. “I started at UNO with the goal of attaining the [advanced writing] certificate, and then I just went on and got the master’s.”
Pawlenty attained her master’s in 2015. All of her teachers throughout her time as an undergraduate and a graduate at UNO, she said, had had a deep impact.
“I can’t think of anyone I had a class with who didn’t influence me,” she said. “All of those experiences were so good...I looked forward to going to class, and that’s because of the people who taught them.”
After the receipt of her master’s, Pawlenty became an educator at Metro Community College, teaching commercial truck driving and English courses, and then at UNO, teaching technical writing and “doing some writing in the criminal justice department.
“A lot of times, I would have the same students in both the English classes and the truck driving classes [at Metro],” she noted. “That was maybe the first really obvious way that I saw the two things—these two interests I’d developed—intertwining.”
In 2017, still committed to attaining her PhD, Pawlenty would go on to do postgraduate study at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Despite contending with COVID-19, being a teaching assistant, volunteering teaching English as a second language for Lincoln Literacy, and driving a concrete mixer throughout much of her PhD study, Pawlenty was able to graduate with her doctorate within five years.
“Probably four out of the five years I was at [post-]graduate school, I drove a concrete mixer full-time,” she noted.
Her 2022 PhD dissertation, “Perpetual Shifting: An Experiential Exploration of Labor and the Academy and Why Work Matters”—an “auto-ethnographical” examination of the way studies of labor and the experiences of working students are often “left out” of contemporary university courses—would become the foundation of Clutch.
“In the master’s, a creative nonfiction component really started to weave itself into my literary studies,” Pawlenty noted. “Later, when I went to get my PhD, I did a literary studies focus, but the way I sold it was, it had this creative nonfiction component. The research was part of my experience, and vice-versa.”
The dissertation, and the book it would later inform, were inspired by Pawlenty’s own experience as a working student.
“Just the experience of being a worker, being employed for somebody—perhaps especially in a manual labor context—gives you a different outlook on a lot of things,” the UNO alumna said. “The more that I worked, the more I read about work, and the more people I met in work, the more...I wanted to write about and study work.
“The dissertation was...a way for me to explore my work, all the questions surrounding that, and the conflict between academia and work. And that, in turn, became the basis for the book.”
Whether she was surrounded by career academics armed largely with “truck-driving references” or making allusions to Martin Eden with her construction coworkers, Pawlenty’s experience as a working student often made her feel like an “outsider”—someone with a “foot in both worlds,” but anchored in neither.
“I never really felt completely in either place,” she said, “but they were both important. I wouldn’t be who I was without both of them.
“That was a big part of [my motivation]. And it’s a thread that runs throughout Clutch.”
In most any context, Pawlenty said, when intersectional borders become too rigid—when people become this or that at exclusion of all else—“we lose out.”
The interrelationship between the grounded, work-a-day world and the often highly abstract and theoretical world of academia, said the UNO alumna, seems often to suffer from too nonporous a boundary. The barriers that keep laborers laboring and academics sequestered in halls of quiet abstraction thus threaten to do a disservice to both worlds. Academics become lost in swirls of abstractions divorced from reality, merely repeating and iterating on “other texts over time” and failing “to live life.” Laborers, swallowed by work and the ready-to-hand, become cut off from the rhetorical “toolbox” needed to express their own experiences or make a case for their own essential value.
At their best, theory and lived experience, she said, put a kind of pressure on one-another: “Without one, the other doesn’t develop.
“Your famous theorists—Foucault, Judith Butler—are super important; they help us understand,” said Pawlenty. “But stories—the stories of these working class students—are the theory...When you try to apply theory and go, ‘What does this really mean?’ Well, they are out here living it.”
Pawlenty’s book, Clutch: An Education at Work, is available starting September 4th from Mad Creek Books, an imprint of the Ohio State University Press. The work is part of the Machete series, which, according to the Ohio State University Press website, aims to showcase “fresh stories, innovative forms, and books that break new aesthetic ground in nonfiction,” and to provide “a platform for writers whose work intervenes in dangerous ways.”
“I would love for people to read this and take something from it,” Pawlenty concluded of the book. “The opportunity to write this, and the chance that it might help somebody, is exciting.”
In November 2024, after six years, driving a concrete mixer, Pawlenty decided “it was time” to make use of her PhD. She began working for an area nonprofit. But her love for operating heavy machinery soon called her back.
“The office environment didn’t work out,” she laughed. “It wasn’t for me.”
Currently, when she’s not writing, she works full-time driving a “truck and pup,” hauling material—like rock, sand, and gravel—to and from building sites.
