Reproduced from TV411 in Print (issue #28).

MEET KATHI WELLINGTON DUKES: WRITING OUT THE RAGE

In the late 1970s, Kathi Wellington Dukes hated her minimum-wage job and feared going home to a heavy-drinking husband who beat her. One day Kathi heard the local steel mill was hiring. She immediately put in an application, determined to be the fourth generation and the first woman in her family to work in steel. The job offer came just in time -- by then, she was getting divorced and needed a bigger income to support her five-year-old son.

Today, Kathi looks back with a mixture of rage and pride on her 25 years as a laborer for Bethlehem Steel. It hasn't been easy, day after day, working amid dirt and danger, standing in what Kathi calls a "quagmire" of axle grease, lifting hundred-pound chunks of scrap metal onto a conveyor belt.

But that quagmire has proved a great source of memories and material for stories. In a creative-writing workshop organized by Kathi's union, the United Steel Workers of America, and taught by TV411's poet-in-residence Jimmy Baca, Kathi discovered a talent. She turned her toughest life experiences into emotion-packed stories that were published in The Heat: Steelworker Lives & Legends.

In class, Kathi learned two basic and important steps to good writing: put everything down on paper, uncensored, and then edit the work as many times as necessary to get it right. "I rewrite it, I soften it, I cut it, but I keep that inner rage that goes down on the paper first," Kathi explains. When she reads her work to audiences today, people wipe away the tears and give her standing ovations.

How does Kathi the steelworker feel about Kathi the writer? "Writing is...like life," she says. "If you bottle it all inside, keep it all to yourself, nobody's ever going to know how you feel about things. You just have to take that chance."

Read an excerpt from "The Card," in which Kathi writes about her grandfather and her father.