Tiny’s voice lives up to her name, a soft purl that occasionally defies itself, exploding into hysterical laughter as her words carry her from thought to thought, unfolding her stories and the soul of her work. Her work could also be called her life: As someone who’s lived through weighty situations most would fold under, she’s been learning how to survive and help others survive since she was 11, when her mother Dee lost her job and Tiny became the backbone of her family unit.

Tiny, a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia, is the “co-mama” of POOR Magazine, a glossy lit mag with a twist: It is by and about poor people and their struggles. The other co-mama was Dee, her mother, who passed away last year. Working out of the Bay Area as an activist-artist-author-publisher, Tiny is wearing many hats these days.

Activist-artist-author-publisher Lisa Gray-Garcia, a.k.a. Tiny, with her son. At age 11, Tiny held her family together after her mother lost her job.

She also swears like a sailor, which puts me instantly at ease, remembering my own father’s liberal use of the f-word provided my mother wasn’t around. Some things need expletives; her stories practically mandate them. “In San Fran[cisco], 40 percent of the people in homeless shelters are 60-70 years old,” she says, before responding to her own data with a scream: “What the fuck are they doing in homeless shelters?”

“If you educate people on this shit, things would change, but people don’t think about it because they’ve been mindfucked.”

In her first book, Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America (City Lights, 2007), Tiny explores the potential causes of said fuckery while interweaving the tales of three generations of poor women: herself, her mother, and her grandmother. Whereas grandmother Helen Jo and mother Dee (nee Mary Jo) were both fostered in practically parentless situations with no family cohesion, Tiny grew up by her mother’s side, and they became a pair rarely separated. Tiny never stepped out on supporting her mother, even though it meant missing high school, a bittersweet reality for her. She writes about being 12 and hearing children playing after the last school bell:

“Each shrill, excited thread of their voices shattered the blank stillness with a momentary drop of life in a sea of empty air. Oh how I longed to be them for even a second, to have friends, to worry about my clothes, homework, boys.”

School or not, she’s still a scholar. Everyone who has lived through poverty and come out alive is a scholar, or an expert, according to Tiny. “What even is a scholar, and who defines that?” she wonders. “Usually people with a formal education from a formal institution of learning who have had very little if any direct experience with some of the issues that they’re actually studying.” Referring to people who live through diabolical circumstances in their everyday lives as scholars as opposed to just homeless or low-income people is a way to buck the language of oppression. “It’s a political statement — we have solutions but nobody listens to us.”

The “Don Quixote-style” scholarship in her book is a headlong tackling of North American cultural windmills — specifically what she sees as the myth of independence that’s been perpetrated on us. You know: Go to school, get a job, get a house, start a new family from scratch, or else. “All of these notions, like if you don’t leave the house you’re a bum! And who benefits from this shit but furniture companies and landlords?”

The causes of poverty run deeper than lack of money. For her, it’s the loss of indigenous family structures that are built to support, not alienate. She sees the need to teach poor people to use their knowledge to become scholars and speak their stories, as well as look at the outside world for context. “Poor people get caught up in our notions of what we deserve,” she says. “For instance, we don’t know that in Canada and most of Western Europe, they give people child care.”

Tiny’s trying to put together a new issue of POOR Magazine for 2008, but they’re still short 5 grand. Almost all of her income is going to keep the magazine and website, Poor News Network (a web clearinghouse for poverty-related news), alive.

“I’m so over it right now, I don’t think I can handle this crazy-ass life.” She might complain, but I can tell she’s going to keep going. When you’ve walked out of hell, you don’t stop walking.