Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark

“Ohio is a green world glazed”: An essay-review of the novels of Anesa Miller

Maybe each generation has its gaze.

If the Boomers looked outward and upward, Gen X-ers looked inward. Millennials examined the male gaze, the feminine gaze, the queer gaze. And, lately, Generation Z is perfecting the Gen Z stare. There are memes aplenty, but basically the Zoomer’s stare is an unblinking, powerfully defiant straight-in-the-eye gaze, less glare and more disaffected showdown. (I know it well—I have teens.) It’s a staring contest of disdain that flies in the face of the lowered-eyed, modest, “demure” vibe of 2024. In response to the Gen Z stare, the trad-fluencers—those pop culture paragons of all that is modest and retiring—would, indeed, demure. (Or pretend to.)

I’ve begun to consider the Gen Z stare as a kind of protest—particularly when employed by young women. I thought of this as I read the novels of Anesa Miller, an Ohio writer “exploring the lives of Midwestern white women in our polarized era,” according to her Instagram profile. Her second novel, I Never Do This (Sibylline Press, 2024) is set in modern-day small-town southern Ohio, and in rural Missouri. Here’s a taste of Miller’s description of the Ohio setting:

September in southern Ohio is a green world glazed in sun-honey wrapped in sweet air. Nothing had been touched by fall so far, but every color filled my eyes like something fresh from the day of creation. We were in flat country along that road. Deep-green trees lined the horizon, and the bean field across the way glowed ripe and tawny with yellow butterflies fitting over top. The sky cupped everything in its bottomless dome. A caravan of clouds drifted by real slow to the south, so blinding white I could hardly keep my eyes on their shifting shapes—

Rather than a coastal story that reads New York City gritty or Los Angeles sunny, Miller’s story feels decidedly Midwestern, the nuances of a place intent on establishing its personality, however contradictory—fiercely independent and forever loyal, traditional and broadminded, honest but (of course) nice. What’s freeing about writing from a, say, Ohio setting is that there isn’t a fixed archetype. After all, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, often lauded as the Ohio novel is barely more than 100 years old—and what’s a century when talking literature? 

What is Ohio literature? What is an Ohio novel? These are questions Miller has asked herself. Her own two novels begin to answer these questions.

Our first-person main character in I Never Do This, 27-year-old LaDene Faye Howell tells her story in a page-turner of a (nearly 200-page) novel written as a monologue delivered to the police who are holding her in custody. LaDene confesses the details of the crime spree she engaged in with her paroled cousin Bobbie, and at the same time she reveals the pivotal secret of her past. The dual mystery twists and turns as she unwinds it in the telling, but the pacing never stalls. Our narrator’s voice is a fierce and fiery one.

Setting the scene of her Ohio upbringing, LaDene describes her clashing ancestors, the Twist-Howells: the Revolutionary War-era Howell line, who made their early fortune by establishing the area’s first ferry crossing; meets the Twist line, who made their way in the world through “scale-tipping, tax-dodging, all kinds of scamming, gambling. That’s what they get up to,” she says. “And by all accounts, they’re not one bit ashamed of it.”

I’m reminded of that famous warring family, the Hatfield-McCoys, and of the joke map of Ohio that circulates on social media, which labels the state (going counterclockwise from the northwest): “corn, The South, West Virginia, and Hillbillies.”

While LaDene is no hillbilly, she was not savvy enough at just 15 years old to get out from under her father’s performative-religious thumb before she gets “in trouble,” as we might have called an unplanned teen pregnancy when we were growing up. Of her secret past, LaDene describes being swiftly sent by her parents to a home for girls in the Kansas City hinterlands to wait out her pregnancy with other girls like her, girls from religious families embarrassed by a daughter’s mistake. Upon arrival at the home, LaDene dons the modest uniform of drab top and calf-length denim skirt and learns the ground rules. Among many other constraints: “We were especially not allowed to chat idly with each other, speak without permission, talk back to elders, look anyone in the eye unless so instructed…” To meet someone’s eye would have been a sign of disrespect, she tells the reader.

The U.S. did not have Magdalene Laundries, brought to our literary attention by Claire Keegan’s bestselling novel Small Things Like These, in the way that Ireland did. Indeed, the Catholic Church in Ireland kept thousands of girls in work camp-like conditions through their pregnancies; while the Irish story retold by Keegan as fiction—a story set in 1985—feels archaic, it is not (unless you yourself are Gen Z.) Likewise, reading Miller’s novel, it would be easy to dismiss such a tale as not of our time or place—culturally irrelevant. Surely this is someone else’s Midwest! But it is not, and you know what they say about history. What’s more, if the “trad” movement that has flooded my Instagram feed and my Catholic church pew of late has taught me anything, it’s that history repeats itself if we’re not careful. And everything old—whether better or worse—can be made new again. 

Just take “demure.” Rather than being relegated to times gone by, demure had its own social media moment only a year or two in our rear view. What started as a joke meme took off, and young women were encouraged by influencers to be modest, reserved, mindful. The religious trad wife set took the demure trend to heart, adding the vibe to their already-restrictive aesthetic, and bowing even lower to the male gaze—whether from husbands, fathers, or religious. Heaven forbid (quite literally) we meet his eye.

Miller’s women characters are products of their time, place, and upbringing and are expertly—and lovingly—drawn. While these young women don’t overthrow the systems of power, neither do they bow to them for long. They are forever changed by the patriarchal society that would keep them down, yet they do surface. They also remain loyal to their places and people, however flawed. In this, the novels’ narratives feel true-to-life—and very, well, Midwestern.

Miller’s debut novel, Our Orbit (Sibylline Digital First, 2024) is a multi-voiced novel that shines a light on a culture of guns, God, and tax evasion in Appalachian Ohio. The plot explodes out of the gate with the jailing of a father that sends nine-year-old Miriam Winslow to live with a foster family. Raised in a strictly religious home—one that abided by an evangelical purity code that demands that sinners must repent in dramatic acts of remorse—Miriam struggles to adapt to a more secular, mainstream culture. At the same time, her teenage sister Rachelle struggles to define for herself what womanhood will mean. All the while, their antagonist brother, teenaged Josh, aims to bring both sisters back into his destructive fold.

He is at once a mouthpiece for his jailed father and for the father in Heaven he purports to follow. He is a potent symbol of patriarchy’s power to void young people of agency—women and men alike. In scripture-laden language, he expresses his destructive frustration at his failure in becoming the authoritarian his father was: 

Not a bird falls from the nest, Josh thought, unless my Father wills it … So there has to be a reason … The water was so high, why couldn’t it rise a little higher? One more heavy rain and the creek could flood the park, wash out the county roads, add its torrent to the Ohio River. It might not be so bad to see the world swept away with all its troubles.

Still, Miller refrains from naming good and evil in the characters she’s created. The propulsive story makes use of multiple perspectives that work to provide a multi-faceted view of lives straddling tradition and modernity, religion and the secular world, and the myriad ways we engage with others in love. (How vital to see young characters wrestling with love beyond the romantic!) In doing so, Miller creates an empathetic and memorable story that rings as true today as it might have a hundred years ago. 

There are no simple plotlines and no easy answers—nothing that can be boiled down into a social media soundbite. There is searching. Late in Our Orbit, Rachelle muses on her emotions as she stands at the cusp of womanhood, what was “supposed to be the most important and mysterious event of a girl’s existence”: romantic love and sex. But perhaps what’s more important than the character’s rumination is that she allows herself the time and space for it: “The great thing about art class is that dreaming is permitted,” she thinks to herself, “… her eyes gazed out the window, her thoughts somewhere else.”

Through well-told, dynamic stories of family, tradition, faith—and self-love that flourishes outside scripture or strictures—Miller provides a window onto hope. All we need to do is gaze through it. 

By Rebecca Moon Ruark

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The Essay as an Act of Love: My Conversation with Author Eric LeMay

Eric LeMay’s The First 649 Days: Essays and Other Acts of Love has been called “a work of breathtaking honesty and heart,” “profoundly human,” and “a largehearted exploration of love’s capacities as well as an experiment in documenting the now via forms as various as a cancer diary, children’s book, birth story, field guide, afterworld address, medical erasures, first words journal, pandemic triptych, birdseed performance piece, and worry list, among others.”

I wrote about this collection, LeMay’s fifth book, for Pittsburgh Review of Books.

Eric LeMay is a multimedia artist and writer currently in remission from cancer. He is on the  faculty at Ohio University, where he directs the creative writing program. He is also a host on the New Books Network. He is the author of five books, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, the Best Food Writing series, and other venues.

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Eric about his latest collection, about the essay form, about writing from Ohio ground, and more. Read on, and watch him flip the script on me, ask me—the interviewer—probing questions, and even give me an assignment, just like the most delightful professor (which I’ll bet he is). I’m so happy to share some of our conversation with you here!

Rebecca: Eric, I loved that you call an essay an act of love. I’ve been thinking about that a lot because, lately, though I was trained as a fiction writer, when I’m writing about heart-rending stuff—love, my children, my faith—it comes out in an essay. Why is the searching essay form so loving of ourselves, when we’re writing about ourselves, or so loving of our children or others when we’re writing about them?

Eric: You have me wanting to start with a question, which is: You’re working on a novel. Why doesn’t that energy move towards fiction for you? What is it about the essay that suddenly says, this material, this emotion, or this connection with my children or my faith has to come out in the essay form?

R: I don’t know.

E: I need to know.

R: Ha, I think it’s something about the searching aspect, that I feel like there’s no time for in fiction. In fiction, things have to be moving, and of course that goes for any piece of writing that you want someone to read. But I do wonder if it’s that allowance for the searching and the asking back and forth, like we’re doing right now, which I think the essay does so well. Or, certain poetry does so well, too. I’m obsessed with Ross Gay and I love his poems that feel searching, where he asks a question or says, you know what I mean? Or, he’ll give us two metaphors instead of just landing on the one. It’s like a give and take. What are your thoughts?

E: The first place I jump to is the standard definition of the essay that I offer in the book. The word means “an attempt” or “a trial.” So, what you’re talking about in terms of searching—that’s built into the essay. You’re like: I’m not quite sure what I want to say, but I know it’s burning within me to be said. And these two things coming together—where do you go to do that? I think the essays says: This is the place where you can go.

I’m also a scholar of English literature, where the essay evolves from. For me there’s a great comfort in the fact that failure was built into the origin of the essay. It wasn’t meant to be perfect. In fact, some of the early essayists felt that if it was too good, it wasn’t an essay. It was something else, a meditation or a reflection or a history. But an essay: it’s messy, it doesn’t quite know what it’s doing. And I think for me that’s very inviting. Especially with this book, I was writing about emotions and situations, and I didn’t know how it was going to turn out. But I knew that it was at the core of who I was, and so the essay becomes this place where you can bring all that. You can say to the essay: I don’t know what I want to say, and I don’t know how I want to say it, and I don’t even know if I can say it successfully. And the essay says: Well, okay. Whereas a sonnet would say: Hold on. And, as you know, fiction would say: Wait, how does this move into character or plot, those conventions are already at work on you. Whereas the essay says: Make a mess. That’s in the design. The essay lets you bring that raw material, and then sometimes it becomes beautiful. 

R: I love that. So, essays take lots of different forms, and your collection is like a funhouse of forms. Can you talk briefly about how a form comes about for you, whether you start with subject matter freewriting and a form emerges. Or, do you ever think, today, I’m going to tackle the braided essay.

E: For me the whole question of form is, what is the form that will allow me to capture what I want to capture, say what I want to say, or miss what I want to miss? Form becomes a search. It’s not so much ornamental as essential.

So, the form is dictated by the material or the content, and the content is dictated by the form, and the two are in this dance—which is a better metaphor for you, right?—and the question becomes, how does the form allow you to say what’s essential? 

Eric LeMay

To take one example from the book, I have a really short piece called “1-13-21.” The way that the form works: there are three columns, and the one is a list of every Covid death that was published for January, 2021. It’s the chart all of us saw, the body count for that day, and it’s completely dehumanizing. But every one of those people who died was a life and had a story. The central text is the story of that day, what happened. So, now this form is saying, here’s the objective statistical information and here’s one individual story, and it turns out that that story is about the fact that my father could have ended up being one of those statistics, because he had gone into the ER during the pandemic with symptoms that looked very grave. And then there is a third column that is a reflection on those first two. So, it allows for more of the meditative voice to come in and ask, what does this all mean? 

And there’s different weights, so the central column is a little bit darker, so it stands out, but it’s haunted by these two shadow pieces. That for me was a form that allowed for the complexity of experiencing that moment both when it was happening and after the fact. Whereas, if it was just one of those things—a list of deaths—it wouldn’t capture what it means to be human. Or, if it was just this moment, it wouldn’t capture the staggering national context of what was happening. And if it was just this moment in two forms it wouldn’t bring in that power of reflection and meditation and realization that the essay can do so well. All that comes together and you get a form that is most commiserate with the moment, the emotion, and the experience.

The First 649 Days: Essays and Other Acts of Love

By Eric LeMay

The Kent State University Press

R: I remember in one of the later entries in the reflection, you say something about your family, like, maybe we loved each other too much, or not enough. You were reflecting on the silences your family held. And then the list of Covid deaths makes it feel universal. Like, imagine how many families were going through a similar experience on that very same day.

E: Yeah, exactly. And that day was just one day of one month among the years and years that we’d gone through. The list of Covid deaths is still being published right now, we’re just not paying attention to it. We’re looking at the list of deaths taking place in Iran and other places. And it’s the same statistical wallop—and heartbreak.

You looked just a little while ago at Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises—a 1548 copy. That’s a very interesting form because it’s this set of instructions that’s supposed to create this experience. What were you thinking about in terms of form as you looked at that book? What was that like?

R: I was so overwhelmed. First of all, because we were allowed to touch these books. I was holding it like it was the most fragile tiny baby. And I am so much a natural-born reflector, I guess, that I write to process. In the moment I was overwhelmed. They had five tables of these rare manuscripts. I wish I’d had the clarity of an essayist to say: Now let me look at this form. Instead, I thought to myself, I really need to go on a retreat and do the exercises. I haven’t done that yet! 

E: Here’s my request. This is going to bring in your talent as a reviewer and this new life chapter that you’re in, working with the Jesuits. If you do that retreat, I would love it if you wrote a review of the Spiritual Exercises. What would that look like? You take this contemporary genre of the review and bring that together with this centuries’ old practice. I think it would be really great.

R: That’s fun. I like that idea. You have good ideas.

So, last question, and I have a long preamble. A writer friend of mine, Anesa Miller, has written a couple novels steeped in Appalachian Ohio, and she wrote an article published at Belt Magazine asking if there is a distinctly Ohio literature? She laments the Ohio brand (which doesn’t sell very well) and provides statistics about how many novels are instead set in coastal locations. There has been for a long time a flight from Ohio by writers and other creatives to other parts of the country. Reading your essay, “Ohio Ground,” which touches on death, and which begs the question of where we’ll lay our mortal heads for eternity—you say “Ohio has always marked me.” You were born and raised in Ohio, left for a time but came back. Ohio may be where you end up, in the very end. What does it mean to you to be an Ohio writer?

The (oft-ignored but essential) back cover

E: There’s so much richness there. Is there such a thing as Ohio shame and we all fly from it? Then we all grow up a little bit and reconcile with it. Or is that universal? That essay, “Ohio Ground,” which is the first essay in the collection, was the last essay to be written. Part of it was my wonderful editor at Kent State University Press, Kat Saunders, said, it would be great if there could be a little more about place to frame the collection. So, after the book was basically completed, I did a lot of thinking about what it means to be a writer specifically of this place and of Ohio. For me, that was immediately complicated by the fact that Ohio isn’t that old and that it’s also a colonial construct, and there were Ohioans here for 20,000 years before the word Ohio would have even come about. How do I write myself into that history and that awareness and into geological time. The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountains I think in the world and so what does it mean to be in those mountains—and to also be here as a result of settler colonialism. My family comes from Scotland and France, and so I’m not indigenous to this place. 

How do I write myself into that history and that awareness and into geological time?

So the question came to me: How will I become a writer of this place? Well, if I’m buried here I will contribute to this place—literally, materially, biologically, in the way that when a person dies they become part of the soil and the energy of this place. I didn’t go into that kind of larger argument in the essay. But that was the thinking behind it, and I had known that I wanted to be buried there long before I sat down to write the essay. But that helped me clarify that that was the case.

But mostly I think there are experiences in the book—we talked about Covid, and a large part of the book is that I’ve been diagnosed with cancer multiple times, and so death is hovering around. For me, the place where I learn the most about what it means to die is out in the woods, and not curated woods but woods that are allowed to be themselves. There are trees that have fallen, moss growing on the trees, new things coming up, leaves disintegrating, mushrooms doing their work breaking things down. And you can really see this cyclical energy of the way life works and the way that life comes out of death. And that to me feels like the essence of place. Where are you going to be in that cycle? 

Behind the question you ask is: How are we rooted in place? What does it mean to be of these generations that can be uprooted and move to Maryland, in your case, or live in all these places—because eventually we’re going to be grounded in one. 

R: Yep, compost.

E: Right, how do we become good compost?

R: That’s a good question to think about. So, one last question for you, because I’m not there and you are. Do you have a favorite “weird Ohio” place?

E: Athens is weird, because it’s still got the legacy of the 60s. There’s this sort of funky Athens, but also Athens is supposedly surrounded by a pentagram of cemeteries, so it’s this prime place for witchcraft. But Ohio is funky and quirky in so many different ways. That’s part of the beauty of it. Which brings us back to, why would you want to write your way out of Ohio? Because within the landscape, it is so diverse: you have the Rust Belt, the agricultural landscape and the way it’s tied to global food cycles, and down to the river with all its history with the Underground Railroad, and then you move into the corner where I am—where there’s Appalachia and that’s another distinct culture, with the history of coal. And all of this comes together within these lines people drew on a map 200 years ago.

I think it’s as rich a place to write out of as any.

Many thanks to Eric LeMay and The Kent State University Press for the review copy of Eric’s fantastic collection, and for the insights and time!

Like this interview? Comment below or on my fb page. And please share with your friends and social network. Want more? Follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~ Rebecca

*Book images provided by The Kent State University Press

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“These Fragments I Have Shored”: No Saints, No Martyrs: A review

By Emily Harris

Refusing to bog itself down in any medical jargon or victimhood, Jason Irwin’s memoir “These Fragments I Have Shored” offers 265 pages of grief-writing that are as funny as they are unsparing. Irwin’s May 5, 2026, release is a memoir essay collection in accordance with his experience as caretaker for his mother over the last stretch of her life. With humor and humility, Irwin weaves two medical histories, placing his 1980s childhood—one spent in and out of surgeries, an ostomy bag fastened to his abdomen—in conversation with his mother’s cancer diagnosis nearly 40 years later. Not so much a chronology of illness but rather a family portrait of dysfunction, bodily decline and a mother-son relationship defined by mutual stubbornness. 

It is Irwin’s refusal to stall in the dense medical digressions that allows him to move quickly from his own birth to his youth, all the way through his marriage and the death of his mother. His brevity is buoyed by a voice that feels conversational and cynical, without being glib. His pacing reflects the experience of chronic illness and its whiplash of appointments, argument and gallows humor. 

Isolated and bullied for his surgical deformities, the sections of his childhood are vivid. But even in the passages of suffering, levity surfaces. In one tender anecdote, we learn of his childhood best friend Jojo, memorably described as “a phantom plucked from darkness.” The troublemaker with a good heart, the neighborhood delinquent who befriends and also protects Irwin, described as “threatening to kill anyone who made fun of my brace, the way I walked, or questioned why, at age twelve, my bicycle still had training wheels.” Inclusions such as Jojo render a whole image of instability—it can be destructive, but not without being formative. 

In one devastating episode, a classmate punches Irwin’s ostomy bag. But the humiliation comes through plainly, without attempts of swelling authenticity. Not interested in being a victim, nor dignifying his younger self, Irwin details the destructive bravado of high school. He admits to drinking as a performance of toughness among many moments of cruelty. He confesses to his own actions as a bully, acknowledging, “I knocked books out of upper classmates’ hands as they walked the halls and made fun of those students I knew were weaker than me, like Ezra, a refugee from Central America, and Tammy, who chased after pennies I threw at her.” It’s here where the memoir’s humility lies and Irwin does not paint himself any kinder than he was. He calls it what it was: insecurity, and his candor is refreshing. 

He approaches his deceased mother with the same clarity, depicting a woman with personhood rather than an archetype of maternal failure. Sixteen years after discovering a tumor in her nose, the cancer eventually spread to her bones, killing her just after her 75th birthday. We see her resist medical advice, refuse to stop smoking and grow petulant in doctors’ offices. In it, Irwin lets her read as irritable, even unpleasant, and we witness her unraveling along with him; from snide to exhausted, from a sick woman to a dying one. But, crucially, Irwin restores her to a fullness that posthumous portraits of motherhood tend to flatten. He shows us the mistakes she made, but also her agency: the late-in-life decision to enroll in college to study creative writing, her curt candor in the face of growing weakness. When her old friends try to reconcile with her upon her diagnosis, she dismisses it: “Fuck ‘em. If they can’t visit me while I’m healthy and alive, I don’t want them looking at my body when I’m dead, crying their fake tears.” She does not get reduced to the dying parent. Evidently, she was difficult. But Irwin makes sure we know she was a full person too.

Finally, Irwin gives us a self-referential depiction of being a creative. The fear of inadequacy and the suspicious longevity of art as a career is embedded in Irwin’s prose. The effect is intimate and locates Irwin among writers: “Sometimes I wondered if I was in over my head. Was I really a poet, I wondered.”  Irwin struggles; he drinks; he creates. He falters and he keeps writing. 

Irwin resists the manufactured epiphany. The memoir closes on a quiet image of his mother, still instructing him in how to endure. It is appropriate and true to the book’s spirit.

Emily Harris is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh studying History and Nonfiction Writing. She is Copy Chief at The Pitt News and has written criticism on contemporary memoir, narrative craft, and literary nonfiction.

These Fragments I Have Shored: A Memoir

By Jason Irwin

Apprentice House Press, pre-order $31.68 / $21.43

Like this post? Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network. 

Are you a Rust Belt writer interested in seeing if your own post, or author interview, or book review might be right for Rust Belt Girl? Hit me up through this site’s contact function.

Check out my categories above for more guest posts, book reviews, interviews, literary musings, and writing advice we can all use. Never miss a post when you follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, and playing God in our life stories:

Image of cover of Ann Patchett's novel Tom Lake

I am a writer who loves story—and homework. I’m sure I’m not alone there. So, before I sat down to read—or more specifically listen to Meryl Streep read—Ann Patchett’s most recent novel, Tom Lake, I watched Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town, which features quite a bit in Patchett’s story. I caught the excellent PBS “Great Performances” production from the 1980s featuring Spaulding Gray as the narrating stage manager, a young Penelope Ann Miller as Emily Webb, and Eric Stolz (swoon) as George Gibbs, her love interest.

Tom Lake, then, is a story about a story about telling stories—or, the act of dramatic portrayal. Lights, camera, characters. Confused yet?

Okay, the front story, or more immediate narrative of Tom Lake, follows 50-something Lara Nelson, a wife and mother living on a Northern Michigan cherry farm (another dramatic subtext) as she tells her three grown daughters, home during the 2020 pandemic, about her long-ago love affair with famous actor Peter Duke (think: a 1980s James Dean; I’m picturing 90210-era Luke Perry). 

Note that in this novel there is not a whole lot of Rust Belt significance to hang our hats on here at Rust Belt Girl. This setting is not Rust Belt Michigan, but the Michigan of the Upper Midwest’s Fruit Belt. But, hey, we contain—and read—multitudes, right? And, really, Patchett rarely disappoints.

Told as a dual narrative, Tom Lake’s backstory follows the love affair between then-young actors, Lara and Peter, at a summer stock theatre in Michigan where they perform both Our Town and Sam Shepard’s one-act Fool for Love, which I need to watch next. (A girl can only do so much homework.) Quick distillation, Our Town is a gentle (even genteel in that puritanical New England way) portrayal of young love; Fool for Love explores romantic love’s dark and destructive side.

Image: Harper Collins website

So, Patchett’s novel Tom Lake is a story about the light and dark of love. But it’s also—and this might be even more interesting and applicable to us writers—a story about storytelling. Who tells the story, when, how, why, and about whom and to whom. What’s included in the storytelling and, maybe even more importantly, what’s left out?

A dual narrative novel is difficult to pull off; I know because I’ve tried this twice. Invariably, a reader will like one narrative more than the other and grow impatient when their favorite narrative is offstage. For me, Tom Lake’s 1980s narrative, its backstory, is more compelling (because much more is happening) than the 2020 narrative, which is mostly telling, with less forward-moving action (think: literal cherry picking). Which left the modern timeline feeling more like a frame or bookends for the real story—a way to go back in time to the main action and a way to come out of it again. 

I won’t digress too long on why writers like Ann Patchett feel the need for modern-day frames for historical stories. (Yes, a novel set in the 1980s is considered a historical novel.) My guess is it’s because historical novels today are often relegated to the “genre” genre, as in not the literary fiction shelf. Okay, digression over.

My favorite (oft quoted) line from Our Town, which feels very instrumental to this discussion on storytelling (and okay there’s a little spoiler here): Toward the end of the play, the dead character Emily, who returns to her life for just one day, asks the stage manager if any living person ever realizes “life as they live it,” and he says no, but then adds an exception. “The saints and poets maybe—they do some.” 

There’s a lot of smart stuff happening in this novel of Patchett’s when it comes to the all-important telling of life’s story—our human way of re-living what we can’t grasp with our little human minds in the moment. We can’t all be—though maybe we can all aspire to be—saints and poets.

Patchett’s main character, Lara, who is narrating her story of young love, to her grown daughters, is basically the stage manager of her own story, choosing how and what to tell as she goes. At one point Lara equates the stage manager in Our Town with God, which brings up interesting ideas about faith (Patchett was raised Catholic and it often shows in her writing) as well as destiny/Providence in our lives, and agency in how we portray our life stories.

What about the part of our story we leave untold, for our hearts, alone? I thought about this a lot as I read Patchett’s novel. For the main character, Lara, it was a dark part, and (dare I say) foolish aspect of young romantic love she shields from her grown daughters. In not telling her whole story, the light and the dark, is she playing God? Are we all?

In my writerly opinion, the darkness in her story Lara keeps to herself isn’t earned by the character, un unusual flaw in character development on Patchett’s part. (Also very important to know when to wrap up a narrative.) But it is a stumble far outweighed by all the really fine storytelling she does in this novel. If this criticism feels vague, it’s because I don’t want to spoil the reveal. (Read it and tell me what you think!)

If there’s one author I’ve followed closely for some time, it’s Patchett. Her annotated version of Bel Canto—my favorite novel of hers—makes a great gift for the literary fiction (or opera) lover. Of her more recent novels, her 2019 release, The Dutch House, felt like a near perfect novel to me: quiet, to be sure, with none of the Le Carre-like action of Bel Canto, but an incredibly immersive read with characters who felt like my own brother and sister by the end of the book. Family ties Patchett writes about brilliantly, if she’s a little less adept at depicting romantic love and specifically sex.

Saints? I might know a few in the making. Poets? I’m honored to know a good handful. But for the rest of us, Patchett’s got me thinking about how lucky we writers are to get to craft our stories. How lucky we readers are to watch other writers and poets tell their stories just as they wish. We receive such instrumental gifts this way!

Have you read this novel? Have you seen the plays that informed this novel? What elements of craft and storytelling did they bring up for you?

And…what was your favorite bookish gift you gave or received so far this holiday season?

Check out my categories above for more guest posts, interviews, book reviews, literary musings, and writing advice we can all use. Never miss a post when you follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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Lit Fest Roundup 2025: who I met, what I wrote, how much pizza I consumed

This October I attended my eighth annual Fall Literary Festival hosted by Lit Youngstown. It was the Ohio literary organization’s ninth—and final—fall lit fest (at least for now). I could just be weepy about it (I’m weepy about much these days, tbh), but I’m too grateful to stay weepy. Since it’s a weekend to do grateful, let’s get into it…

Don’t worry, Lit Youngstown itself—with all of its amazing programming–is going strong at 10 years old. But before I get into my 2025 lit fest roundup I want to take a moment to share a few highlights from lit fests gone by (forgive my literary nostalgia), in no particular order:

  • Novelist Rachel Swearingen telling us craft session participants to, “Write towards change.” And “Stop thinking about characters and start thinking about relationships.” (Fiction writing changemaker right there!)
  • Me, getting to tell my story of my mom’s protesting of a nuclear power plant near my hometown when I was a kid (I wrote about it here) and detailing how that story turned into an integral part of my eco-novel (published someday, world!)
  • Exploring ekphrastic writing at the Butler Institute of American Art (great museum road-trip idea for you out of towners!) and exploring Youngstown writ large (getting to stay with friends and enjoying the local cuisine (there will never be enough pickle pizza, noggin-sized meatballs, and pierogis!))
  • Getting to be a student of Sandra Beasley, Ross Gay, Lawrence Coates, and so many other teacher-writers and getting to tell them over charcuterie and a glass of wine: “you wrote my favorite poem, essay, novella, thank you…”
  • Meeting writer friends (like the talented Melissa Fraterrigo) in person after years of reading her work (her novel Glory Days inspired a lot of what I’ve been trying to highlight at this blog these last nine years or so—stay tuned for a review of her memoir in essays, pictured). And meeting other friends year after year and weaving our stories—and lives—together.
  • The highest highlight? You. Becoming a member of the Lit Youngstown community through the fall lit fest has been incredibly rewarding for my literary life—and my life-life. Thank you, friends.
Photo credit: Carrie Leonard
Photo credit: Carrie Leonard
Photo credit: Carrie Leonard
Photo credit: Carrie Leonard
Photo credit: Carrie Leonard

Now, 2025’s list fest was one for the books. (Peruse a few pics above and below.) And if you thought the environmental theme was going to mean a slew of nature poems…well, yes, and… Yes, and fascinating eco-fiction and challenging environmental memoir and poetry about nature redefined—from a place that was once an indigo plantation to the night sky over the Grand Canyon to trails cut by troubled teens into the Pacific Northwest woods—and so much more that “shapes our experience and identity, and represents our rootedness in earth.” Whew! I encourage you to read the impressive bios of the five 2025 featured presenters. 

My preparation for this lit fest happily began months in advance of the event. (Once a student, always a student.) For my conversation with fiction writer David Huebert and memoirist and poet Sean Prentiss I read several of their books—she gestures to collage artfully displayed on her office floor—representing an array of what we lump under the term “environmental writing.” Look for a follow-up post with a good chunk of our discussion—fascinating and fun!

Other personal highlights from this year’s lit fest. (Know that this is just a fraction of the offerings and I, once again, wished I could have cloned myself, so I could make every single session.):

Day 1:

  • Narrative Medicine [definition: healthcare practiced with narrative competence]: A Generative Workshop, facilitated by family nurse practitioner and poet Dana Reeher. Imagine me taking furious notes for the anthology project I’m co-editing: Body of Work, essays at the intersection of dance and health. For a little workshop exercise, Dana asked us participants to respond to a writing prompt, “an expansive invitation to open the mind,” so I thought I’d write a very short piece about my own dancing and its impact on my physical and mental health outlook:
Maybe the mistake was I listened too well, that I pointed my feet too hard, that I really could feel that string coming out of the top of my head lifting me up to the studio ceiling. Maybe I postured too much, wanted too much. Maybe I turned out until I was turned in. Maybe all that looking in the mirror made me someone else. I can still spot a dancer, or an anorexic, from fifty paces.

My dancer friends here will likely recognize a lot of this, but especially the posture-reminder telling baby ballet dancers to imagine there’s a string coming out of the top of your head… After sharing my short piece of writing, a couple of the other workshop participants said the string image reminded them of a marionette. I’d never thought of that before, and I’ll tell you that image is still working on me!

  • The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolary Story of Academic Pandemic Pandemonium: The Musical. Based on the award-winning novel by Nancy McCabe, published by Outpost 19 in 2024, the presentation included a dramatic reading (with singing—who was expecting a musical at the lit fest? Not I. And it was such fun!).
  • Readings by David Huebert and Sean Prentiss in St. John’s (gorgeous limestone and stained glass) Episcopal Church sanctuary. Your girl provided introductions to both writers—thanks for putting up with my unorthodox investigative process to make sure they were exciting, guys!

Day 2:

  • Bengal Tiger Moments: Time Perception in Creative Writing, facilitated by Sean Prentiss. In this fascinating session, we talked about speed on the page, presented in five categories from fastest to slowest: Gaps, Summary, Scene, Dilation, and Pause. Sean presented examples of these techniques from creative nonfiction and explained the brain science behind our understanding of the movement of time—irl and on the page.
  • Rooting the Self: Writing as an Act of Person, Political & Environmental Transformation & Transcendence, a multi-genre workshop with (beautiful and talented) Rebe Huntman, author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle: Rebe took us through various stages/ways of honoring our voice and our writing by making space for it and celebrating it, including meditation, morning pages, repetitive activity (including list-making), “the writing cave,” and writing constraints and freewrites. My favorite prompt, a list-making exercise we did in this session, produced these lists, below. (From there I spun out a short prose piece, “Reasons to Revere Your Vagus Nerve” (we’ll see where that weirdness goes!):
5 Things I Consider a Miracle
High arches
Warm pie
The vagus nerve
Sweating carafes of water
Tanned leather
5 Recurring Obsessions
Ballet hands
Song
Accents, dialects, and regionalisms
Mom, mom, mom
Delight
  • Readings by poets Lauren Camp, Todd Davis & Kourtney Morrow: poems of cityscape to countryside to the night sky over the Grand Canyon left us audience members awed.

Days After

And then, after… there’s nothing better than returning home from a literary event inspired, nurtured, and with a few new ideas for writing already on the page.

If you’re reading this on Small Business Saturday, might I suggest you also read small and lit small by supporting your local indie bookstores and your favorite literary organizations today?!

Did you attend Lit Youngstown’s Fall Literary Festival last month? Another lit fest? What was your favorite part? Have an inspiration gleaned or a piece of writing captured you’d like to share? Feel free to jot it in the comments. 

Like this post? Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network. 

Are you a Rust Belt writer interested in seeing if your own post, or author interview, or book review might be right for Rust Belt Girl? Hit me up through this site’s contact function.

Check out my categories above for more guest posts, interviews, book reviews, literary musings, and writing advice we can all use. Never miss a post when you follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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From Petrichor, Pittsburgh’s art scene magazine: A photog. review by Emma Riva

I have long admired the art writing and advocacy of Emma Riva, Petrichor’s founder and editor-in-chief. After reading this exhibit review, you’re going to want to follow Petrichor and everything Emma does! Click below…

A little more from Emma about Pittsburgh’s art scene and her place in it:

“I do know one thing, whether Pittsburgh is in the Midwest, Appalachia, or the Mid-Atlantic, Pittsburgh is home. And something great is happening here.  My writing background is in the novel, and I’ve struggled with whether being an art critic and being an author are mutually exclusive. But maybe I was never meant to tell stories by myself. This magazine is the novel of our art scene here in Pittsburgh. I want us all to create it together.”

LIMINAL INTIMACY IN RADIAL SURVEY VOL. 4
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More from The Rabbit Hutch: Reflecting on a conversation with National Book Award winner Tess Gunty

Tess Gunty’s 2022 debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, won that year’s National Book Award for Fiction (and other awards) and also won hearts—especially among Rust Belt readers.

Pittsburgh-based author and art writer Emma Riva wrote a wonderful essay about The Rabbit Hutch published here at Rust Belt Girl I encourage you to read next—if you haven’t already.

I was late to the novel, myself, and was struck by how Catholic it felt, despite not being marketed that way (for obvious reasons).

I was thrilled to “meet” Gunty yesterday evening through the Jesuit Media Lab‘s conversation over Zoom with the author. A sizable group of us avid readers tuned in to listen to Gunty talk about being raised Catholic and writing about The Rabbit Hutch main character’s deep interest in female mystics and mysticism, about researching Hildegard von Bingen and discovering her “extraordinary theatre of mental activity” and agency, about technology and art and how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a “perfect allegory for AI,” and much more!

“I wanted to make art out of my characters’ lives, including their digital lives,” the author said about her novel that still feels very much of this technological moment. (Gunty herself doesn’t partake in social media and, clearly, it benefits her writing. “You need to keep the tool of your mind as sharp and clean as possible,” she said.)

Buy your own copy here

As for the novel’s fictional setting of Vacca Vale, Indiana, Gunty said that the place was the only thing she knew for certain she wanted to portray, going in, that the setting started out being the MC—until she was about three-quarters of the way through writing the first draft.

She said she wanted to capture the “purgatorial” nature of post-industrial cities like Youngstown, Ohio, Flint, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana. (No shade intended, I don’t think!) How to capture the sensation of such places, like her hometown of South Bend, on which the novel’s setting is based? In the books she read, Gunty said, “I never encountered any place like my hometown.” And yet politicians and movies portray a flat stereotype of such post-industrial Midwestern places.

Gunty’s description sparked pride in me, last night. She described our Midwestern and Rust Belt cities as places of mystery, magnitude, and complexity. When you don’t see a place like your home reflected in literature, “you feel like it doesn’t matter,” she said. For Gunty, writing this novel, then, was an attempt to insist upon the “dynamism and multi-dimensionality” of her hometown—and others like it.

Like mine. Maybe like yours, too.

I encourage you to check out JML for their book talks and other events.

Have you read The Rabbit Hutch? What did you think? Did you read Emma Riva’s essay about it?

Like this post? Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network. 

Are you a Rust Belt writer interested in seeing if your own post, or author interview, or book review might be right for Rust Belt Girl? Hit me up through this site’s contact function.

Check out my categories above for more guest posts, interviews, book reviews, literary musings, and writing advice we can all use. Never miss a post when you follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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Reading rn…

Shoutout to Belt Publishing for all the great Rust Belt-ish books they put out. I don’t get around to reading enough of them, but when I pick one up, I know it’s going to be good. Belt Publishing’s 2016 release The New Midwest by Mark Athitakis is still a bible of Rust Belt lit for me, and my copy resides permanently in my bookshelves. And then there’s Edward McClelland’s super clever How to Speak Midwestern (linguistics is never not fun!).

Of Belt’s newer releases, I’m most excited to read Patrick Wensink’s The Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place in America that Nobody’s Ever Heard Of. (I am so here for long titles and of books that make me feel like a somebody–in that I have heard of the Great Black Swamp, since my dad lives in Northern Ohio. Also, when the personal and the environmental collide–which should be often–fantastic storytelling happens, imo.)

I just finished Jonathan Wlasiuk’s An Alternative History of Cleveland, and thought, yep, Belt Publishing did it again. (I think Ed Simon–of Belt Magazine, now Rust Belt Magazine–wrote An Alternative History of Pittsburgh, which is bound to be as great, if not even better.) I’ve been dipping in and out of this history of my native northeast Ohio for months, not because it isn’t gipping but because it’s so layered. A summary for you from the back jacket copy:

Part natural history, part archaeological essay, and part a contemporary call to arms to reclaim and rewild Cleveland’s future, this unforgettable trek into the heart of ‘the land’ will change the way you see the city forever.

No easy task, the author attempts to provide at least a bird’s eye view (both figuratively and literally, as you’ll see) of 10,000 years of human history. He zooms in on the relationship (fraught, as you can imagine) between humans and the environment–of which there’s a lot to find interesting, as northeast Ohio is situated along the eastern shore of Lake Erie, bountiful in flora and fauna, when it’s left alone, that is.

Incredibly well-researched and cited, the parts of the book that “sang” to me best were those moments where the personal and the environmental intersected in a visceral way. In the final chapter, “The Land,” Wlasiuk describes his work for an organization called Lights Out Cleveland, which has him looking for dead birds on the sidewalks of Cleveland before dawn during the heart of migration season. These birds came to an untimely end along their journeys due to humans’ penchant for light, of course, and see-through buildings.

This might sound like a depressing chapter start, but the author has a knack for involving fascinating local voices–including the “irreverent” and mostly-anonymous voice behind the @trashfish_cle account on IG, who spends his days in a kayak fishing trash out of the Cuyahoga River–and for providing hope, often in the way of a call to action. Or, at least we get lessons by watching locals who are doing their part to “remediate the environment and spread awareness.”

And look, we can do our part–not just for the Rust Belt-ish literary world but for the world at large, for our flora and fauna neighbors–by talking about the books we read that not only entertain but open our eyes to the ways we are connected to each other and to these ancient environments we call home. Right?

What are you reading, reading, or watching right now? Let me know in the comments.

Like this post? Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network. 

Are you a Rust Belt writer interested in seeing if your own post, or author interview, or book review might be right for Rust Belt Girl? Hit me up through this site’s contact function.

Check out my categories above for more interviews, book reviews, guest posts, literary musings, and writing advice we can all use. Never miss a post when you follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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An Alternative History of Cleveland

By Jonathan Wlasiuk

Belt Publishing, 2024