Rust Belt Girl

Posted on May 25, 2023May 25, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 2 Comments

Building thriving post-industrial cities, one story at a time

We talk a lot about place here on the blog. While I’m usually talking about place or setting in literature, I’m also interested in the real places that inspire—especially Rust Belt places.

I never gave much thought to England’s rust belt, until a conversation with a good friend, who is English, last summer. Born a “southern softie,” a not-very-nice term for a person from the South of England, my friend recently moved to Sheffield, in the North of England. It’s basically smack dab in the middle of England’s rust belt, she told me.

As coincidence—or bots—would have it, I learned of a symposium hosted on Monday by the University of Sheffield featuring writers, community organizers, academics and the like from the UK and US. I found it fascinating and thought I’d give you a taste, here.

An “across-the-pond conversation,” the symposium featured four panels that explored how to build “thriving, integrated post-industrial cities.” There was talk of architecture, anthropology, heritage, history and more. Panelists discussed new ways of connecting with the past, such as through urban explorations and art—including writing.

Thanks to Zoom, I was able to check in on the first panel of the half-day event, which included a presentation by award-winning author, essayist, and journalist David Giffels—dubbed “the bard of Akron” [Ohio] by the New York Times. If you’ve been here at Rust Belt Girl for a while, that’s a name you’ll recognize. David has graciously talked with us before about a couple of his books: The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt and Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life.

As a featured speaker, David touched on the idea of our place’s “story.” He talked about sometimes feeling like our place isn’t worthy of story because it’s a humble place. But, of course, every place is worthy of story. He talked about pushing back against a prevailing narrative that comes from the outside (see: flyover journalism) by championing the local voice and lived experience.

David dug into his own past lived experience, as a student at the University of Akron during a time when the city’s downtown was full of abandoned buildings. “As young people we didn’t see it as failure,” he said, but as a place of promise. “You could reimagine the built environment”—a bookstore here, an art gallery there.

Just don’t call it a “dying” city. Rather, cities evolve. David’s’ story of Akron is important to tell, because “it’s the story of hard times”—and hard times can be instructive. Take the COVID-19 pandemic. Ohio was ahead of the curve, David noted. The reason? The state had been dealing with a public health crisis—the opioid crisis, with Akron at the epicenter—for years. The realigning of emergency and social services necessary to deal with such a crisis, Ohio was on it. “Our hard times had something to teach,” David said.

Let’s not “fly over” the stories of lived experience—the hard and good times—in places like Akron and Youngstown, like Sheffield and Liverpool. It’s important to get cities talking, David said. “Dialogue between cities can remind us of the value of our narrative.”

Thanks to the symposium organizers and participants, especially David, for spreading the word about this symposium. It developed from new-genre artist Jennifer Vanderpool’s social practice art exhibitions, called Untold Stories, a series of exhibitions taking place in the post-industrial Midwest region of the US and the industrial North of England. Maybe catch one of the artist’s exhibitions if you can?

What are you attending, watching, reading, and writing this month? Let me know in the comments…

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Posted on May 5, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 22 Comments

Behind the Scenes: “A New Nuclear”

The lovely folks at Great Lakes Review published my story, “A New Nuclear,” about my favorite fictional dental hygienist Patty’s struggle to find herself during the last summer before her child leaves for college. It is a most Rust Belt-y story, and I’m grateful to editor Mitch James for giving it a fine home along my favorite Great Lake.

One of the questions writers hear most–even about fictional works–is: “Is this story inspired by your life? Is this you?” Yes and no. Do I understand Patty’s situation? Do I feel a sense of my nest emptying out? Sure, my boys are 13 now, and every day becoming more independent. But also no. Patty is not me, and is definitely not my mom (read on). But I thought I’d give a little backstory in case my followers want a peek into the real-life influences and (really weird) brain of a fiction writer.

Family might recognize Patty’s stint with the No Nukes! environmental chapter. My mom–who would have been proud to be called a tree hugger, if we used that term then–did a stint with the group that protested the local nuclear power plant. (The plant’s still in operation, btw. Planned to be deactivated in 2021, it’s now licensed to operate until 2037.) I remember my mom’s bright yellow No Nukes! shirt. She might have participated in one protest but was much more often spotted at the church basement food co-op she helped run. Also, note the spiderwort plants in my story–plants that are able to detect small amounts of radiation. My mom would have loved that fact. Maybe she knew it? I wish I could ask her.

A writer friend–hi, Jessica!–who is more perceptive than I noted that I have teeth on the creative brain as of late. She also read a prose poem of mine, recently published in the print journal, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry,” titled “Jesus, My Son’s Buckteeth.” What do they say about teeth dreams? Spurred on by anxiety, right? Should I be worried if teeth are taking over my creative mind? (Don’t tell me.)

And a note on the craft of writing and the novel process: Writer friends who’ve read my WIP–a novel set over one Ohio summer, bridging two lakeshores and three generations–will recognize Patty. Early drafts of the novel included Patty’s perspective and more time for her on the page. In later revisions, Patty’s POV–but not Patty’s character–was cut. Still, I couldn’t leave the protest scene (or the dental chair scene!) on the cutting room floor. “Kill your darlings,” they say. But, also, sometimes those darlings can make for a good story.

I hope you like it: “A New Nuclear”

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Posted on April 27, 2023April 27, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 5 Comments

My interview with Valerie Nieman, author of In the Lonely Backwater: Part II

Part II of my interview with Valerie Nieman continues our discussion of her novel and her poetry and also covers the poetry she loved to teach her students. She also shares what she’s writing and reading, right now. (Spot the friend of Rust Belt Girl in her TBR!) Missed Part I of the interview? Find it here.)

Valerie Nieman’s latest, In the Lonely Backwater, a mystery in the Southern gothic tradition, has been named the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award winner for the best novel by a North Carolina writer. To the Bones, her genre-bending folk horror/thriller about coal country, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award. She is also the author of Blood Clay (Eric Hoffer Award) and two other novels. She has published a short fiction collection and three poetry collections, most recently, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, which was runner-up for the Brockman-Campbell Prize. She has published widely in journals and anthologies, and appears regularly in juried reading series such as Piccolo Spoleto, Why There Are Words, and Women of Appalachia. She has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships. Nieman has degrees from West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, and was a reporter and farmer in West Virginia before moving to North Carolina, where she worked as an editor and a creative writing professor at NC A&T State University.

Valerie, In the Lonely Backwater has been praised for its “deep sense of the wonderment of the natural world.” I see this in your poetry, too:

Can you talk about this poem of yours, its impetus, its rooting in the bog but also “close to the sun?”

This is a poem that came directly from observation. I was walking in the Bog Garden in Greensboro when I came upon a group of people staring up into the treetops. It’s that barred owl, I thought, a resident of the garden. Instead, I was shocked to see a full-grown groundhog up there grazing on the new leaves. I went home and looked it up online, finding numerous videos and learning that it’s not uncommon for woodchucks to climb trees.

Among other inspirations was the late Gerald Stern’s poem “Behaving Like a Jew” and his line about a dead opossum’s “little dancing feet.”

The family at the center of your novel is part of the “Appalachian diaspora.” What does this term mean for you personally—and for your poetry, especially?

Well, it’s who I am. I grew up in northern Appalachia, the Allegheny Plateau in western New York where the Allegheny River rises and flows to Pittsburgh. I went to school at West Virginia University, and worked as a reporter and editor at papers in Fairmont and Morgantown, both on the Monongahela, before leaving the Ohio River watershed for the first time in my life. I moved to central North Carolina in 1997 for a newspaper job. Now I live one county line over from Appalachia as defined by the ARC, but Rockingham County has all the earmarks of Appalachia—rural, with faded industry and a changing agricultural life, and beautiful hills and rivers. Not really mountainous enough, I guess. So my work draws on my upbringing in dairy country, 20-plus years in the coal fields, and then working as an editor in tobacco country before a final 20 years in academia. Nature poet, blue collar writer, Appalachian writer, Southern writer.

“Tinder” feels like a nature poem, an ode to Shakespeare’s witchy “double toil and trouble,” and a horror story all at once:

Tinder

I am the woman your mother 
warned you about. 

I am boiling bones boiling bones boiling bones. 
I am washing out the war-rags at the ford,
blood pluming downstream 
gaudy to catch the heart.
 
I am scraping scraping scraping
on the stretched skin of the world. 
My pet is a scrofulous cur,
my bird a dobsonfly all wings and jaws.

I look under rocks.
I find what I expect to find.

Can you talk about your influences here and what you want your reader to know about the persona in the poem?

Ah, that’s a dangerous woman. She harbors grudges and has a long memory for those who’ve done wrong by her. What bones are those in her broth? Difficult to say.

Influences indeed include Shakespeare, and Poe as well, a bit of Hawthorne—all of whom I read as a child, pulling the classics from the shelves during long western New York winters. I also was influenced by many years of research into early Celtic and Norse cultures. “The washer at the ford” or bean-nighe is found across the Celtic nations. She’s seen in wild places, kneeling beside a lake or river, washing the blood out of the clothes of men who are fated to die. So that was in my mind as the image of the dobsonfly appeared. It’s the quite terrifying winged adult of the hellgrammite, a stream insect with enormous pinching jaws. As a child I spent a lot of time in “the crick,” turning over rocks, and as an angler I’ve done the same for years, to see what fish might be eating, and just because I like to see what’s underneath.

What was your favorite poem or story to teach students when you were a professor at NC A&T State University?

“Out, Out” by Robert Frost is a favorite, to show how a poet can compress an entire short story into 34 lines—dialog, description, setting, plot. I liked showing students the flexibility of the sonnet, comparing traditional forms with Terrence Hayes’ “American Sonnets.” I also loved teaching humanities and exposing students to ancient work from the negative confessionsof the Egyptian Book of the Dead, to framing a discussion about war and the death of young men through Priam’s visit to Achilles.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing? What can we look forward to, next?

The top of one stack: Hemlock Hollow by Culley Holderfield, The Sound of Rabbits by Janice Deal, Red Clay Suzie by Jeffrey Dale Lofton, All the Little Hopes by Leah Weiss, and Hungry Town by Jason Kapcala. Dipping into a number of poetry books as well, including Anything that Happens by Cheryl Wilder. Eager also to get back to some science fiction, with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future. There are many shelves, and many stacks, and I keep adding to the accumulation.

I’ve just (as of 4/3) completed the first draft of Dead Hand, a sequel to To the Bones. I had almost as much fun writing this as the first one! The action moves from the West Virginia coalfields to Ireland. I revisited places I’d seen a few years ago, from the Shannon Pot to County Cavan to Dublin, and added others including an Irish coal mine. While that simmers in the hands of beta readers, I’m working on pulling together a new book of poetry.

In the Lonely Backwater

By Valerie Nieman

Regal House Publishing $18.95

Like this interview? 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 an author interview or book review of yours might be right for Rust Belt Girl? Pitch me through this site’s contact function.

Check out my categories above for more interviews, book reviews, literary musings, and writing advice we can all use.

What are you reading and writing this week? Let us know in the comments…

And never miss a post when you follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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Posted on April 21, 2023April 20, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 12 Comments

My interview with Valerie Nieman, author of In the Lonely Backwater: Part I

Author Valerie Nieman grew up in the Rust Belt of western New York State, lived and worked for many years in the northern coalfields of West Virginia, and now lives in a North Carolina town that’s still recovering from loss of the Lucky Strike plant. In short, Valerie explains, she’s “seen a lot of industrial wastelands.”

How do these evocative locations inform her prose and poetry? In the following author interview, I asked Valerie about this, about her latest, award-winning novel–and much more.

Valerie, can you tell us about your Rust Belt upbringing and how it informs your creative work? What was it like to not only live but work in the coalfields of West Virginia? You were both a farmer and a reporter there. Can you talk about how those roles are similar/different?

I grew up the child of a factory worker who’d wanted to be a farmer. His plant in Jamestown, NY, built desks and filing systems. I remember copies of “The Machinist” in the bathroom, and the annual July shutdowns and factory picnics. Royal Metal was part of a thriving factory district that produced everything from heavy equipment to tools to furniture. Crescent Tool, Proto Tool, Blackstone, and so many others used to run three shifts. The last time I was there, I found a ghost district, post-apocalyptic. It’s been a long time and maybe things have gotten better, but this part of the Rust Belt was truly “rusty.”

My father had to leave the factory when it closed and go to one in South Bend, IN, that carried on for a few more years. When he could no longer walk concrete floors as a foreman because of worsening knee injuries from the Korean War, he and Mom followed me to West Virginia. They opened a bait and tackle shop near the Monongahela River just outside Fairmont, WV, where I worked for the newspaper.

That city had a prominent and troubled history as a coal center. Consolidation Coal was founded there, and the Watson mansion became an inspiration for the Kavanagh home in To the Bones. Marion County had two of the nation’s most deadly mine accidents, Monongah 1907 and Farmington No. 9 in 1968, both of which led to massive overhauls of mine safety regulations. The offices of UMWA District 31, headed by Richard Trumka, were next door to the church I attended.

During my time as a reporter, I covered the coal industry and the environment, along with the police beat, so I got to see everything from murder investigations to the working longwall at Martinka Mine. I later became editor and helmed major investigations, one into the county’s secretive dealings with a waste coal entrepreneur and another about acid mine drainage, both of which won state AP public service awards and other recognition.

My home was a small version of the classic Appalachian hill farm. It rested above some of the former Consol No. 9 workings and a mine crack furrowed the hayfield. My ex and I built a house and barn and were creating a partial subsistence lifestyle there, with beef cattle, organic garden and orchards, before divorce ended that part of my life.

I’ve never regretted the newspaper years, despite the low pay and often difficult working situations, because I got to see and experience so much! My novels and poems draw on those years still.

Valerie Nieman, Winner of the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award

Your poem, “The size of West Virginia,” begins “Few know the Mountain State…” Here’s a taste:

“The size of West Virginia”

Few know the Mountain State but all
recognize it, easiest puzzle-piece of the states,
its awkward panhandles and pendulous gut
lolling into East Virginia.

A vast aquifer "lake" lies trapped under southeastern 
Greenland, larger than the size of West Virginia.

It’s a convenient scale for journalists, 
standard candle like the Cepheid Variables 
or Type Ia Supernovae that allow 
for dead reckoning on distant stars.

As of July 15th, fires have blackened nearly 21,000 
square miles. (That's nearly the size of West Virginia.)

Can you talk about that—how being from a lesser-known (or maybe even unknowable to outsiders) kind of place informs your writing?

Appalachia remains “the other” for so many in America, a stereotype compounded of Snuffy Smith comics and Disney cartoons and Deliverance. The people are lumped together as white, poor, ignorant, violent.

This didn’t happen by accident. The dispossession of Irish and Scots crofters by “noble” landowners who considered them an impediment— “lice on the land” as one said—led to mass migrations and provided many of the region’s early immigrants. That legacy of dispossession continued with the rape of Appalachia’s land for timber and coal, at the expense of smallholders and their communities. And writers from the Northeast found a willing market for stories of the region’s exotic and dangerous folk.

The region was and is diverse, from the many Native American tribes that lived, traded, farmed, and hunted there, to German, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish immigrants who came to work the mines and mills, along with Black families moving up from the Deep South, Lebanese merchants who served the coal communities, and more recently, people from Nigeria to India and the world over who come to study at West Virginia University or work in industry.

I began to notice the repeated use of West Virginia as a unit of size comparison for other places, did a search online and found many more, and that brought about this poem.

Although I’ve lived in North Carolina for many years, West Virginia was where I became a writer and the place that continues to feed my work. Along the lines of this poem, my 2018 novel To the Bones uses and subverts some of those cliches about this “unknown place” in a genre-crossing tale about the coal industry and its enormous impact on the people and place.

How did you transition from journalism to poetry and fiction? How do these disciplines influence one another?

Brevity, compression, observation are the watchwords for journalism. Equally true for poetry. And while I can wax descriptive in my prose writing, it’s always economical—no wasted words. At least I like to think so, and readers have said as much.

Your latest novel, In the Lonely Backwater, features a teen protagonist, Maggie Warshauer. What a voice! (Take note, fiction writers.) Here’s how Maggie describes a detective who’s come to her North Carolina high school to ask her and other students about a girl who’s disappeared, a girl Maggie is related to and with whom has had some “squabbles”:

I didn't expect a detective to look like my dentist. He waited, watching me like an underfed hound. If I were going to place him in the marina, I'd say he was a fishing boat. A small one, from Sears, not on a slip but parked on the monthly lot. Plain aluminum johnboat with a little outboard.

Can you tell us when and how Maggie first started speaking to you as a writer, when you knew you needed to write this story?

Maggie’s been speaking to me all my life: a version of my sarcastic inner voice that doesn’t get spoken aloud very often. She’s not me, but there’s a lot of me in her. Specifically, she began speaking with the opening line, “There wasn’t anything wrong between Charisse Swicegood and me except that she was her and I was me, and with the family history and all it was just natural.”

Her character has many roots, including my lifetime of solo wandering in the woods, an interest in biology and ecology, and a number of years sailing a “pocket cruiser” at Kerr Lake. Like Maggie, I was a girl who preferred boy things, in a time when the terms gender-fluid and nonperforming had not yet appeared.

The spark that brought together many disparate elements was the discovery of an inscription in my senior yearbook. A girl I do not remember wrote, “I hope all our misunderstandings are cleared up.” It’s signed Love. I do not remember anything about the disagreement, but I did recall the intensity of emotions in those years.

The town you live in now, in North Carolina, is still recovering from the loss of the Lucky Strike plant. Coal and tobacco both had their boom and bust. I’m reminded of Emma Riva’s review here at Rust Belt Girl of Tess Gunty’s novel, The Rabbit Hutch, set in a fictionalized Indiana town decimated by the loss of an auto plant. What makes these “wastelands” fertile settings for your creative work, for suspense, and even horror?

I think such hollowed-out industrial centers have much in common with haunted houses, and with the beloved ruins of the Romantic poets and artists, in the evocation of what once was and is now gone. I’m drawn to them, as I am to songs by Bruce Springsteen that depict these same broken places and the people who despair, maybe leave, or maybe find the grit to keep going and rise up again. I most like cities that have a past, Pittsburgh, Glasgow, Greensboro, but have reinvented themselves without losing that slight acrid tang of their former smokes, their former selves.

I remember when retraining programs were offered for West Virginia miners losing their jobs in the transition from conventional mining to long wall. They were offered welding or computer coding, both honorable careers, but pretty specific. It’s good to see current efforts to train miners and legacy factory workers for careers in new industries that may better fit or expand their existing skill sets, such as wind turbine maintenance, electric motor building, ecological remediation, and solar installation.

Where I now live, in Reidsville, NC, the landscape is marked by the former tobacco warehouses, the mill houses and owner’s mansions, old curing sheds, and over all, the smokestack of the former Lucky Strike plant emblazoned with that logo. It’s been purchased and is being repurposed as an e-commerce hub. I hope they keep that emblematic stack standing as a symbol of this community.

Please check back for Part II of my interview with Valerie Nieman–for more of her poetry, for what she loved to teach her students, and for what she’s writing and reading, right now. For more about her latest novel, follow the link below:

In the Lonely Backwater

By Valerie Nieman

Regal House Publishing $18.95

Like this interview? 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 an author interview or book review of yours might be right for Rust Belt Girl? Pitch me through this site’s contact function.

Check out my categories above for more interviews, book reviews, literary musings, and writing advice we can all use.

In case you missed it, my review of Megan Giddings’ latest novel, The Women Could Fly, which first appeared here at Rust Belt Girl was republished at Belt Magazine last month. Check it out!

Never miss a post when you follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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Posted on March 2, 2023March 2, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 17 Comments

THE RABBIT HUTCH’s Rust Belt Renaissance

By Emma Riva

People in Pittsburgh will tell you where things are based on what used to be there. Most of the time, the landmark that used to be there is food related. A fancy seafood restaurant. An ice cream shop. In a small city, those are the sorts of things people remember. To out-of-towners, this might seem like a quaint practice, but something I’ve come to realize is that it is a profoundly human one.

As a fiction writer, I often find myself navigating the complicated narrative of how our memories and associations of the past interact with our experiences of the present. I look at a candle and think of my favorite candle store in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, which I went to for the first time because I couldn’t use the bathroom on the Y46 bus and I bolted in not expecting them to have a restroom, but they did. The candle reminds me of my desire to go back there, of the friends I know in Elizabeth. All of this interacts with the energy of the place, the former boating hub, the Monongahela River Valley that built Lewis and Clark’s boat. All of that comes from the split second of looking at a burning wick.

Sharpsburg over the Allegheny River from the 62 St. Bridge; photo credit: Emma Riva

Tess Gunty’s 2022 debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is a master class in this mixture of memory and present, owing in part to its setting within the Rust Belt. The novel’s setting of Vacca Vale, Indiana, is a facsimile of her hometown of South Bend, though she’s fictionalized a car manufacturer named Zorn as the ghost of industry haunting the town’s abandoned structures. “I wanted to be able to pull from Gary, Ind., and Flint, Mich., and Youngstown, Ohio, and a number of other cities in the Rust Belt whose economic devastation was much worse, I think, than it was in South Bend when Studebaker closed,” Gunty said in an interview with the South Bend Tribune.

The Rabbit Hutch is a genre-bending work that follows a cast of characters who all live in an affordable housing complex called La Lapiniére, nicknamed “The Rabbit Hutch.” Its central character is Blandine Watkins, née Tiffany, an eccentric former foster youth obsessed with Christian mystics to the point where she changed her own name to a martyred French woman’s. But the book switches between the past and the present and between the perspectives of different residents of the apartment complex, including one of Blandine’s roommates, another former foster youth who serves as an omniscient narrator for several parts of the book which foreshadow some horror described as Blandine “leaving her body.” Though the characters’ Vacca Vale has its echoes of Gunty’s own South Bend, it’s an imaginary future where the University of Notre Dame didn’t fill the gaps in South Bend left behind by Studebaker. Here’s what Gunty’s characters say of Vacca Vale, while stoned and watching a commercial for a new apartment complex, much nicer than the titular complex they live in:

“Vacca Vale, Welcome Home,” scoffed Todd, but he looked sort of emotional to me. “What the hell kind of slogan is that?”
	“More like—Vacca Vale: Don’t Touch the Rust,” said Malik. 
	“Vacca Vale: Excuse Me, Sir, Are You Lost?” I added.
	“Vacca Vale: We’ll Clean That Up in the Morning,” said Todd.
        We laughed. We warmed. We didn’t know who we were trying to impress.
	“Vacca Vale,” joked Malik. “We Used to Make Cars Here!” 
	“Vacca Vale: Where the Churches Outnumber the Humans.” 
	“Vacca Vale: Where the Rabbits Outnumber the Churches.” 
	“Vacca Vale: At Least You Can Still Fuck Here.”

For many in the literary publishing world Gunty has ascended into, the Rust Belt is only a feeling, not a region. It’s an image from the movie Flashdance or a short chapter in a history textbook. So, it’s important to define what it is exactly we’re talking about when we say “the Rust Belt.” There’s some confusion among people who don’t live here about the categorical differences between the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and the Midwest. Pittsburgh and Buffalo aren’t exactly in the Midwest, but they’re still in the Rust Belt. The map in the Encyclopedia Brittanica looks like a gasoline blotch on a sidewalk or an oddly shaped hickey.

It’s a region defined by things which used to be there, sites of innovation and excess then turned to rot, now home to … what? Those of us who live there will be familiar with the exchange that takes place in one scene of The Rabbit Hutch. Blandine and Jack get into a heated argument in the loft of a real-estate developer who plans to “revitalize” their city. Blandine complains about how the real estate development is ruining Chastity Valley, one of her favorite parts of the city, and Jack shoots back:

“Look,” says Jack. “I know what you want me to say. You want everyone to hate the Valley plan as much as you do. But I just don’t. A lot of people are excited about it, and I think you’re being sort of judgmental and shortsighted. I mean, a lot people say it’s going to help our economy and make jobs and stuff. And I’ve only met him a couple of times, but Pinky doesn’t seem that bad. From what I’ve heard, he grew up poor, he knows what it’s like not to have what you need, and now he wants to help Vacca Vale get out of the gutter. Sure, he’s making money off it. But so what, if it helps people at the end of the day? We need to get out of the gutter.”

Gunty then notes: “In the ensuing silence, Blandine spots a camera, situated atop a thick book called Rust Belt: The Second Coming.” There is much reference to Catholicism in The Rabbit Hutch, and “the Second Coming” refers to resurrection, that most American of impulses. It’s no coincidence that the nature park to be bulldozed for the buildings is called Chastity Valley. But The Rabbit Hutch is no hollow anti-gentrification plea.

From having grown up in New York, I have a keen and nuanced understanding of gentrification and the ways in which contemporary activism often ignores its tangled nature. The Rabbit Hutch frames the Chastity Valley developments and the so-called “revitalization” of Vacca Vale as part of a meditation on the uncomfortable truth about change. One of the most gutting lines in the book is: “Six months after Tiffany/Blandine had submitted her court papers, proof of birth and $210, she discovered that the name Blandine is Latin for ‘mild,’ while Tiffany is Greek for “Manifestation of God.’” I, too, went through long stretches of hating my own name, wanting to replace it with something more elegant and powerful. In those lines, Blandine reveals how, though her activism comes from a genuine love for Vacca Vale, there’s a deeper hypocrisy and insecurity there. Though she wants Vacca Vale to retain its grit, the scars that give it character, she is unable to deal with her own scars, to the point where she threw away her own name for a fantasy.

The South Side from the Birmingham Bridge over the Monongahela River; photo credit: Emma Riva

There is much more to talk about in The Rabbit Hutch, and the only way to truly experience all of it is to read it for yourself. But here are a few sneak peeks. There’s the death of an aging child star and the vengeance of her bitter, angry son—another scar of the past opened into a wound. There’s the woman who moderates content on a site for obituaries, who spurns that son by deleting his callous comment on his mother’s obituary—a marker of the absurdity of how we deal with loss.

The Rabbit Hutch is all about people on the margins, people who are orphaned by society in some way, regardless of their age or their circumstances. In the contemporary publishing industry, there’s a certain obsession with “marginalized” or “underrepresented” identities. It feels like a reduction, like generational oppression is a badge of suffering for coastal publishing executives to give out to those poor, unfortunate souls in quote-unquote Middle America. I’m perhaps one of the people Blandine and her friends might laugh at, who traded New York for this strange, desolate place. But I know exactly how Blandine feels about Chastity Valley, because I watched my childhood public library in Washington Heights get bulldozed to make space for an “affordable” housing complex with a supposed library inside of it, the skeleton of which now looms over Broadway like a dying animal. I know exactly how it feels to not care how many people get to live in that building or how many families get to make nicer dinners because of the paychecks the developer creates, because connecting to a sad, poor place makes you feel like your suffering matters in some grand story of socio-economic distress.

In the same conversation, above, Jack says to Blandine: “’I’m not judging you.’ The tenderness in his expression catches Blandine off guard, makes the room glitter vertiginously. ‘I just want to know what happened to you.’”

What happened to you? I hate the passive voice. As a literature tutor, my screed to my students is that passive voice makes them sound less confident. I don’t say weak but the implication is there. And of course, there are political and emotional implications. We’ve all heard mistakes were made or I was assaulted. Of course, it’s an important step in reclamation of your life and accountability to say You made mistakes or He assaulted me. But in modern American language, we are profoundly uncomfortable with the passive voice even when we overuse it. Being scarred by your history is a hard thing to admit. You have to admit that things affected you. That (how terrible to admit!) they damaged you. That (even worse!) you are damaged. The Rust Belt is one big, glaring scar of affectation and damage. Its very name is spoil and decay. We spend a lot of our lives teaching ourselves not to be affected by things. In The Rabbit Hutch, what Blandine seeks when she wants to leave her body, is truly to feel instead of simply to suffer.

The Rabbit Hutch, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for fiction, is available from Penguin Random House or wherever books are sold.

Emma Riva is an author and art writer living and working in Pittsburgh. She serves as the managing editor of UP, an international online and print magazine covering street art, graffiti, fine arts, and their intersections in popular culture. She is also a staff writer at regional magazine Belt and a contributor to Pittsburgh-based art criticism site Bunker Review. You can find out more about her on her website and her Instagram and order her book Night Shift in Tamaqua wherever books are sold.

Rebecca here, with huge thanks to Emma for her fascinating review.

What are you reading and writing this month, as we look forward to spring? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Are you a Rust Belt writer? Do you write book reviews or conduct interviews of Rust Belt authors? If so, think of Rust Belt Girl for a guest post, like this one. And check out the categories above for more writing from rusty places.

Find me on FB, and on IG and Twitter: @MoonRuark

And follow me here. Thanks!

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Posted on January 26, 2023January 25, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 18 Comments

My interview with John W. Kropf, author of Color Capital of the World

For you Rust Belt boosters, Sandusky aficionados, history buffs, arts lovers, and education champions … I’m so pleased John Kropf agreed to answer my questions about his fascinating historical memoir …

John Kropf is the author of Color Capital of the World: Growing Up with the Legacy of a Crayon Factory (University of Akron Press, 2022). Color Capital provides a history of the crayon through the build, boom, and bust of the American Crayon Company. Readers will come away feeling a greater appreciation of the human story behind the crayon and the Ohio town that produced more crayons and paints than anywhere else in the world. Melissa Scholes Young, author of The Hive and Flood, described it as a “delightful and engaging read.” Kropf’s earlier work, Unknown Sands: Travels in the World’s Most Isolated Country, was praised as a fascinating narrative bound to hook adventurers. His writing has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Washington Post, the Middle West Review, and elsewhere. Kropf was born in Sandusky and raised in Erie County, Ohio. He works as an attorney in Washington, D.C., area.

John, multiple lines of your family came together to make the American Crayon Company, begun not long after the end of the Civil War. Your grandmother was the one to tell you the stories of the company. In Color Capital, you write that it was at her “Sunday afternoon dinner table with its white tablecloth and real silverware [where it] felt almost like I was receiving a sacrament in church. I was hearing the gospel of the crayon.” You also write, “Crayons were my birthright.” What did it feel like to have this legacy, as a child, and then see it decline and finally disappear?

Be careful of the stories you tell your children! My grandmother’s stories and the magic of crayons was a powerful combination for a young child. Crayons were somehow different–not like ball bearings or rolls of finished steel. Crayons were something easily understandable and exciting for a kid. And from a kid’s perspective, I thought there must be a way to keep it going. As I mentioned in the book, I desperately wanted to find a way to be part of it, but by the time I entered high school, I realized the company had been sold from the founding families and I could see the decline of the company coming. Maybe the hardest thing was decades later reading the stories in the Sandusky Register that the abandoned factory building had been neglected for so long it was falling into ruin. It was kind of like seeing an old family relative with no one to take care of them. There’s a head-heart issue going on–your head knows it is the natural end of a business but your heart reacts to mourn the loss.

I am a big crayon fan now! I never gave so much thought to the importance of crayons. One very important point you make in the book is that this was something made and built for children. I was fascinated to learn that the crayon movement and the kindergarten movement (pushed by German immigrants) coincided. Yes, there were crayons made for train workers, carpenters, and other industries, along with crayons made for artists; but the bulk of crayons made were made with children and their art and education in mind. In your research, what was the thinking behind these Germans interested in putting color sticks in children’s hands? What a shift after a time of war, I would think, this time of color. That shift in the company from the “rugged utility of blackboard chalk and industrial markers” to “pure creativity and imagination of children and artists.” What do you make of that?

Yes–it was an exciting time in education. The crayons that American Crayon Company and others, like Binney & Smith, created in the first part of the 1900s were practical and inexpensive. American Crayon even made “penny-packs” that had different pictures on the back of the package to encourage children to color. We think of computers in a similar way being introduced in the 1980s in schools and colleges. The introduction of affordable color crayons to young children was revolutionary. Coloring contests in schools were a big deal, where the winners could earn prizes and national recognition. American Crayon even developed a magazine written by educators, called Everyday Art, to help teachers with coloring projects.

It goes hand and hand with the art education of young students that Sandusky was a pioneer in secondary public education, as one of the first towns in Ohio to develop a public high school. From your research, can you tell us what made Sandusky an education leader? What were the conditions that made that possible?

I think some of the conditions go all the way back to Ohio being part of the Northwest Territories. The Northwest Ordinance that carved out Ohio and other Midwest states mandated public education among its first articles. The emphasis on public education created a demand for new and innovative teaching techniques–the kind that drew one of American Crayon’s founders, Marcellus Cowdrey, to Sandusky to become its first superintendent of schools. Marcellus had been educated at a teaching academy in Kirtland, Ohio, and he emphasized good penmanship as a critical skill to learning. From his start in Sandusky, Marcellus wanted to ensure his students would have practical effective means of practicing their penmanship, starting with chalk on the blackboard. His techniques helped create Sandusky as an innovative center for public schools and set the stage for better writing implements.

Your book helped me learn about Sandusky from the ground up, as “The Color Capital of the World,” as a relative of yours said the city was known. Sandusky is also known for its gypsum mines. I had no idea what gypsum was, until I read this, and I certainly didn’t know it was used to make crayons (among other things). You detail the development of the formula for crayons (slightly different across brands). I’m thinking the crayon recipe likely ran parallel to other industrial recipes. Can you give us a sense of what else was being developed in the time period that this development is happening?

Researching the book, I learned that gypsum deposits in northern Ohio were a vestige of glaciers. The deposits are found in silts and clays in the beds of former glacial lakes. William Curtis, the crayon company’s inventor, had access to the gypsum through his brother-in-law, John Cowdery, who ran a local outdoor nursery located near an abandoned quarry with a deep pond in it. I like to think the American Crayon Company was truly connected to the land and water of Ohio and nearby Sandusky Bay.

In your book, you also give readers a history lesson of the greater area, going back to the end of the Revolutionary War. At the time, Sandusky was part of the Northwest Territories, created in 1787 by congressional ordinance. This fascinating piece of history I didn’t know: “…the ordinance did something the U.S. Constitution had not been able to do—explicitly ban slavery throughout the territory.” That fact, along with the fact that Canada is just across Lake Erie made Sandusky a “critical link” on the Underground Railroad. Can you tell us another historical fact of the area, one that maybe didn’t make it into the book?

Sandusky had been at the center of innovation in the 1800s. I mentioned in the book that the first chartered railroad west of the Allegheny Mountains was started in Sandusky, The Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad. The railroad created a demand for skilled mechanics and engineers and that is what attracted my great, great grandfather, Jonathan Whitworth who emigrated from England. It was his son who was one of the founders of the crayon company.

It’s also worth mentioning that at the very end of the 1800s Sandusky begin building segments of an electric interurban railway that later merged Lake Shore Electric Railway that connected numerous small communities with Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit. The was the second railway of its kind in the country. Coincidentally, Thomas Edison had been born in Milan, Ohio, in Erie County just 10 miles south of Sandusky.

The American Crayon Company, at its peak, employed about 500 factory workers, salespeople, and staff across several offices around the country, with the factory in Sandusky. What was Sandusky like in this heyday?

I don’t know if it was the heyday, but as a child in the 1960s, Sandusky, like so many other small and medium sized towns, still had a thriving downtown shopping district including a department store. It was in the early 1970s that the Sandusky mall was built south of town and the downtown followed the pattern of so many others with stores closing. What’s ironic is now many of these malls are struggling to survive or closing. I’d like to think people truly value the downtown experience of a real town.

There are glossy, full-color photos in the center of the book that really are compelling. Can you talk about your favorite photo(s)—one that was a challenge to get, maybe, or one with personal significance?

I suppose the one that I’m partial to is of William Curtis in his Union Army uniform holding a sword. He has the most intense, hardened look on this face. I try to imagine what he must have been thinking at the time.

Your personal connections are what makes this a memoir, even more than a fascinating history of a place, and I most like when you consider how the generations before you might have felt. Your great-grandfather went from grocery clerk at age fifteen to a bank president to American Crayon Company president in thirty years. This is American Dream kind of stuff. You went to law school and have a good career. What do you think he would say if he time-traveled to the here and now to see you?

I’m not so sure I could imagine what he would say or think. I know, I’d have many questions for him about how he learned about business and how he took a risk with financing the crayon company.

I found the parallels you draw in the book between Sandusky and your personal journey really illuminating. You write of the difficult times in your family, when over the course of a few years, your grandmother died, and then your parents divorced and you moved with your mother to a nearby town. You say, “The outside world in the mid-seventies also seemed to be in decline…Familiar stores in downtown Sandusky were closing and land was being cleared south of the town for the new Sandusky Mall.” (If that’s not a death-knell for our historic downtowns, I don’t know what is.) Do you think these parallel declines helped push you to go away for your education and career?

I didn’t think about it consciously. I suppose I didn’t see the kind of opportunities that I wanted in my future with so many businesses closing. The metals company that my father worked for in Sandusky was bought out and he was transferred out of state. I even worked there a summer in college but that foundry was later shuttered and demolished. I suppose I was lucky enough to have very supportive and encouraging parents who had lots of books in the house that exposed me to many different places and ideas. Pursuing a law degree was what I felt was a form of security in reaction to the insecurity I saw around me.

After college, you made the same journey your grandfather did 70 years before, across the U.S. from Sandusky to Pasadena, California, where he had American Crayon offices. Why did you make his trek? And what was the most important thing you learned from yours?

I think having an adventure before I stepped into the professional world was something I had to do and it was also a way for me to connect with my grandfather who had just gotten out of the army after World War I [when he made his trip]. One of the parallels that I loved was that we were both 26 when we made our trips. I was preparing to start my first job as a lawyer and he was preparing to go into the family business at American Crayon. I even hope to write a book about his trip and my trip, together. I published a magazine article out of it and I still haven’t given up the thought that I could do a book on our parallel trips, me following in his footsteps.

In 1988, you moved to D.C. and started your professional journey. Fast-forward to your book. Why did you write it when you did? What was the impetus?

In short it was loss. In 2014, I first read about the abandoned American Crayon Company in Sandusky and the long drawn out wrangling over its demolition. A short time later, I lost both my mother and sister who were part of that crayon story. Two years in a row, I returned to Oakland Cemetery in Sandusky, both times to bury them next to the founding family members of the crayon company. My father also died about this time and I felt I was the last one standing that had the stories I wanted to share.

You talk about Sandusky as a younger sibling of Cleveland to the east and Detroit to the west. I’m reminded of the smokestacks our native cities have in common. You’ve been taking your story to the Cleveland area and other neighboring places. I’m guessing you’re hearing some similar stories of the rise and fall of industry and small manufacturing in other places. What’s the reception been like?

It seems like a natural fit to me that the story of an innovative and successful industry hits its bust. People understand that story in Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Detroit, and many of the other Midwestern industrial towns. In researching my book, I read a lot of other memoirs from these cities and understood their build, boom, and bust stories.

You write, “…under the monochrome, gray skies of northern Ohio, was an explosion of color.” Northern Ohio, along the lake, is known for its overcast skies. I think it’s romantic but it can take some getting used to. I’m imagining crayons and colors mean so much more to children who don’t get to glimpse the sun from November through March. (That might be an exaggeration.) Can you tell us a personal childhood crayon story that didn’t make it into the book?

When I wrote that, I kept thinking about the contrast between the grayness of northern Ohio in the winter and the spectrum of brilliant colors being produced on the inside of the factory, and how the colors were being sent out to the world to help brighten things up.

The fall of the American Crayon Company mirrors the decline of manufacturing and industry across the Rust Belt. What did it mean for Sandusky when the company was sold and the manufacturing moved to Mexico? What did it mean for you, personally, as a son of Sandusky and a legacy child of the American Crayon Company?

It seemed like adding insult to injury in ending such a great company. When I spoke at the Sadusky library about my book, there were union members from the factory who told me they refused to train their Mexican counterparts and that scabs had to be brought in to try to train them on the antiquated and delicate equipment. When the venture in Mexico failed within a year of its relocation, it seemed like there was some sort of small irony at play–equipment taken from the American Crayon Company transported outside the country was never meant to operate anywhere else but Sandusky, Ohio, U.S.A.

What has it meant for you to see Sandusky come back again, the action on the waterfront, new condos where old industry was. What are your favorite places to go when you go back? How about your favorite local beer or other beverage? And, if there is one, a particularly Sandusky meal you never miss?

It’s actually very inspiring to see Sandusky making this transition. It will never be the same type of manufacturing center it was but I don’t think that could ever come back. What I’m pleased to see is the preservation of some of its great old limestone buildings and city and business leaders looking ahead to capitalize on Sandusky’s location on the waterfront along with nearby Cedar Point Amusement Park and Sandusky’s other historical sites and markers like the Underground Railroad.

Favorite places are the downtown waterfront, including a look at the coal docks that are a prominent feature of Sandusky’s skyline. Other stops are the Sandusky Library and Oakland Cemetery and newer spots like the rooftop bar of the Kilbourne Hotel that overlooks Sandusky Bay.

As far as food goes, whenever I’m in town, I always stop for a Lake Erie Perch sandwich.

Color Capital of the World: Growing Up with the Legacy of a Crayon Company

By John W. Kropf

University of Akron Press $25

Be sure to follow John on Twitter (@JKropf)–especially if you’re in Ohio. His pinned tweet lists his author events, a few of them next month!

Like this interview? 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 an author interview or book review of yours might be right for Rust Belt Girl? Pitch me through this site’s contact function.

Check out my categories above for more 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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Posted on January 21, 2023January 21, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 19 Comments

Reading rn …

WordPress, the lovely content management system that hosts the Rust Belt Girl blog and so many others, is running something called #Bloganuary. Hmm. Not exactly catchy. However, today’s prompt spurred me to write to you, dear followers and readers.

“Who is your favorite author and why?”

Well, we could be here a year, and I hate to choose favorites. But let’s go with the author I’m reading right now, who is certainly among my favorites. If you’ve ever had a friend who knows just the right thing to say when you’re mourning or elated, terribly empty or full to bursting … you know what it’s like to read Ross Gay.

You know, that friend you can sit with in companionable silence (is there anything better for us avid readers?) without any awkwardness. How is it that an author whose business is words exudes a watchful, waiting, respectful quietude? Yet, at the same time, Gay’s words demand to be read–in the chillest come-and-stay-awhile kind of way. The latest book from the Youngstown, Ohio, native, Inciting Joy: Essays, is an open invitation. Yet, let me make clear there is nothing easy about Gay’s work. This is heart-opening-with-a-crowbar stuff, and that takes work on the reader’s part. But if there is a more grace-filled writer alive today I don’t know them. For comparison: think a secular Henri Nouwen (who was, of course, a Catholic priest.) I bet Gay would excel at the Jesuits’ daily examen, just sayin’.

But isn’t that what the best essays do? Examine something of the author’s life? And in our reading, then, our own understanding is enlarged, enlightened. My favorite essay of the book so far is “Through My Tears I Saw (Death: The Second Incitement). It’s my favorite for its subject matter, the author’s father, “an uncomplaining dude if ever there was one” in his last days on earth; and also for Gay’s humor and voice (see: “dude”) when grappling with a subject as difficult as a parent’s death. I’m not spoiling anything to give you a bit of the conclusion of that essay: “It was through my tears I saw my father was a garden.” (And, yes, if you’re wondering: this is a book about joy–creating it, fashioning it out of what you have. Find me someone who doesn’t have pains and sorrows. Joy can be ours, too.)

There’s a lot of gardening, a lot of tending and watering, nurturing, pruning, and surviving in Gay’s work. Read a couple essays and you’ll quickly learn that this is not only metaphorical gardening. The author is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard in Indiana, where he’s a professor and a poet and essayist, and, from the sounds of it, a fairly uncomplaining dude, himself.

One of his poems from a previous book, “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands,” which begins in a garden, inspired a short essay of mine, “Ode to an Ode about Hands.” Written during the darker days of the pandemic, my essay is about grief. How we tend to it, what we make of grief, is directly related to the joy we feel. (It’s not free is what Gay’s saying, I think, and I agree.)

Are you new to Ross Gay? Where to begin? I think of his The Book of Delights: Essays as the gateway drug. This is the book I gift to family and friends who might not even be big readers. Short essays about absolutely everything (including joy)–there’s a great chance you’ll connect with (and come back to over and over) at least a few. From there, I recommend his Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, an award-winning collection of poems that reviewer Evie Shockley called “shout-outs to the earth’s abundance.” The Ross Gay trinity of poetry, gardening, and basketball wouldn’t be complete without an ode to the hardcourt, which you can find in Be Holding, an epic poem and a “love song” to basketball legend Dr. J.

Now for a couple plugs: Lit Youngstown, my favorite community literary organization, is hosting Gay twice this year. The first is an online reading; the second is the in-person, weekend-long Fall Literary Festival in Northeast Ohio, where Gay will be one of the featured writers. I’ll be at both. Maybe I’ll see you there!

Who’s your favorite author? Who are you reading right now? Are you taking part in #bloganuary? Have you made any fun connections?

Want more Rust Belt writing, book reviews, author interviews, writing advice, essays, guest posts, and more? Follow me here. Thanks!

And check back here next week, when I will be interviewing John Kropf, author of Color Capital of the World: Growing up with the Legacy of a Crayon Company. You won’t want to miss it!

*header image is the cover of Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay (Algonquin Books, 2022); jacket design by Christopher Moisan

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Posted on January 12, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 2 Comments

A review of The History of Our Vagrancies by Jason Irwin

By Marjorie Maddox

In his often haunting and unsettling poetry collection, The History of Our Vagrancies, Jason Irwin travels between neighborhood bars, churches, soup kitchens, diners, prisons, and county fairs. The real setting, however, is the grit and blur between past and present, hopelessness and hope—that often hard-to-define mix of place and identity just outside the obvious. “Aren’t we all living in the parentheses?” he asks. “One pine in a forest, in a forest in a forest.” In this way, Irwin examines our inner and outer landscapes, as well as what we reject or claim as “home”—with all its traditions, beliefs, and parentage. He holds up for us “our vagrancies, the histories of our comings and goings,/the doubts that invade our greatest aspirations, and propel our return.//Welcome home they say. Welcome home and don’t come back.”

Not surprisingly, then, several poems address and confront what has been passed down—both literally and metaphorically—from parents to son. In the book’s opening piece, “Poem about My Father Disguised as the End of the World,” Irwin lays out many of the book’s themes: landscape as “a façade,” “the unavoidable reckoning/of empty rooms,” both influence and suspicion of religion, and a childhood of mixed messages. “My father was an asteroid,” he states. “Some nights I caught sight of him crashing/through space. Other times he was the whiskey/in my glass, the voice crying ‘No.’” From the start, we understand there will be few divine or human saviors in these poems—“they’re only smoke signals in the fog”—the poet must find his own murky way.

Sometimes such recognitions occur while confronting parent/child relationships. In “Photograph of My Father, 1959,” Irwin confirms “I know we would not/have been friends.” While “still needing you,/needing to blame you,” Irwin as son can’t escape “all the words/that turn to smoke/in [his and his father’s] throats.” Likewise in “My Father Asks Me to Go to Church,” he acknowledges his father’s “own troubled alchemies.” Though they share a belief in miracles, their definitions vary drastically. Add to this the mother. When, in “Soothsayer,” a local evangelist demands to take the young Irwin to church to be healed, the mother counters, “’I don’t have time for this shit.’” Thus, each parent influences how the author paradoxically views the world.

But let’s back up to how the author defines himself. In “The Condition of the Self as Related to Certain Trees,” he catalogs: “Small town, born and bred/my body…gnarled and irregular….Amputee, Dextrocardia….an old man’s hat….Son, lover, husband, fool.” In “Still Life with Leg Brace & Pontiac,” he juxtaposes his grandfather’s polished “’73 Grand Prix,” the possibilities inherent in his own first day of kindergarten, and how, underneath childhood’s fancy apparel, “[His] four-toed club foot fits/inside [his] shoe like the corpse of someone else’s foot.” Elsewhere in the book, he recognizes himself in a billboard at the county fair “advertising oddities” and as composing an alternate ending to life where “we’re happy with the people we’ve become.”

And yet in The History of Our Vagrancies, the poet also looks toward others—artists, authors, painters, philosophers, waitresses, old “codgers”—for insight. There’s the church visit to see rows of prisoners waving their hands, swaying, and singing “On Eagle’s Wings.” There’s Monk, Miles, and Bird and “a song/you find yourself riffing on/…all the colors/that kaleidoscope this dream/we keep dreaming….” There’s stealing Kerouac from the library, acknowledging the saint in Max at the soup kitchen, and recognizing in the silence and gaze of old men “the ruins of this company town,/where the sunbaked blacktop goes on/forever.”

In a particularly poignant poem, Irwin describes phantom pain—“Hammer hits to the synapse. Blood thumping like a subwoofer in 4/4 time”—as well as how “[i]t no longer startles [him], like cruelty…” At poem’s end, he explains, “I shift in my seat, and scratch at the empty air.” Similarly, in “Things We Don’t Like to Talk About,” the pain and confession are familiar: regret, grief, fear. Both phantom and real, the hurt also is ours.

And yet, in addition to this sometimes “delirium of shadows and muffled voices,” The History of Our Vagrancies hints at moments of optimism. In the prose poem “Instinct,” Irwin insists, despite evidence to the contrary, “[T]here’s a room inside each of us where everything we’ve lost is/gathered.” Elsewhere, he carves “epitaphs into the sticky wood [of a bar],/believing, as only the doomed and pure of heart believe,/that we’ll be remembered.” At its end, the collection sounds a call to acknowledge and accept beauty where we are: “Look at the two of use sitting at the table drinking wine./Each moment of our lives has brought us here. Each moment/could have as easily led us somewhere else.”

Yes, look. On these rust-belt streets, on these ordinary corners, you, too, may imagine how “the sky transforms,” how once “God held us in his hands.” You, too, may gawk “at the Polish waitress/as she dances across the tile floor” and even join in. “Sometimes it takes a lifetime/,” explains Irwin, “…to let go of the torn shirt of our failures.” In The History of Our Vagrancies, Jason Irwin encourages us to do just that.

The History of our Vagrancies

By Jason Irwin

The Main Street Rag $14

Jason Irwin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020), and two chapbooks. He was a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow and has also had nonfiction published in various journals including the Santa Ana Review and The Catholic Worker. He lives in Pittsburgh. Please see www.jasonirwin.blogspot.com.

Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 13 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (Paraclete, International Book Award Winner), and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts), an ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist International Book Awards), A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry; I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book), and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press). In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, based on her daughter’s paintings (www.hafer.work) + works by other artists, will be published in 2023 (Shanti Arts). Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com. (Author photo credit: Melanie Rae Buonavolonta)

Rebecca here, with many thanks to Marjorie for her wonderful review of Jason’s latest poetry collection. I can’t wait to pick it up! What are you reading and writing this month, as we dig into the new year? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Are you a Rust Belt poet or writer? Do you write book reviews–or conduct interviews of Rust Belt authors? If so, think of Rust Belt Girl for a guest post, like this one. And check out the handy categories above for more writing from rusty places.

Find me on FB and on IG and Twitter @MoonRuark

And follow me here. Thanks!

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Posted on December 29, 2022December 28, 2022 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 15 Comments

2022 Reading Superlatives: top book picks and passages

With thanks to one of my fave book bloggers and reviewers (and Rebeccas), Bookish Beck, for the inspiration … I present to you my year in books (or novels, really–I do love an escape!), in a nutshell.

Note that this reading summary doesn’t include the books I read as a beta reader or as a member of a fantastic writers group I joined this year–a 2022 highlight–or books I read for a class. Then there are also the craft books and collections of poetry and stories that I dip in out of and don’t always log. Do I sound like I’m making excuses? The thing is, I never feel like I read as much as I want to, but I try.

Longest book read this year: Chimes of a Lost Cathedral by Janet Fitch at 752 pages. Was it worth all those many pages set during the Russian Revolution? Mostly yes, worth all 22 CDs of the audiobook listened to on the way to and from my kids’ school. Second longest, if you’re taking notes: The Nix by Nathan Hill at 640 pages. Another (very different) historical novel, that one was one of the funniest books I read this year. (Want a book that will undoubtedly make you cry? Try the gorgeous Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.)

Most popular book read this year (735,545 reads on Goodreads): An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. Did it live up to the hype? Pretty much, even if the ending was tied up with a bow a little too neatly for my tastes.

Best first line: “God was dead: to begin with.” From Winter by Ali Smith. This is a play on the famous first line of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: “Marley was dead: to begin with.”

The best first line also leads into the best opening paragraph, imho:

God was dead: to begin with.
    And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead.
Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and
art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead.
Literature was dead. The book was dead.
Modernism, postmodernism, realism and
surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music,
disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead.
Decency, society, family values were dead. The past
was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was
dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead.
Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all
dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead.
Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead.
Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was
dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media
was dead. The internet was dead, Twitter,
instagram, facebook, google, dead.

Have I gotten around to the other novels in this seasonal quartet? Not yet.

Most challenging book read this year (but not as challenging as it would have been if I’d not read it as an audiobook): Matrix by Lauren Groff. Worth it? Definitely. Also it was the first novel I read of hers. What should I try of hers next?

Most Rust Belt-y (and that’s a very good thing): Hungry Town by Jason Kapcala. Read my interview with the author here. Have you every made a play list for something you were writing? Check out the author’s take on literary play lists here.

Book I’m most glad I read despite the literary community’s love of hating the author: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen. Another doorstopper (at 592 pages), this is the first book in a projected trilogy. Do I plan to read the next couple? Maybe, but the more than a little depressing personal lives of the characters make me a little reticent to re-enter their world.

(And now you see why the Franzen also wins for worst cover!)

And last and the opposite of least … my favorite book of 2022 (drumroll, por favor): Book of Extraordinary Tragedies by Joe Meno. If you’re on Twitter, you know I can’t shut up about this book. Really, it’s wonderful and, the author says, his most autobiographical novel yet. This book–that ticks all my boxes for a story that sings–also wins for a favorite passage that will stick with me well into the new year:

[The MC says] I put on my headphones, pull up my hood, and go through my CDs, looking for the right composition.
     Be it a riot, Mozart. Having your throat cut, Beethoven.
Be it the beginning or end of the universe, Bach. Getting
your nose broke, Wagner. Having your head stomped,
Mahler. A knife in the back, Bartók. Death by drowning,
Haydn. Blunt-force trauma, Grieg. Slow poisoning, Puc-
cini. Blown to pieces by cannon fire? Brahms. A car acci-
dent with multiple fatalities? Stravinsky. Strangled to death
by someone you know and love. Stauss. Overdose? Liszt.
Suffocation? Handel. Internal bleeding? Ravel. But what symphony do you play while riding your wobbly bike across the southside?

And that’s a wrap! Want to see more of my year in books, find me at Goodreads.

Please share your top reads for 2022 in the comments. I’d love to hear about what you’ve been reading–or writing.

Want more Rust Belt writing, book reviews, author interviews, writing advice, essays, guest posts, and more? Follow me here. Thanks!

And a very happy, book-filled New Year to all!

*free header image courtesy of Pexels

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Posted on December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 8 Comments

From Belgium to the Rust Belt

A guest post by John W. Miller

The genesis of the PBS film Moundsville and its companion blog Moundsville.org, about a classic American postindustrial town, was a mid-life crisis mixed with the 2016 election and a curiosity about the truth of Rust Belt communities.

Six years ago, I was on staff at the Wall Street Journal, covering mining and the steel industry out of its Pittsburgh bureau.

Like everybody else, I watched as the Trump-Clinton presidential election blew anger, confusion, and fear through the culture.

Personally, I was going through my own crisis. I was about to turn 40, and experiencing mid-life’s deepening cravings for meaning and direction. That second mountain beckoned.

After 13 years roaming the world for one of the world’s great newspapers, I simply wasn’t enjoying it anymore. So I quit, and started climbing. After some discernment, I decided to stay in Pittsburgh.

Poking around for creative projects, I started driving to Moundsville, a small town in West Virginia on the Ohio River 75 minutes from Pittsburgh. In 2013, I’d reported on it for the Journal.

photo of a 2,200-year old Native American burial mound in Moundsville, West Virginia — 2,200-year old Native American burial mound in Moundsville, West Virginia

The town fascinated me. I grew up in Belgium, the child of American musicians who’d wandered around Europe in 1976 and dropped an anchor in Brussels. I’m fascinated by places in America that tell a deeper story about my ancestral homeland.

In late 2017, I connected with filmmaker Dave Bernabo. We put together a proposal to tell the story of Moundsville in a documentary. I thought that town was a perfect place to tell a deeper story about America because it’s built around a 2,200-year old Native American burial mound, it harbored a glorious industrial age including the world’s biggest toy factory (Marx Toys, maker of Rock’em Sock’em Robots!), and it now subsists on a service-based economy anchored by a Walmart. There’s also a lot of pain and grief in Moundsville. In a generation, the town lost 8,000 jobs. The population halved. Young people left for Pittsburgh and New York.

Rock’em Sock’em Robots! first manufactured by Marx Toys of Moundsville, West Virginia

David and I spent most of 2018 driving down to Moundsville and interviewing people. At the end of each interview, we’d ask a question about Trump and national politics. Almost always, the answers lacked depth. It dawned on me: These people didn’t know about Trump. They didn’t live in DC. They weren’t very thoughtful about politics. But when we asked them about their work lives and their parents’ work lives, they engaged with depth and wisdom. Those questions, I realized, were actually loving. Almost always, I decided, asking about Trump simply wasn’t loving.

After experimenting with a voiceover, we opted to tell the story without a so-called “voice of God” as narrator. The movie is an oral history, without any academics or outside experts.

In our interviews, we heard about grief a lot, but we also heard and told tales of resilience, from a back-to-the-land farming couple, a small manufacturer of kitchen cabinets, and the leaders of a burgeoning tourism sector. The ancient burial mound looming above the town is a daily reminder that civilizations ebb and flow, and that time moves only forward. My hope is that we acknowledged grief in a healing way while pointing the way forward with stories of hope and perseverance.

In December 2018, we premiered Moundsville in the town itself, a practice of sharing work that anthropologists recommend. Over 170 people showed up. A few grumbled about our portrayal of segregation in the film, but at the end, we received an ovation.

A month later, we screened at America, the Jesuit magazine I had started writing for, in New York City, on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan across the street from News Corp., home of the Wall Street Journal.

To my surprise–and gratitude–the movie holds up. People appreciate its openness and listening attitude. “This amazing project reflects a diversity of stories that I needed to experience to remind me of hope and resilience and kindness,” wrote Anupama Jain, head of a Pittsburgh diversity training group, on Twitter.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned making and showing Moundsville is that every place carries an organic placeness that deserves respect for its uniqueness. You can find wisdom and thoughtfulness in people when you engage them over that place and recognize its differences from your place. We can’t love our neighbors as brothers and sisters if we expect them to be just like us.

I created the Moundsville.org site to promote the film, but quickly found an audience for pieces I was posting. It gets an average of 10,000 readers a month. So I keep writing and posting. I’ve written over 100 pieces for the blog, on everything from Lady Gaga’s mom, who grew up in Moundsville, to people going to watch baseball inside the prison in the 1950s.

I’m still on a journey of figuring out a new kind of journalism that suits my skills, and my heart. I’ve co-directed Out of Reach, a new movie about the American Dream. I’m developing a podcast called Philosophy with Strangers, where I go with an older friend to small towns and ask big questions. First episode: We went to Charleroi, PA and asked people: What is happiness? I contribute regularly to America, a monthly magazine run by Jesuits. I coach baseball. Lots of other stuff, too. But wherever my career takes me, it was forever changed by the road that ran through Moundsville, West Virginia.

John W. Miller is a Pittsburgh-based writer and filmmaker, and co-director of the PBS film Moundsville.

~~~

What are you watching, reading, and writing this month. Let me know in the comments…

Are you a Rust Belt writer? What’s your story? Would you care to share? Do you write book reviews–or conduct interviews of Rust Belt authors? If so, think of Rust Belt Girl for a guest post. And check out the handy categories for more writing from rusty places.

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