Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 11 Comments

My interview with Amy Jo Burns, author of Mercury

Let’s begin with a sample paragraph from Amy Jo’s stunning literary (also mystery) family saga:

Spring was breaking through in lilac buds and daffodil shoots, but winter held on. Tufts of dirty snow clung to curbs, and porch steps, and parking lots. The heat had stopped working in the Citation, and Marley shivered. Theo was bundled in the backseat; she caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror. Then her eye snagged something else behind her–someone limping from a snowbank into the intersection. Marley slowed to a stop and turned around.

Whew. Good stuff.

Amy Jo, your main character in this Western-PA-set novel is Marley, whom we first meet when she’s 17. You left your Western-PA hometown for college around that age. What was it like to write this book and “inhabit” Marley’s character in a place (and time) similar to the one you were raised in? And how similar is your real-life family to Marley’s found family?

    Marley is a really special character to me. When I was creating her, I took the qualities I love most about my best friends from home and put them into her character. Her willingness to step into someone else’s messiness, her ability to tell the truth in such a loving way, and her desire to build a business with her own creative stamp on it are all qualities I really admire about my oldest friends. Marley showcases what I think real resilience actually looks like. It isn’t perfection or misery or loneliness—it just comes through in a big-hearted, flawed human who shows up for the people in her life. 

    The Joseph family in the novel is like mine in that we’re both a family of roofers—which means both houses were full of grand storytellers, brave hearts, and lots of tar-stained jeans. The house I imagined the Josephs living in was inspired by the old Victorian house my grandparents used to own in my hometown. I’d always loved that house and couldn’t imagine any other place a family of roofers would live. The characters in Mercury come from my imagination, but the bond they feel with each other—the sometimes too-close intimacy they have with one another is absolutely something any member of my extended family can relate to. When it comes down to it, I’d say both families care about the same thing—keeping people safe under roofs and on top of them.

    This novel is mostly set in the fictionalized town of Mercury. How did you go about constructing this place, this “forgotten Rust Belt town.” Did you use Pinterest boards or clip photos from magazines? Was there map-making involved to mark where the salon, post office, and library stand? And, as the daughter of real-life roofers, do you picture this town from an aerial/rooftop view?

    Mercury is heavily inspired by my own hometown, which I also wrote about in my memoir Cinderland. When I started writing the early pages of this book, I knew it had to be set in Mercury—a place I know, love, and left. So most of the early “research” came from my own memory, and then I squared it with pictures from the 1990s and also by talking with my parents. My dad drew a map of the church steeple and attic (which both play an important role in the story), and I talked with my mom about what it was like to help build a roofing business from an administrative perspective. It was really special to get to share a bit of this project with them, especially since so much of the book is about what it means to belong and how we claim home for ourselves.

    I hadn’t imagined my hometown from any aerial views until I started putting characters on roofs pretty early in the process of drafting the book, and it was the coolest thing to envision this place anew from an entirely fresh perspective. I was able to find a few aerial videos of my hometown to watch, which really helped me fill in the landscape for what these characters find when they’re up higher than everyone else.

    I’d call this book a literary family saga; however, there is also a lot of romance—some steamy! What’s your best tip for writing romance or sex that deepens character and moves plot?

    I would say my best tip is that sex is never just sex. Falling in love is one of the most monumental things we experience as humans—it shows us at our best and our worst—and I think it’s really important to reflect it in literature. When I’m writing romantic scenes, I’m always considering what each character is risking about themselves in a very unique way—are they sharing something no one else knows? Are they saying one thing and thinking another? What is it about falling in (or out of) love that changes how they see themselves? What past events have shaped how a person approaches their most intimate moments? Those scenes are such a great way to show what a character deeply wants and what they fear, whether they’re aware of it or not. And when all that juicy backstory collides with someone else who is just as complicated—it’s fictional gold!

    Like in your last (gorgeous) novel, Shiner, you explore profound female friendships in Mercury. Can you talk about how you developed the friendship on the page between Marley and Jade? When you’re writing, do you do character studies/background/backstory with detailed info–any that doesn’t make it into the book?

    Mostly what I do when I’m building relationships between characters is think about it A LOT. I write many drafts over a long period of time and throw out a lot of material, usually because that’s how I’m getting to know the characters. Scenes will start off as sketches and they get more detailed as I learn who the characters are. Many of the scenes between Jade and Marley felt very cliché for a long time as I was working, and I’d have to go back in and re-work them to go deeper so they felt earned and true. 

    I am such an impatient person (what a terrible trait for a writer!), so character studies always feel like they’re detracting from the real heat of the story I’m working on. The only thing I usually do outside of drafting itself is create a playlist for each book that I write, and I’ll include songs for each of the characters. It helps me track down their psyches, their moods, their secrets. You can learn a lot about a person if you know what songs they’re listening to when they’re alone.

    In this novel you touch on dementia. What kind of research was involved there? As this book is set in the 90s mostly, was there any other, historical research you had to conduct for verisimilitude?

    I had a family member with a form of dementia (though under different circumstances than those in the book), so I used that as the basis for building it in the novel. I decided not to do much clinical research on it because I wanted to portray it through the eyes of a family who isn’t sure what is going on. So often we don’t get the answers we are looking for in real life when it comes to medical diagnoses, and it was really important to me to give that truth a lot of space in the novel. 

    Motherhood is portrayed in a very real, and sometimes heartbreaking, way in this novel. Marley’s mother-in-law says, “This life is unmerciful to mothers.” You’ve got two young children at home. How has your writing practice (and product) changed since becoming a mom? And, follow-up, what is your favorite novel for exploring themes of motherhood?

    The biggest difference in my writing practice is that I have to keep my working hours to match my kids’ schedule. It is GIGANTICALLY easier now that they’re both in school, though I rarely get done what I’d like to in the course of a day. I remember when my son was an infant and my writing sessions were so short, I thought I’d never finish the book I was working on, which turned out to be Shiner. Sometimes my writing sessions would only produce a few hundred words. I had to learn to talk myself through it and say, “Maybe no one will ever see it, but I’d still like to try.” And I’d repeat that to myself over and over when my daily frustrations came. And the book got done!

    In terms of my favorite book about motherhood, I once attended a talk by Nicole Krauss just after she’d published Great House. Someone in the audience asked her how she was able to write and be a mother, and she said, “I wouldn’t have been able to write this book if I hadn’t become a mother.” It was so encouraging to me, as I was contemplating how I might have kids and continue to write. That story inspires me still.

    A lot of the plot of Mercury centers around the family’s church—but not necessarily around worship. No spoilers, but can you talk about how religion, faith, and or belief works in the world of this novel—and maybe also in your own life?

    My faith is a huge part of my life and my creative process. I think maybe writing books is a form of prayer for me. What I love about it is that the page becomes a place for my uncensored thoughts, my questions, my frustrations, and—most powerfully—the things that I love and I think are worth fighting for. It feels like a quiet place where I can meet God without judgment, where I don’t have to be any other version of myself but the real one. Also, I do a lot of listening when I’m writing which feels very peaceful.

    In this particular story, many of the characters have an idea of what “religion” is, but what they’re all hungry for is faith. Faith in a God who loves them just as they are, and faith in each other. I like to think each of them encounters God in an unexpectedly meaningful way in the book, and usually it’s through they way they learn to love each other.

    For those of us who aren’t just readers but who are also writers, what’s your favorite generative prompt for a writing day when the words just aren’t coming?

    I absolutely recommend starting with a memory from childhood you can’t get out of your head. Try retelling it to yourself from an adult perspective (which you can interpret any way you like). I actually began Mercury in just this way—the opening scene of the book is a memory of mine from a little league game when I was around nine years old. This exercise was how Waylon’s character first came to life.

    Tell us how the reaction to Mercury has been on your visits to libraries, bookstores, etc.?

    It’s been really wonderful. When Shiner came out in spring of 2020, there were no stores open, so getting to visit libraries and bookstores has been the best thing about publishing Mercury. My favorite thing is hearing about readers’ favorite characters and how they saw themselves in the story. I love it when that happens in a book I’m reading, so getting to provide that experience for fellow readers is a real gift.

    What are you writing and reading right now? And what are your kids’ favorite children’s books, lately?

      I love this question! This year I’ve been trying to take my time and read longer books (which I’m calling “biggies”), so right now I’m reading two—Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I’m really enjoying them both. Right now my son, who is nine, is loving the entire Percy Jackson universe by Rick Riordan, and my six-year-old daughter is very into Dog Man by Dav Pilkey and the Max Meow series by John Gallagher. I love seeing them read!

      Writing-wise, right now I’m working on a novel about the true story behind a famous country-folk singer’s disappearance. I don’t know if it will be my next book or not, but I’m really enjoying the work itself. Thank you so much, Rebecca!

      Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and the novel Shiner, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, NPR Best Book of the year, and “told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal,” according to The New York Times. Her latest novel, Mercury, is a Barnes & Noble Book Club Pick, a Book of the Month Pick, a People Magazine Book of the Week, and an Editor’s Choice selection in The New York Times. Amy Jo’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Elle, Good Housekeeping, and the anthology Not That Bad.

      You can find her on Instagram at @burnsamyjo.

      Mercury

      By Amy Jo Burns

      Celadon Books

      Many thanks to Amy Jo Burns for sharing her insights and time–and kid book recs– with us here at Rust Belt Girl. I know I can’t wait to read what’s next from Amy Jo!

      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

      *Photos provided by Amy Jo Burns

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      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 17 Comments

      Welcome to the 2023 Rust Belt Girl round-up…

      I interrupt this Covid haze–mine, yes, I was gifted the virus for Christmas–to present a round-up of all the Rust Belt Girl goodness in 2023, made possible by you amazing readers and followers. (For you math and science types, here are your facts and stats):

      2023 total views: 5,069, from 3,575 viewers, for 231 likes, and 170 comments. Thank you for engaging!

      Most Viewed Post (MVP) 2023: A stellar review of Jason Irwin’s poetry collection, The History of Our Vagrancies, by Marjorie Maddox (Side note: I met Jason in person for the first time and reconnected with Marjorie in October at the Fall Literary Festival in Youngstown.)

      2nd Place for MVP 2023 (and tops for most–and most heartwarming–comments): “Mad Dog, “Steel Poet,” Tim Russell, a literary reflection by poet and publisher Larry Smith. Thank you to Larry for being such a pillar of this literary community. (I also met Tim’s widow, Jodi, for the first time, in October–there were hugs!)

      3rd Place for MVP 2023: The Rabbit Hutch‘s Rust Belt Renaissance, a review by Emma Riva, an author and art writer living in Pittsburgh, who is also the founder and EIC of Petrichor, Pittsburgh’s art scene magazine. Check it out!

      Most Viewed Author Interview: My interview with John W. Kropf, author of Color Capital of the World. (Though John and I both live in the Greater Washington D.C. area, as luck would have it, we were in Ohio at the same time earlier this year, and I was able to meet him and his lovely wife Eileen at a reading and book-signing not far from where Color Capital takes place.)

      And don’t miss all the other 2023 bloggo goodness, including interviews with Mitch James, author of the rural noir novel Seldom Seen; Valerie Neiman, author of YA novel The Lonely Backwater; and David Giffels, author of The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio. (This makes three interviews with David at Rust Belt Girl, some kind of interviewing trifecta!)

      Then there was John W. Miller’s beautiful guest essay: From Belgium to the Rust Belt. (In a fun coincidence, John and I ended up in the same storytelling course this fall–the writing world is a small one.)

      And in other fun blog news, my 2022 review, Enlarging “Rust Belt lit” and Megan Giddings’ The Women Could Fly, was picked up by Belt Magazine in 2023.

      2023 felt pretty good and creative outside of the blog, too: I published a short story and a poem(!) and started querying a novel (a couple of you blog followers and friends beta-read!). I am infinitely lucky and grateful to cross paths with as many of you as I do–even if only on these interwebs.

      I think we deserve a happy and healthy 2024 with all the writerly and readerly connections we desire. Those of you local to these D.C./Baltimore parts, find me on January 14 at EC Poetry & Prose’s Salon Series. Thank you again to Patti, my fellow blogger–and extraordinary poet and spoken word artist “little pi”–for inviting me to read!

      As for Rust Belt Girl, keep in mind that I love a guest post–author interview, book review, or essay on the writing life and beyond–so hit me up.

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

      Oh, and if you want to check out my reading superlatives for 2023, they’re at Goodreads. Or, find me on FB. Share your top posts or top reads for 2023 in the comments. I’d love to hear about your writerly, readerly year.

      (Off to nap…again.)

      *free header image courtesy of Pexels

      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 9 Comments

      My interview with David Giffels, author of The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio

      David Giffels is the author of The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio, coauthored by Jade Dellinger and published by University of Akron Press in 2023.

      …this is a story of five spuds from an industrial wasteland with big ideas. It never should have happened. But it did. And in its wake, it leaves a parable.

      Hold onto your energy domes, readers! I spoke with award-winning author, Akron Ohio’s own David Giffels, about all things Devo–and much more.

      David, how did your Devo fascination begin? How much did you know about the band before you started writing about it?

      My first encounter with Devo was when they were on Saturday Night Live in 1978. I remember it being this spectacle of a rock and roll band, like something I hadn’t seen before—and being equally freaked out and intrigued. This was in their yellow suit era and they were doing their robotic stage moves. My parents were watching with us, and my mom said something about them being from Akron. I don’t know how much that resonated with me then. But I recognize now that I did associate them with the place I was from, and that meant something abstract but important to me then. And it means something very specific to me now, that in their era, Devo really did define what Akron was.

      What made you want to go down the Devo rabbit hole, conducting scores of interviews with Devo members and Devo-tees to write this—and your last Devo book? And what changed between your last book and this one?

      My coauthor Jade Dellinger and I met in 2000 at one of the first of the Devo fan conventions, called DEVOtionals. I was there covering the story for the Akron Beacon Journal and Jade was an independent art curator. I had been dabbling with the notion of writing a book about Devo, because there was no biography of them. At the same time, Jade had been compiling research. We were introduced and immediately hit it off and combined forces.

      In 2003, we published the first serious biography of the band: Are We Not Men? We Are Devo, the title taken from the band’s first album. The book went out of print, and for years we’d wanted to bring it back. When we approached the University of Akron Press about publishing it, we hit on the idea of reshaping it into what we really felt was the heart of the book. The original book covers Devo’s entire career. But the most interesting part is everything that happens up until they become a famous, commercial band: the ten years that takes place in anonymity in Northeast Ohio.

      The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio is revised to tell the story of these outsider artists, who found each other in an unlikely industrial landscape and started to explore all forms of media, art, and music, and what it was like for them to not only be ignored but also almost universally reviled. And yet they stuck to it and found a way into the mainstream. What’s so fascinating is the moment of them making it is also the beginning of the end. I don’t want to spoil the book’s ending, but there’s this moment of: ah, we’ve arrived, and here at the arrival is the specter of doom.

      This book includes so many wonderful photographs of the early days of Devo. That’s a change from the first book, right?

      Yeah, by creating a tighter focus, there was room for more than 80 new photographs that had never been seen before. It’s an amazing collection of memorabilia that we were able to showcase in this book that we couldn’t in the last book. Most of the photos were taken by Bobbie Watson Whitaker, who was a Kent State student and there from the very beginning of the band. She was always taking pictures and really documented Devo’s whole first decade—it’s just amazing.

      What was it about the Rust Belt of the 1970s, and specifically Northeast Ohio, that was the perfect petri dish to birth Devo?

      I make the argument in the intro to the book that Devo couldn’t have come from anywhere except Akron and Kent, really. There are factors in their development and aesthetic and philosophy that are directly tied to their environment. The most important is that the key members of Devo were students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the national guard murdered four students and wounded several others. Two of them were friends of Devo co-founder Jerry Casale. He witnessed the event, and it changed everything. Devo’s dabbling with the philosophy that humans are evolving in reverse—de-evolution, where they got their band name—became something much more real. Here was an inhuman act by the government that happened right before Casale’s eyes, and it changed his life.

      Then there’s the waning industrial backdrop of Northeast Ohio, the factories and the monochromatic gray polluted skies, the monolithic blimp hanging overhead. It almost had a German Expressionist feel, and it worked like an art-directed backdrop for the music Devo was making. Early on, they were working with mechanical sounds, and while they are not an industrial band, they have a strong industrial aesthetic. The yellow suits, their defining uniform in the early days of the band, came from a janitorial supply company that supplied the factories—so they were picking up on these industrial elements.

      Another very important factor specific to Northeast Ohio was a guy named Ghoulardi, who hosted a Friday night B-horror-movie show out of Cleveland. He wore a weird wig and sunglasses and performed in this hipster schtick way. He was this anti-authoritarian guy, who played primal rock and roll in the background while he was doing his monologue in between segments of the movies he made fun of. Out of Cleveland, he was seen by vast numbers of teens in the 1960s, who were also watching Ed Sullivan and the Beatles. Many artists and musicians who came from Northeast Ohio site Ghoulardi as a key influence for their twisted sense of humor and rebellious natures, and that was the case with Devo.

      And then there’s the work ethic of a working factory town. Devo stuck to this not-very-commercial art project for a decade—and that’s really the heart of the book—before they got any validation. That comes from that stick to it attitude that is baked into the nature of an industrial landscape. 

      What’s a favorite story of yours from Devo’s early days?

      One of my favorite stories is the way they would get gigs around the local music scene. Most of the bars would only hire cover bands. So the guys from Devo would call up the owner and say, “Hey, we’re this band called Devo and we play covers,” and they’d get booked. And they’d go on stage and say, “Here’s one by Bad Company,” and then they’d play one of their tuneless songs. They were using a homemade electronic drum kit at the time that made these atonal sounds of metal on metal. So this was clearly not a Bad Company song. And they’d get through one song and then say, “Okay, here’s one by Foghat,” and they’d do it again. By about the third song, they’d get the plug pulled or be paid by the club owner to leave. But they just fed on that. It was a total punk rock move—without the glamour of punk.

      Do you label Devo punk rock or new wave?

      I think Devo is new wave, and Iggy Pop makes the case too that they are the defining new wave band. Their quirkiness, the colorful presentation, the use of new technology, they embraced and embodied all of that. Not only would I call them new wave but I’d say they are the quintessential new wave band. 

      Devo was made up of art majors and outsider artists who were just as interested in Art Devo and related artistic theories as in music. How much of this was real artistic statement? Performance art? Something else?

      The first two people who started playing around with this were Jerry Casale and his friend Bob Lewis, who met at end of 1960s as freshmen at Kent State. As often happens with curious people when they make that big step from high school to college, every new idea seems like a bolt of lightning. Those two started having these late-night, pot smoke-fueled conversations about the fact that humans were devolving, and they started to write poems and manifestos about this, and I’m sure it had a serious intent, but it was also theoretical and philosophical. It was something they were trying out, as one does at that stage of one’s life.

      I don’t think it was a joke, but until May 4, 1970, I don’t think there was as strong a political and social intent behind it. But the Kent State shootings changed this from theoretical to graphically real, right in front of them. Everything changed going forward.

      One thing Devo did well was to mix up the joke with the serious intent in a way that one can’t be extracted from the other. So many songs that could be taken on the surface one way have something completely other underneath. Take for example “Whip It,” which has been cited among the Top 5 songs about masturbation, but it’s also a song that’s very much Dale Carnegie-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps: “When a problem comes along, you must whip it,” as a serious self-help statement. As I write in the book, if the intent was serious, it was meant to be laughed at, and if it was a joke, it was meant to be taken seriously. 

      Devo’s costumes are iconic. Can you talk about the importance of the masks and uniforms they made into their costumes?

      Masks go back to their very first performance in 1973—50 years ago—at an art festival at Kent State. Mark Mothersbaugh by default became the singer, and he was not at all comfortable on stage. The band was almost anti-music; they were making really atonal, mechanical kinds of sounds. Mothersbaugh wore a mask because he was terrified to be on stage. So it began with that, but as they went on and began experimenting with a performance art kind of presentation of their image, they started to adapt—first of all this sense of a uniform. They wanted to be seen as indistinguishable as individuals; that was part of the philosophy of Devo. It was part of the aesthetic, but also the philosophy that the individual is not important.

      One thing they were trying to do was to undermine what had become part of established rock and roll culture. Men with beards, wearing faded jeans and leather—Devo wanted to reject that. The way to do it would be to put on a uniform and confront what rock and roll was. Of course, the first splash they made was by taking the quintessential rock and roll song, “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones, and turning it completely inside out. Musically and visually, that’s what they were doing to a rock and roll culture that thought it was radical.

      How about the red, cone-shaped hats?

      If you were going to have one new wave symbol, it would be those red energy dome hats they wore for the Freedom of Choice campaign of 1980, which are almost always referred to as the upside-down-flowerpots. And that seems like a silly, cartoonish, tossed-off gimmick. And yet you could write an academic thesis about what the energy domes really are. First of all, they’re drawn from an early image in Jerry Casale’s imaginative mind as a student at St. Patrick’s Elementary School in Kent, Ohio. He would walk down the hallways, and above him were these light fixtures that were art deco ziggurat shapes. Something about them stuck in his artistic mind.

      Devo had a new look for every album and was very much about their visual presentation. So, when the members were designing the Freedom of Choice look, Casale went with this art deco, ziggurat shape. But it wasn’t just that. Devo also decided to call them energy domes, and the idea was that this would be a way to concentrate the psychic energy of the universe into the mind of the wearer. And of course nobody knew or cared—they were just the red flowerpot hats. But again, if it’s a joke it was meant to be taken seriously, and if it was serious it was meant to be taken as a joke. And I think the members of Devo are quite happy that the people who get it, get it, and the people who don’t, don’t.

      Devo left Ohio in the late 70s and didn’t play in Akron again until 30 years later. Did you see them perform?

      Yes. The last show they’d played in Akron was their homecoming tour in 1978. Then in 2008, they were invited to do a fundraiser for the local democrat party. It was Devo, Chrissie Hynde and the Black Keys—the three most iconic musical acts from Akron’s rock history—and they played together and it was an amazing night, to see those artists on the same stage. They jammed at the end, all playing together, which was really cool. 

      We all know Devo’s 1980 MTV pop hit “Whip It,” but what Devo songs do you think we should be listening to today?

      The most interesting Devo music to me has always been what falls under the tag of hardcore Devo, which is their early demos of what became their early albums. It’s the pre-Warner Brothers recordings. There’s a new hardcore collection that just came out. [50 YEARS OF DE-EVOLUTION (1973–2023), a retrospective collection, also released in 2023.] I would recommend that more than their mainstream commercial releases, because I think it captures their rough edges. To me that’s the true spirit of Devo.

      Devo has been on tour this year, what’s being called their farewell tour, though they don’t like it called that. Part of it is that they’ve been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame the past few years. This is another one of those ironies of Devo. An outsider band being put in the museum for rock and roll—that would be very Devo.

      What’s the current Northeast Ohio music scene like? In addition to writing, you play in a band. Can you tell us about it?

      I’m currently playing bass in a band called Dave Rich and His Enablers. It’s sort of indie rock power pop. The drummer is Chis Butler, who was the founder of The Waitresses [“I Know What Boys Like”], another Akron new wave icon. He had a lot of interaction with Devo, because they were in the scene at the same time, so he has lots of Devo stories to tell, himself. As far as the Northeast Ohio music scene, it feels like things got splintered with Covid. Over the pandemic everything was done alone in isolation, and the music is just now creeping out of the basement and back into the light of day.

      What is the Devo parable, and what can we learn from their story? One of the parables is that if you mess with the system, the system will devour you. It’s better to know that it’ll happen and do it anyway than fear it’ll happen and not do it. That’s very much what happened with Devo. At some point they changed from wanting to be pure artists to wanting to join the music industry and get signed to a commercial label. As they were undergoing that transition, they were very aware that they were just meat in a world of vultures. That’s the main parable. They knew they were going to get scalped, but they did it anyway.

      The second lesson is that their own theory also defined them. Their belief that evolution is working in reverse applied to them. Their music was so vibrant and new when they began, and then they slowly fell into some of the cliches of the rock and roll world: drugs, infighting, and problems with the record label. All of that started to pull them apart and they devolved from being bold iconoclasts to having to play the game. As they devolved, their music devolved—as they had predicted it would.

      David Giffels is the author of eight books of nonfiction, most recently The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio, coauthored with Jade Dellinger. His 2020 book Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America, was described by Publishers Weekly as a “trenchant mix of memoir, reportage, and political analysis,” and selected as one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2020. His other books include the memoirs Furnishing Eternity and All the Way Home, both winners of the Ohioana Book Award, and The Hard Way on Purpose, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice.” A former columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal, his writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Parade, The Iowa Review, Esquire, Grantland, and many other publications. He also wrote for the MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is a professor of English at the University of Akron, where he serves on the faculty of the NEOMFA creative writing program.

      The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio

      by Jade Dellinger and David Giffels

      University of Akron Press

      Many thanks to David Giffels for sharing his insights and time with us here at Rust Belt Girl. Can’t wait to read what’s next!

      Check David out at his website. And be sure to pick up The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio for all the new wave fans on your holiday gift lists!

      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

      *Photos provided by David Giffels

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      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 14 Comments

      My interview with Mitch James, author of Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale

      For my Appalachian lit aficionados, Grit Lit fans, and readers who aren’t afraid of the dark … I’m thrilled to share with you my conversation with author and professor Mitch James about his debut novel.

      From the back cover, an intriguing blurb:

      A dead mother. An auctioned childhood home. Loss in the womb of a coal mine.

      Seldom Seen follows main character Brander, who encounters a “specter of a man who promises him that the answers to life are in Seldom Seen Mine, the largest coal mine in the United States.

      With nothing holding him back, Brander … takes a job at Seldom Seen Mine, and fails at every attempt to amend his life, losing a friend, a lover, and maybe his mind.”

      Reader friends, how does an author make good on such a blurb? I’ll tell you. With prose like this. I’m prefacing my first question for Mitch with one of my favorite passages in the novel. This is from early in the story, when Brander first enters Seldom Seen Mine:

      Brander was surprised. The road was rather smooth and well-lit, the air stale but not dirty. They rolled along, everyone quiet. Brander stared around. The mine’s back had a skeletal structure of beams and crossbars and cribs, packed tight with backfill in places and all sealed up with gunite. It was surprisingly silent beneath the earth, the hum of the transport, the crunch of residue below the tires, the occasional whoosh of an air course. If not for the forced mechanization, there would be no sound, not like on the surface. Noise is life. But even free of men, the mine wasn’t dead, exactly; there was something, a kind of energy present in the long back road, an innate awareness, like the womb of a pulse-filled thing.

      Mitch, welcome to Rust Belt Girl! Let’s dive in. The mine in this story works as much more than a compelling setting but a real character. I’d say we readers end up knowing as much about the mine as we do about Brander. How did you decide where to set this story? How did you learn so much about mines and mining? What kind of research did this entail?

      I’m so happy to hear you’re engaging with the mine in that way because it is very much its own organism. It felt that way when writing the book, and it means a lot to hear that it felt that way to you as you read it. When I wrote the novel, I was up to my ears in rural Pennsylvania, working on farms, mountain biking old logging roads, kayaking rivers, and clearing land. I couldn’t get enough. I lived not far from the real Seldom Seen Mine. The research I did that allowed me to accidentally stumble into the idea for the novel also happened there. It was a perfect recipe—the need to express the region as I had experienced it as a transplant who had been there awhile, the need to tell Brander’s story, the need to imagine others’ lives and suffering alongside my own.

      As for research, I read literary books on mining. There aren’t many. And I read short stories about mining in the U.S. and abroad. I read historical writing about mining at different periods in the U.S. in microfilm and microfiche. I watched a lot of YouTube videos, read instructional handbooks on mining equipment, found out who sold it, and found videos on how to operate it. I was friends with a mining engineer who guided me some.  A little bit of everything.   

      Here at the Rust Belt Girl blog we’re a little fascinated with how place works in story. Place helps plots turn. Place also helps form characters. While a rural setting, I’d say that your Seldom Seen mine situates your novel squarely in Rust Belt lit territory. There are other commonly-appearing aspects to Rust Belt lit (or contemporary Grit Lit, writ large) that feature in your story: teenage pregnancy and the meth crisis for just two examples. Can you talk about how you explore such aspects of Rust Belt life and the characters living these lives without resorting to stereotypes in your novel (you do this well!)? 

      I’m relieved to hear you don’t think my characters are stereotypical. I would never want that. That said, though, if I’m being honest, I think all fiction runs off a little bit of stereotype. I think most readers need to see characters that are somewhat familiar and that present themselves as equations they believe they can calculate, at least at the start. Lucky’s the gruff, crude, masculine man. Brander is the wounded, self-loathing Midwesterner. But beneath the stereotypes that reveal a small percentage of what makes up who we are is the rest of us, the best of us, the parts of us that are unique. Brander and Lucky also have these qualities within them. It’s my job to complicate their stereotypes by fleshing out the rest of their characters, for they drive the story. I see stereotypes everywhere, including in myself. But by seeing them, I can perceive their limits, their boundaries; I can peer around them to what else presents itself, and that’s gold as a writer, the stories everyone tells but doesn’t mean to.

      Basically, look for the people within the people and write about that. Then be prepared to conscientiously employ a little stereotype to get the ball rolling.     

      For those of us who are writers, ourselves, I wonder if you could take us through the process of crafting this novel. What was the first idea/image that came to you? When did you know you had to write this story? How long did it take? What’s your writing process like? We craft junkies want all the details!

      The idea for the novel came to me when I was reading a translation of a Russian short story from the early 1800s, a story about a miner who encounters a ghost in a mine. The ghost starts manifesting in his life outside the mine until he goes insane and, if I remember correctly, kills himself. The story was so short. I wanted so much more. So I made it. 

      When did I know I had to write the story? Immediately. I can always tell the difference between something I could write and something I must write. I had to write Seldom Seen.

      As for the process, I woke up at 3 a.m., wrote a 1000 words a day five or so days a week, and had the first draft in a few months. Then it took me 10 years to publish the book, so you can imagine the revisions, drinking, and self-loathing that occurred after repeated failures. Brander had to get it from somewhere!  

      I often wonder how Rust Belt lit will appear in American Literature textbooks a hundred years from now. Since you’re a college professor—maybe you wonder about this too? For me, my most formative American Literature course introduced me to William Dean Howells, the father of American realism. I’m not going to draw a perfectly straight line from American realism of the late 19th century to Southern Gothic of the early 20th century and the Grit Lit of today, but somebody could try. All that’s to ask where you see Seldom Seen fitting into the canon of American Literature? What are your reading/literary influences? What literary characters informed Brander, who—despite hard work and, yes, grit, fails, fails, and fails again?

      It makes me feel a little pretentious to think of my work in any kind of canon. But my writing, including Seldom Seen, is influenced by myriad Appalachian, Midwestern, and American Western and South-Western writers, all rural and spread across the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I would hope Seldom Seenwould be welcomed by the Appalachian literary community and rural literary communities more broadly. 

      As for character influences, I have to be honest, I don’t know that I’ve ever consciously (though certainly subconsciously I have) created characters based on other characters about whom I’ve read. The characters begin with me, but they take over their story, and I just try and keep up and do justice through my writing to what they show me. I know that sounds mystic and woo-woo, but it’s the truth. For example, Lucky wasn’t a character I intended to have in the story, but when he showed up, he had plans, and I went along with them. Now, I can’t imagine the novel without him. 

      As for the last part of your questions, I don’t need to read a book to see hard work, grit, and abundant failure in a person. I’ve witnessed it in the working poor rural communities I’ve lived in my entire life. But I want to make something clear; I’m not saying the working poor are failures or that their efforts are in vain. I was working poor until I was thirty-two years old. I worked fifty hours a week with multi-billion-dollar industries and still had no healthcare or money, and couldn’t afford a vacation or a car that could make it out of the county. Goals like a home instead of a rental, good health insurance, the ability to take a vacation or have a safe vehicle all create comfort and stability in one’s life. The working poor are grinding but failing to reach important thresholds like these and others. There are many reasons why, but amongst them are certainly socio-economic and political barriers. These folks, my mother and father, cousins, aunts, uncles, neighbors—they’ve taught me how to create characters with grit that fight and fight and fight.

      This world has shown me how to write characters who fail.

      And final question: What are you teaching, reading, and writing right now? What’s next?

      I’m teaching various writing composition courses. I’m reading, gosh, so many random things. I feel like I read and read and finish nothing. I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By; Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead; Adam Grims’ The Art and Science of Technical Analysis; Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, and a textbook on world history because I screwed around too much in school when I was younger. I’m ashamed by how much basic knowledge I missed out on for being too stupid to know better. 

      As far as writing goes, I just finished a book of poetry that a press requested and for which there is a promising chance of publication. I’m pitching a couple of short story collections and two novels and am kind of tinkering around on a new one, so if there are any publishers/agents out there who think my work and I might be a good fit, reach out. I’m doing some final revisions on two peer-reviewed articles due out soon as well. Keeping busy. 

      Upcoming? I’m excited about the Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival. It’s one of my favorite events all year!  

      Mitch James is a Professor of Composition and Literature at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, OH and the Editor-at-Large at Great Lakes Review. Mitch is the author of the novel Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale (Sunbury Press) and has published works across the genres of short fiction, poetry, and academic scholarship. You can find his latest short fiction in Made of Rust and Glass: Midwest Literary Fiction Vol. 2, Red Branch Review, and Bull; poetry at Shelia-Na-Gig, Watershed Journal, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices; and scholarship at Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Find more at mitchjamesauthor.com and on Twitter @mrjames5527. 

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

      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 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.”

      Poet and author Valerie Nieman

      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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      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 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, 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 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 19 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.

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      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 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 23 Comments

      My interview with Jason Kapcala, author of Hungry Town: A Novel

      For fans of American Rust by Philipp Meyer and Ohio by Stephen Markley . . . comes Jason Kapcala’s Hungry Town (2022), a Rust Belt-set crime drama with serious literary chops. From the back cover summary: 

      "One October night in the depressed steel town of Lodi, Ohio, two police officers respond to a call about trespassers in the derelict Lodi Steel Machine shop. A chase through the crumbling cathedral of steel columns launches a chain of events that will test the officers' partnership and leave a boy to fend for himself in a decaying Rust Belt neighborhood choked by joblessness, boredom, and addition.

On the opposite end of town, a young woman steps out of a rust-bucket Grand Marquis into an all-night diner...She doesn't realize her ex-boyfriend has hired two brothers to track her down and bring her back, by any means necessary."

      I was delighted to meet the author in person at AWP22 and even more delighted that he agreed to answer my questions about his novel—its literary (and culinary) influences, its Rust Belt influences, and more . . .

      Jason, of course definitions of noir vary, but the crime genre’s traditional elements consist often of an outsider perspective, systemic failure, economic insecurity, and existential despair. To my mind, the Rust Belt feels like a perfect tableau on which to set a noir. I mean, take for example this description of setting, your novel’s fictionalized Ohio town of Lodi—just stunning:

      “Outside, night curdled into matte blackness, still and quiet, except for the breathy whine of motors on the hill, low rumblings as the delivery trucks downshifted on the steep grade and made their early morning runs into town.”

      How did you come up with the setting for this novel? Which came first, the setting or the story? Can you talk about influences—in literature, film, TV, or other artistic mediums—for this literary crime novel?

      It’s funny but I don’t know that I ever set out to write a noir. Of course, I realized, at a point, that I was working in that tradition, but I don’t recall sitting back and thinking about what makes a noir a noir, or from a definitional perspective, what I could do to adapt the noir genre to the Rust Belt setting. I just had this town—I knew it was a hard place where rusty steel meets barren farmland—and I had these characters who spent their days bearing the crucible of that place, and I followed that thread.

      To that point, most of the authors who influenced me aren’t overtly noir writers. My biggest influence was Kent Haurf, particularly his book Plainsong. I love the way he uses language and image, how he ends a scene by cinematically pulling back from the characters.

      For sure, Philipp Meyer’s American Rust is another novel I admire which opens with similar circumstances—an accident in an abandoned mill—but Hungry Town winds up being more related in spirit than in plot or style. 

      Laurie Lynn Drummond’s Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You is a story collection about women police officers in New Orleans, and I admired how much time Drummond spent establishing the little evocative details of being a police officer, some of them quite mundane, some of them anything but. 

      Though it feels weird to say, I also remember thinking about William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying when I was working with the character of Stanley Peach. Faulkner opens with the little boy Vardaman who has just caught a fish and who is processing the fact that his mother has recently died. Both the fish and his mother are dead, and Vardaman simply says, “My mother is a fish,” conflating the two. In Hungry Town, Stanley knows that his brother has died. He also knows that the last place he saw him alive was in the mill, and so he begins to believe, on some level, that his brother now resides in the mill.

      Cover design by Than Saffel / WVU Press

      Did you know when you began writing that the inciting action of the novel would happen in an old abandoned steel mill? And can you talk about how you how you went about researching what a mill is like in order to describe it? Did your hometown influence your selection of the mill as setting?

      You have an abandoned mill, a broken window at the end of the line . . . there’s really only a few places it can go from there.

      I would say the setting and the opening action came as a package deal. 

      I set all my writing in fictional locales—that freedom to manipulate setting provides a lot of freedom, but it still requires an internal coherence. Early on, in order to keep things straight, I drew a map of Lodi, the setting of Hungry Town, with the mill and all of the smaller boroughs located on it, street names, and so on. That helped ensure that I was remaining geographically consistent.

      Even though the setting is imagined, I took inspiration from a few places I know well. I grew up not far from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and have family who live in that area. I’d go there with my dad and brother to get my hair cut as a kid at the old-fashioned barber shop and then we’d stop and get hot dogs at one of the local stands in the Lehigh Valley. So I’ve probably passed the Bethlehem Steel Works hundreds of times in my life, and that wound up being an important analog for the mill in my novel.

      The Bethlehem Steel plant is not attractive in the way that a beautiful natural space is attractive—a forest or a mountain—but it has its own power of attraction, and I always found that frozen industry mysterious and intriguing, especially the Number 2 Machine Shop. It’s an immense building, a quarter-mile long and eight stories high, held up inside by a seemingly endless row of steel columns on each side. It’s practically a tunnel. I had a folder on my computer full of artistic photographs of the Bethlehem Steel Works that I looked at regularly while I was writing. You mention the big event that sets off the novel, and it sort of had to occur in that space. The mill was always going to be the key setting of the book just because of my fascination with it. 

      In Hungry Town, there is also a recurring image of an enormous shattered window at the very end of the machine shop. I borrowed that from the film The Crow, which opens with the main character being shot and falling through a large, round window. Not that I set out to lift it, but I know that’s where the image came from—to my knowledge, there’s no window like that in the actual machine shop. It’s just one of those images that stuck with me for whatever reason and wound up finding its way into the writing. 

      You have an abandoned mill, a broken window at the end of the line . . . there’s really only a few places it can go from there. I believe Ron Carlson calls that “building an inventory”—the idea that you gather up enough details, and images, and expressions, and you observe how they begin sticking together on their own to form Story. I always picture the story like it’s a hermit crab, scuttling along, adorning itself with whatever interesting detritus it comes across. That’s pretty close to how this novel started.

      I was also inspired by Athens, Ohio, where I lived for two years during grad school. It’s a much smaller town, but it shared some attributes with Bethlehem—river running through it, train tracks, an industrial past (in Athens it was the brick company), and a hot dog stand where all the dogs are named after burlesque dancers. That inspired the dog shop that Harry Mulqueen opens in the book (though Harry’s hot dogs are more pedestrian).

      Noir is often characterized by cynicism and fatalism—so much so in this novel that I think your setting rises to the level of full-blown villain. The reader gets a heavy dose of that here in one of the first few chapters:

      “…for all his grim toughness, Harry had trouble resigning himself to a world where kids were out screwing in mills when they should have been at home sleeping. A world where kids died of senselessness, impaled on hundred-year-old pieces of scrap in the middle of the night.”

      One of your main characters, Harry, an ex-cop, fights against the fatalistic sense of doom that pervades this town. Did you need him to leave the force to do this? Without spoiling the plot, do you think he succeeds?

      A lot of people have commented on how dark Hungry Town is, and they’re right, of course, but for whatever reason I don’t think of the story as being that dark or cynical. The characters do treat the mill like antagonist—at one point, Mulqueen thinks of it as a place that consumes people—but there’s beauty in Lodi, just as there is beauty in the abandoned Bethlehem Steel buildings. It may be a town of limited opportunity, but the characters are resilient and they have moments of grace, I think. They may or may not escape their circumstances—I like to think the jury is still out.

      Did Mulqueen need to quit the police force in order to retain his idealism or his sense of hope? Probably. That’s the sort of guy he is. That’s how he takes a stand. And his partner, Rieux—well, she had plenty of opportunities over the years to leave the force and plenty of reason, but she stayed and made her stand that way, because that’s how she’s built.

      Your cast of characters is varied, but each is an outsider in his or her own way. Even the good cop, Rieux, is an outsider; for all her excellence over many years on the police force, she is often seen as a woman playing at a man’s game. Other characters are old and dying, are on the run, are criminals, are neglected children left to their own devices. One way I think you turn traditional noir on its head is by featuring two females in main character roles. Why was that important for you to do? 

      I knew, from the moment I started, that I wanted to take the tropes of cop dramas and turn them on their heads.

      When I’m writing, I honestly don’t have many axes to grind. In fact, I try very hard not to make the story be “about” anything in a larger, moralistic sense. I have nothing to sell you. No lessons to impart. No greater Truths about life to reveal. Just curiosity about the characters and their circumstances, and a willingness to follow them wherever they go.

      Now, I say all that, but there is one exception that comes to mind. I knew, from the moment I started, that I wanted to take the tropes of cop dramas and turn them on their heads. I grew up watching cop movies—Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon and so on—and they are great fun, but there are also a lot of problems with that mythos. The idea that a tough, anti-hero cop can take the law into his own hands, play by his own rules, sidestep bureaucracy, clean up a dirty town, and righteously mete out justice, all because his innate sense of right or wrong somehow remains intact on some higher moral plane—well, that’s starting to become less and less attractive as it ages. So I spent a lot of time thinking about tropes and how I could flip them or subvert them in interesting ways. 

      For instance, there’s usually a jaded veteran cop who gets paired with a rookie. That veteran will likely check off a number of boxes demographically. He’ll be an old-fashioned tough guy who lets his actions do the talking. His sidekick may be more emotionally intelligent but will probably also be portrayed as overeager and naïve. Often, that neophyte cop will be minoritized in some way—a woman, a person of color, an outsider of some sort. 

      In Hungry Town, I very intentionally chose to make the veteran cop a woman. Rieux is the gritty one, the one who’s just a bit jaded. She’s tough and instinctive. Mulqueen may be more physically imposing, but he’s the cerebral cop and the more sensitive of the two. They both take the work home with them, but Rieux drowns her bad feelings in alcohol whereas Mulqueen sits up all night feeling guilty and pondering whether or not Freud was right about there being no such thing as an accident. That inversion of stereotypes was a conscious choice and a part of the project itself.

      I find titles terribly difficult. At what point in your writing of this novel did you light on Hungry Town. And what does that title mean for you?

      I’m a huge fan of music, and I always put together playlist for every project I’m working on. I try to capture the feeling or atmosphere of the project in the music I select. One of the songs I chose for this project was “Hungry Town” by Chuck Prophet. It’s a great song with a killer line: “the devil eats for free in a hungry town.” I kept coming back to that. In the book, one of the characters, Bel, says something about there being a lot of hungry people in Lodi, most of them willing to do anything in exchange for a bite to eat. Her expression takes on a metaphorical double meaning that I like, and so I landed on Hungry Town as a title. 

      What are you writing, right now? What are you reading? What can you recommend?

      Currently, I am reading The Other Ones by Dave Housley, about a group of office workers who win the lottery. It’s a terrific book, funny but not without considerable depth. Next on my list is Neema Avashia’s Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, Mike Ingram’s Notes from the Road, and Mark Powell’s Lioness.

      I’m currently working on a novel that I’m calling “The Mourning Afters.” It’s set in the fictional ghost town of Stillwater, Pennsylvania, which I’m basing on Centralia, PA. There’s a mine fire that has been burning beneath the town for almost a decade, and the town is basically abandoned, most people having relocated to the neighboring town. 

      The protagonist is a rock singer named Kev Cassady. About nine years earlier, he was the front man of a band called The Mourning Afters. They were on the verge of a breakthrough, had finally gotten the attention of a record producer in California, when there was a falling out. Kev skipped town with their demo tapes, took the opportunity for himself, and wound up squandering it all. 

      Fast forward to the present, and Kev gets a late-night call from one of his former bandmates, Muzzie, who he hasn’t spoken to in years. He tells Kev that another member of the band has unexpectedly died. Kev decides to return to Pennsylvania for the funeral and winds up having to face all of the bandmates he left behind, including his drummer ex-girlfriend, Ramie Valentine. In the time since he left, she has raised an eight-year-old daughter, and Kev is trying to do the math on that to figure out if he’s the father. 

      It all sounds very dire in exposition, but it’s actually supposed to be a comedy and the characters find themselves in one ridiculous situation after another. It’s a departure from Hungry Town, in any case.

      I understand you did a lot of research into the culinary masterpiece that is the hot dog in writing this book. What do you take on your dog, and where can we find a good one if we’re in your neck of the woods in northern West Virginia?

      I appreciate you ending with the most important question, and I’ve really enjoyed having a chance to chat about Hungry Town.

      As I mentioned, I grew up not far from the Lehigh Valley where there’s a unique food culture and many excellent hot dog stands, so I’d been eating hot dogs a long time before writing this book. There, the hot dogs typically come with mustard and chopped onion on the bottom and chili on top. (The order of that is important.) It’s usually a thinner chili than you find other places. That’s how I’ve always taken my dogs.

      When it came to writing the novel, I didn’t necessarily need to do any research, but a good writing friend, Renée K. Nicholson, found out about the project early on and offered to take me to different hot dog stands all over West Virginia in the name of research, and I figured, well . . . who am I to argue? 

      We ate at a lot of hot dog joints. 

      I’m going to use the fact that I am a state employee and therefore forbidden to offer endorsements as a way to weasel out of having to declare a favorite, but I will say this: if you like hot dogs and you’ve never had a West Virginia slaw dog before, you need to remedy that as soon as possible. Until my “research” trips, I had never had one before, and I quickly became a fan. Mulqueen probably doesn’t sell them at his hot dog stand in northern Ohio—at least, I never recall seeing them when I lived in Ohio—but they would be a welcome addition, for sure.

      ~~~

      Jason Kapcala is the author of the short story collection North to Lakeville. His writing has been nominated for numerous prizes, including the Pushcart Prize. He grew up on northeastern Pennsylvania, near the ruins of the Bethlehem Steel Works, and now lives in northern West Virginia.

      ~~~

      Hungry Town

      by Jason Kapcala

      $19.99 West Virginia University Press

      ~~~

      Like this author interview? Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network. Want more author interviews, book reviews, writing advice, and general Rust Belt goodness? Follow me here. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 12 Comments

      “Important stories needed to be told.” Robert Miltner interviews Karen Schubert, Director of Lit Youngstown

      I’m thrilled to share this guest post interview with Rust Belt Girl readers. What began as a Spotlight interview–between two of my favorite authors and people–for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) has been gifted to us here, and I’m so grateful.

      We talk a lot about writing as a communal act at Rust Belt Girl and about finding that community where we belong. The first time I met Karen Schubert in person, I’d just driven five hours, home to Ohio, to attend a literary festival I’d never been to before. I knew a few names but no faces. And no one knew me, so I dutifully popped on my name tag.

      Even before my nerves could kick in, here comes the director, Karen Schubert, with the most gracious greeting–as if I were the keynote or a fully-fledged author, and not an emerging writer and editor with a blog.

      I belonged. Just like that. And I’ve returned to that annual literary festival every year since. Last year, I served on the planning committee to do my own small part in welcoming new faces to the community.

      “How does she do it?” This is a question I often ask about Karen Schubert. In addition to being co-founding director of Lit Youngstown, a literary arts nonprofit with programs for writers, readers, and storytellers…

      Lit Youngstown Co-founding Director Karen Schubert; photo credit: Melanie Rae Buonavolonta

      Karen Schubert is the author of The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing), Dear Youngstown (Night Ballet Press), Black Sand Beach and Bring Down the Sky (Kattywompus Press), I Left My Wings on a Chair, a Wick Poetry Center chapbook winner (Kent State Press), and The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House Publications). Her poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including National Poetry Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Water~Stone Review, AGNI Online, Aeolian Harp, Best American Poetry blog and American Literary Review. Her awards include the William Dickey Memorial Broadside Award, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in poetry, and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts.

      Thank you to Robert Miltner for asking “How does she do it?” here and to Karen Schubert for telling her story–and inviting us to tell ours.

      Robert Miltner: Karen, you live in Youngstown, a midwestern rust belt city located within the Appalachian Ohio region. Your city was known for its blast furnaces and mills that, as Bruce Springsteen sings in “Youngstown,” “built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars.” In your poem, “Letter to Youngstown,” you write “Remember the world is full /of places like Youngstown, /and places nothing like Youngstown.” How does that reflect your sense of identity as the director of Lit Youngstown?

      Karen Schubert: I’m not from here, although my mother’s family has been in the area since the early 1800s. I came to live in my grandparents’ farmhouse that I loved visiting as a child, and now I live in the city, in a five bedroom brick and frame house that must have been a stunner with its slate roof and cedar shakes. I bought the house on a teaching adjunct’s salary; that tells you what’s going on here. I think there’s a benefit in having been other places and having a sense of how things might work. But I’ve also been in Youngstown long enough to know what people might miss or seek, what our assets are, and who is doing amazing work. I once attended an AWP session on starting a literary arts nonprofit and someone said, “I can’t convince anyone to get behind what I’m doing because they don’t understand the concept.” I thought, that’s a problem I’ll never have.

      Youngstown is economically poor yet arts rich…

      Youngstown is economically poor yet arts rich—live music, performing arts—with an opera and two extraordinary concert halls including the original Warner Brothers theater, and several local theater companies. The visual arts are available through an outstanding American arts museum and a university museum. On the river, the shell of a steel mill came down a few years ago and a new amphitheater went up. In recent years, the city has hosted Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem, and Tarana Burke, as well as YoYo Ma through Kennedy Center outreach. Youngstown is also rich in literary arts. Lit Youngstown hosts readings at a supportive for-profit art gallery that champions local artists. While many community-based writers and writing program faculty stayed and enrich the community, like Christopher Barzak, Steven Reese, Will Greenway, and Philip Brady, others have left to great success, like Ross Gay, Ama Codjoe, Allison Pitinii Davis, and Rochelle Hurt. There is also a local culture that benefits from the immigrant grandparents who taught their children a profound love for the arts. 

      Youngstown State has been a part of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts [NEOMFA]; in fact, it was founded at YSU, and we were devastated to learn that YSU has decided to sunset their participation in the consortium. We are still processing the loss that will be to Lit Youngstown and the community. 

      Miltner: What inspired you to start Lit Youngstown in 2015?  

      Schubert: I lived in Cleveland for a few years, and there were many literary gigs. The summer of 2013 I was a writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and talked to writers and artists all summer who were doing fascinating work. I began wondering what might be possible in Youngstown. 

      Miltner: Did your experience as an AmeriCorps VISTA at a neighborhood development nonprofit influence your decision to start Lit Youngstown? 

      Schubert: Yes, certainly. I was hired by Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation to write for the Neighborhood Conditions Report including data from every census tract in the City. Grim statistics: 40% of city land abandoned, jobs clustered in edge suburbs, and Black infant mortality rates similar to Guatemala. But I also learned that incredible things were happening, important stories that needed to be told. One day we were out interviewing residents and a woman invited us inside. She was a member of a Black women’s motorcycle club. They had filled a dining room with long tables, conveyor-belt style, and were packing stacks of to-go boxes with dinners for local residents who were struggling. This is an example of Youngstown’s story, its resilience and social weave. What I learned from the neighborhood development nonprofit is to be fearless: work hard, collaborate, research, and don’t buy the idea of staying just in your lane, because everything is connected. 

      Miltner: How wide an array of literary programing does Lit Youngstown offer?

      Schubert: We host a monthly reading series, writers critique group, book and film discussions, writing classes, a Winter Writing Camp for all ages, teen writers workshops, and a Fall Literary Festival. We also do many one-off events and collaborations, including an NEA Big Read grant with the public library and reading lunch poems with adults with disabilities at the nonprofit Purple Cat. One of our early projects was Phenomenal Women: Twelve Youngstown Stories. We interviewed Black women between the ages of 64 and 101 and published their stories and images from their lives. The collection is a rich archive of our city’s history, and the idiosyncratic details of the lives of these tremendously strong, intrepid and insightful women. One of the women worked in the War Room during the FDR administration. Many were tapped for jobs during the Civil Rights movement, to hold newly won ground. 

      Also, in partnership with the YSU Art Department, the vibrant 150-foot Andrews Avenue Memory Mural along a retaining wall of a historically important corridor has just been completed. We solicited memories from the local community, and students incorporated images and pieces of those, and their own, memories. Memory is important and complicated in a place like Youngstown, a city that has suffered so much loss and is struggling to conceptualize an identity. I think it’s especially important us to offer this younger generation the opportunity to imagine a city they can believe in. 

      A memory mural created in partnership between Lit Youngstown and the YSU art department; photo credit: Melanie Rae Buonavolonta

      Miltner: Who are some of the writers you’ve brought in for your literary community?

      Schubert: So many! We’ve had the privilege of hosting wildly accomplished writers including Philip Metres, Nin Andrews, Philip Memmer, James Arthur, Cody Walker, Kevin Haworth, Jan Beatty, and many faculty of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts. We’ve also mixed it up with student essayists; storytellers; an international poetry night featuring poems in the original language and the translation; and a humor night one April 1. One December evening Mike Geither read his play Heirloom; it was so moving I found it emotionally difficult to come back to the mic to close the evening. In 2019, we partnered with the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County on an NEA Big Read grant and selected Into the Beautiful North. There were dozens of related events throughout the city for a month, like a mini film festival, immigrant narratives night, and ethnic foods potluck. Luis Alberto Urrea flew in to talk about the inspiration for the individual characters in his book. 

      Miltner: In a community that is economically challenged, how do you develop funding? And who in the community, or local institutions, or from the state level, contributes?

      Schubert: Our community has been incredibly supportive, as have the foundations. We have built up a funding structure that is a mix of support from community members, benefactors, local foundations and state agencies. Our yearly fundraiser is a raffle for a large work of art, typically a birdbath by a local steel sculptor. In all, we have received nearly $200,000 in grants from the Ohio Arts Council, Ohio Humanities, and local foundations. 

      Miltner: What recent programming has been successful in your literary community?

      Schubert: This year’s Fall Literary Festival was successful in the quality of presenters, and the engagement of participants. It’s always so great to see local writers talking with other writers, educators, editors and nonprofit administrators, asking questions and learning more about the literary landscape. 

      Miltner: The 2020 Fall Literary Festival was held as a videoconference. How was it different from an in-person conference?

      Schubert: Well, to begin with, we had a virtual cookie table! I made Allison Pitinii Davis’s aunt’s Greek cookie recipe from the Youngstown Cookie Table Book published by Belt Publishing. Featured writer Janet Wong found cookies in the back of her pantry and described their staleness in hilarious detail. Zoom awkwardness aside, people were wanting to feel a sense of connection. I think they did, but one missing thing was conversations that spill into the hallway and coffee shops.

      And we were back in person this year and I was surprised how rusty I felt. I made clumsy organizational mistakes. More importantly, I think feeling connected was also very important this year, and even though there were masks and fewer hugs, the comradrie was everywhere. There are many very fine conferences, so I always ask folks why they come to this one. They consistently say it is the connections they make here. 

      Miltner: How has the festival impacted your community?

      Schubert: It’s the only Youngstown conference for adult writers. The English Festival at YSU, for middle and high school students, draws thousands each year, so there is local context for such an event among literary arts enthusiasts. But previously, adults would have to drive to Cleveland, Columbus, or Pittsburgh to attend in person, which we encourage them to do, but it’s also great to have a conference here.

      …they come to hear contemporary work, talks on literature and bringing literature into the community for healing and cross-cultural connection.

      Another benefit to local writers is meeting and engaging with writers from throughout the U.S. Really feeling part of something bigger. Of course, some of our attendees are not writers, but readers, students, educators, administrators, and they come to hear contemporary work, talks on literature and bringing literature into the community for healing and cross-cultural connection.

      Those who attend from a distance appreciate the low cost of the conference, which makes travel and lodging more possible. And we are fortunate that Youngstown State University partners with us, because this allows undergraduate students to attend free, and some faculty members require their students attend. If YSU follows through with their plan to sunset the NEOMFA, leaving only an undergraduate minor in creative writng, I don’t know yet what that will mean for the conference. 

      Miltner: Would you share a project Lit Youngstown is currently working on?

      Schubert: We had cancellations with the lock-down, including Whitman & Brass, an event that pairs staged readings and a brass quartet playing the music of his day. I was hoping to make this into a series, and was thinking next we would pair James Baldwin and Nina Simone. So Whitman & Brass has been rescheduled for March. 

      During the lock-down, we sent out an extensive survey to our community, and one consistent point of feedback is that some writers are looking for more in-depth continuity. So this month, we kicked off a series of nine monthly daylong Poetry Intensive workshops. In the morning we’ll talk about books, chapbooks, journals, submissions, presses, readings, things like that. Each afternoon, a different poet will come to talk about different aspects of poetry, and we’ll look at participants’ poems through that lens. For example, when you come, Robert, we’ll talk about the music in these drafts. I’m crazy excited. 

      Miltner: If an anonymous donor gave you a major gift for Lit Youngstown, what is the dream project you’d immediately implement?

      The Big Dream is to buy a large building and begin a writing residency.

      Schubert: First I would step up the development of our outreach program. We are inspired by the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State and Director David Hassler who has been a great mentor to us. I’d like for us to be doing outreach with immigrants, veterans, retired residents, patients in medical care, and sexual assault survivors. I love Literary Cleveland’s Essential Worker narratives. Our Outreach Coordinator Cassandra Lawton is currently working in the expressive therapy program at Akron Children’s Hospital and will soon begin a study on writing with cancer survivors.

      The Big Dream is to buy a large building and begin a writing residency. In Youngstown, many historic buildings are languishing empty and selling for relatively low prices. I love the model of the Vermont Studio Center, putting studios into a former fire station and school, supporting an indie bookstore, creating links between artists-in-residence and the local elementary school and college. 

      Miltner: What advice would you offer to someone who might want to launch a community literary program in their city?

      Schubert: Collaborate on everything. Keep thinking of new people to bring to the table, to help plan and run events, to shine a spotlight on other community work. For example, when I read Mark Winne’s Closing the Food Gap, a book about food policy, I recognized that it had a lot of relevance to what was happening in Youngstown, a citywide food desert. We partnered with a local co-op on our first book group series and, along with many community development partners, we brought Winne here.

      I like to see the literary arts, in addition to creative expression, as a means to understand and work toward solving problems. During the lock-down, I was thinking about the kids at home and parents and teachers looking for literacy enrichment. So we wrote grants and purchased over $10,000 worth of wonderful books for nearly 800 children in Head Start. We also purchased high quality books for children in YSU Project Pass, a program that pairs education students with city 3rd graders who would benefit from reading skills support. Each year we send a $100 donation to a literary arts nonprofit we admire, and this year we selected Black Boys Read, a local initiative. 

      Miltner: You are yourself the author of several chapbooks and a full-length book. How has your being a writer yourself shaped your role in leading Lit Youngstown?  

      The Compost Reader (Accents Publishing), 2020, by Karen Schubert

      Schubert: As a student, I went to conferences where I met writers like Bruce Bond, Denise Duhamel, Kimberly Johnson, and former NEA director Dana Gioia. I gained much from classes on how to edit, submit work, and shape a manuscript. From classes and conferences, I met writers who are now lifelong friends. Part of my work is trying to recreate those great experiences for those in our literary community. 

      Miltner: In your poem “Youngstown Considers the Future,” you write, “We are tired of our Titanic metaphors— / can’t decide if we’re patching up the hole, / steering toward warmer waters, or / arranging the deck chairs.” It seems to me that your dual role of writer/director is encapsulated in these lines. From your perspective, what fresh metaphor would you offer instead? 

      Schubert:. How about the metaphor of a mural: we’ve cut back the vines, purchased more primer than we knew we’d need, and now we’re ready to create a design harvested from memory and shaped by the young. How’s that for what community building looks like?

      Learn more about Lit Youngstown and Karen Schubert by following the links.

      ~~~

      photo credit: Molly Fuller

      Robert Miltner is a writer, editor, and scholar. His books of poetry include Hotel Utopia, Orpheus & Echo, and Against the Simple, the short story collection And Your Bird Can Sing, and a collection of creative nonfiction, Ohio Apertures. He has received and Ohio Arts Council Award for Poetry, an Ohio Arts Council Writing Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, and was Poet-in-Residence at the Chautauqua Institution in summer 2021. A professor emeritus from Kent State University Stark and the NEOMFA, and Editor of The Raymond Carver Review, Robert has been a member of AWP since 2012.

      ~~~

      Read my interview with Robert Miltner for Rust Belt Girl here. Like this interview? Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network.

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      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 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 18 Comments

      My interview with Robert Miltner, author of Ohio Apertures: A Lyric Memoir

      Ohio Apertures (2021) is Robert Miltner’s latest work, a collection of short creative nonfiction pieces that comprise a memoir. The author of two books of prose poetry, poetry chapbooks, and a short story collection, his memoir represents a cohesive journey. From stories of youth to young and older adulthood; from reflections of Ohio to the American West and trips abroad; from journeys by foot and by car—the car such a potent symbol of the post-industrial Midwest—the reader journeys with the author, and it is a satisfying and solace-making trip that doesn’t look away from the remains of Midwestern heydays past. Miltner provides the objects of his looking and perceiving and also the vehicle of that looking, and I think that matters in studies of observation, in studies of life, which is what we readers want in memoir—the particular and personal expanded to the universal, expanded to include our lives, too.

      The objects Miltner ruminates upon in these short essays are often small—he’s so good at detail. There’s the watch pocket in a pair of Levi’s; the pneumatic tube at the bank drive thru; the crescent roll of youth and croissant of maturity; the sound an old car makes, like “sarcastic laughter”; the song that was playing at the bar after he was robbed as a young man. There’s a lot of music in these pages—a few of these pieces feel like they have their own soundtracks—but most of the music comes from the lyrical quality of these essays. And the quiet, the white space, the musical rests, the silence that is, Miltner says, “both the context for prayer and prayer itself.”

      Always, the author returns to Ohio, the name alone like a song, and to the state’s flowing rivers and Great Lake Erie and its shale coastline that makes for violent, crescendo-like waves at its cliffs. My favorite piece in the collection is the last, “Black River Bridge,” an ode to a bridge that the author has traveled many times to cross his home-town river. He speaks to it, lovingly, in this essay: “Poor Black River, you lonely stepsister in this sad fairy tale of Ohio rivers…No one, lost river of industry, dark river of my youth, kisses your mouth each night along your shale and sand shoreline.” Though somber in tone, the piece ends optimistically, or in a tone I like to think of as Northeast Ohio optimism—which is as tempered as our steel.

      Cover art by Morgan Dyer, “Climbing Uphill”; design by Shelby Ballweg and Colton Bahr

      Recently, I asked the author a few questions about this collection, about his writing process and projects, and about writing in community:

      Robert, Ohio Apertures is a lyric memoir in short pieces. You’ve written a lot of poetry and fiction, but this represents your debut memoir. What do you like about creative nonfiction? Were there things you could say about your life that you couldn’t say—or hadn’t said yet—through other mediums that you said in these pages?

      I view myself as a writer, which I use in the comprehensive sense, rather than identifying by a single genre, because it feels restrictive. In terms of genre, I’ve felt compelled to “contain multitudes.” Writing in a new genre is like acquiring a new language; it’s like becoming bilingual or, for me with Ohio Apertures, trilingual. I used to think adding genres would be about learning the guidelines for new puzzles. Any new genre is like a puzzle, and what is produced is a piece of writing that is one solution to the puzzle. In that way, my collection of short stories was, for me, a collection of individual solutions to a general question regarding the art and craft of short fiction. What I discovered was an art akin to drama, to theater. I create characters then put them in situations; or, I imagine situations then insert characters. Variations on puzzles. What I learned was a way of speaking through masks, wherein the first person singular “I” is not me being lyrical, but some other person engaged in narrative action—it’s not me speaking.

      When the first person singular “I” speaks in a poem or a creative nonfiction, that’s me. It’s like revelatory song lyrics or confessional poetry. And it’s risky to speak for yourself, and safer to speak through a character. In looking back at And Your Bird Can Sing, my collection of short fictions, there are several pieces that are very autobiographical, and so much so, that I can now see them as memoir that I didn’t recognize as such. So here is what my response to your question has been arching toward:

      What I like about creative nonfiction, or lyric memoir, or lyric-narrative memoir, is the element of risk. Of being open and honest and as true as is possible to the material. It’s the risk of being vulnerable.

      Ironically, while I was shaping individual pieces of creative nonfiction—memoir, lyric essays, narrative nonfiction, travelogue pieces—into a book where I was experiencing the most lyric freedom, I was concurrently shaping a new manuscript of poetry in which I was developing these sparse, minimalist prose poems that I can only define as not exactly a-lyrical, but more like lyric zero; they’re textual equivalents to Edward Hopper paintings: empty rooms where we sense the presence of people who are absent. Crazy, huh?

      It’s like I transferred all my lyrical attention from my prose poems into my creative nonfiction memoir. The risk was exhilarating and the results of both manuscripts generated exciting new material through which I have discovered this: choice of genre is really about where I stand in relationship to the subject matter. It’s like the Wallace Stevens poem in which he writes, “I was of three minds,/Like a tree/In which there are three blackbirds.” If I read the three minds as the three genres I write—poetry, fiction, and now nonfiction—the blackbirds can be seen as the creative impulse. But what’s most interesting to me is that Stevens isn’t really addressing the puzzle of the three minds—instead he’s telling us that the blackbirds are in a tree. For them, it’s about where they perch. And for me, now, writing is about where I stand, finding the site that allows the best relationship to the subject matter.

      I asked your friend and mine, memoirist David Giffels once if memoirists have great memories—I thought, how else to capture a moment from one’s distant past? He told me that, for him, there’s a lot of research involved, even for personal memoir—research in the way of interviews of family and friends who might have a different perspective on a past event. Can you tell us a little about your research process for one of the pieces in this book?

      David is a brilliant nonfiction writer; he came into the creative nonfiction room through the journalism door. His The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt really made me keenly aware of the necessity of detail, exactness, and precision in crafting creative nonfiction. His work showed me possibilities that lead me into the creative nonfiction room. I was also influenced by the Appalachian Ohio writer Richard Hague, whom I met when we were in college together; he came to creative nonfiction through the poetry door. In his Milltown Natural, about growing up in Steubenville, Ohio—a city that is categorized as both Rust Belt and Appalachia—Richard fleshed out his collection of creative nonfiction pieces with memorable details that made his Steubenville three-dimensional. But he did something else: as a poet writing prose, the level of attention to language, syntax, the sound of words and the rhythm of sentences showed me the possibility of lyrical prose. He wonderfully disrupted my sense of how poetry and nonfiction are like lost cousins.

      One of the epigrams in Ohio Apertures is from W. G. Sebald, whose creative nonfiction is mesmerizing because almost every third sentence is like a labyrinth: “You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn’t any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth.” Sebald argues for the craft of writing, the attention to make art—that the idea of poetic truth is akin to an aesthetic truth. Sebald laid down the dictum to balance the literal with the poetic, and, of course, poetic license is as valid here, due the lyrical nature of both poetry and memoir. But I learned in writing my book that while the poetic/lyric/aesthetic truth is the goal, it can only be accomplished when the literal truth—much of it sharpened into precision—is researched.

      The piece I recall researching the most—or perhaps the most satisfyingly—is “Desperados,” which in early drafts was very much a linear narrative only. Denver’s Capitol Hill in the 1970s; a sort of “bank” robbery; the Broker Bar on 17th Street; the culture class of the bankers, lawyers, and part-time college student working for a shady landscape company. The need for such geographical precision necessary for linear narrative is like filming a documentary. But the challenge in this piece was to get the poetic/lyric/aesthetic to be equal, co-present, operating almost like it was a character in the narrative. I began to imagine this piece as a film I could see, with me as the director and lead actor. The numerous references to film, to movie acting, the final scene where I imagine film credits, I had to research that. And when I decided a good film needs a soundtrack, I turned to Glenn Frey of the Eagles. I had to know the songs that were released before the day of the robbery, and that had me running down song lyrics.

      Along the bar, bottles of liquor gathered together like an ensemble of actors in a film version of a Charles Bukowski novel. … The glint and dazzle reminded me of theater marquees on opening night. The jukebox played We may lose and we may win, we will never be here again. It could have been the final soundtrack of a movie.

      As I drank that second shot of Tennessee whiskey, I swear I saw the closing credits of a film scroll down the mirror’s silver screen.

      From “Desperados” by Robert Miltner

      Those literal details, augmented by mirrors and movie screen allusions—as well as resonant images, emotion, language play, leaps and jump cuts—bring together the literal and the aesthetic for a poetic closure to the piece.

      ~~~

      In a recent post here at Rust Belt Girl, I talked about the idea of writing companions, authors we avid readers and writers follow faithfully and who shape our work. In your essay, “Into the Bargain,” you describe finding a volume of Raymond Carver’s poetry, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water at a bargain book store, and you’re “entranced and transported.” The book becomes a “talisman” for you, for what it helps you discover about yourself upon reading and re-reading. Can you tell us more about what this writing companion did for you as a poet—and a writer and as founding editor of The Raymond Carver Review?

      Toward the end of that piece, I contrast J. D. Salinger’s The Cather in the Rye,a book that I felt I identified with in my adolescence, with Raymond Carver’s Where Water Comes Together with Other Water, a book that I identified with during my mid-life transition. There are books and libraries and reading throughout Ohio Apertures. I was a shy, bookish middle child who stuttered, and I became a high school teacher and then a university professor, and an author. Actually, I went on to write my doctoral dissertation on Carver’s poetry, more from a sociological lens than an aesthetic one. Raymond Carver was a sort of mirror in which I could catch a glimpse of myself: an awkward child, a kid who liked to fish, a man who was drawn to rivers and lakes, a multiple-genre writer who began as a poet, eventually a university professor, and ultimately a man who came to understand and accept his human flaws enough to seek forgiveness and atonement.

      The brilliance of Carver’s writing, and in particular his poetry, is his gift of stated or implied metaphor. The water of two rivers—one the past, one the present—that converge to carry him into the future resonates imagistically in Ohio Apertures. Carver was a very autobiographical writer, so much so, that at times much of his work can be read almost like creative nonfiction. Having read his letters and manuscript drafts in library archives, as well as interviews and biographical studies, many of his poems and stories are autobiographical. He wrote what his second wife, the poet Tess Gallagher, especially in his late poetry and in many of his autobiographical stories, calls “lyric narrative poems,” that is, poems in which the poet, or more so the poet’s imagination, become the hero of the narrative. That sounds to me much like a way to describe a lyric memoir, especially one that arcs toward a “poetic truth.” As a scholar-writer, I founded The Raymond Carver Review as a scholarly journal that would recognize Carver’s impact as a writer, and the quality and value of the body of his work. He was just 50 when he died, in his eleventh year of sobriety. During his last few years be began to write essays, prose poetry, and screen plays.

      From my perspective as a writer and Carver scholar, I can see he was finding new sites, new places to stand in relationship to his subject material, new ways to grow as a writer.

      Can you get us up to speed with what you’re working on now?

      The past two years have been an amazing culmination of several concurrent projects. I published a book of prose poems, Orpheus & Echo, in the three-in-one book Triptych by Etruscan Press in March 2020; I finished Ohio Apertures, which was published by Cornerstone Press in March; and I’ve finished a new book of prose poems, Capital of Sorrows, that is under review. The pantry is empty, so to speak.

      I’ve been re-reading some of my travel notebooks, and working on some new drafts of poems; I expect I’ll see what tendencies the poems take, looking for a pattern to occur that may shape a next book of poems. I’m re-reading an early draft of a novel that I’m returning to, looking to reshape and revise it into a new draft. It’s an historical novel and there have been some recent books that I’ve acquired, as research, so as to expand my original draft. I put the book aside because I couldn’t solve the puzzles the genre posed, but I’ve re-imagined the book and will write my way to a different solution than I did the first time around. I’ve located copies of some letters written by the character whose section is epistolary, and two books, both recent, are packed with new information I will cull for what can expand the character. And for another character, one who is complex yet relatively unknown, I’m drawing from the use of cinema and documentary, the site where I’m going to stand in, as I revise that section. Also, I’m sketching out notes for a book of long pieces of creative nonfiction, tentatively titled Mid-Century. While re-reading my travel notebooks I’ve come across several pages of questions I would have liked to have asked my father if he were still alive. How interesting it is that I’m ending this interview with an idea for a second book of creative nonfiction, based on questions addressed to my late father, like one would address in an interview.

      ~~~

      Robert Miltner is the award-winning author of two books of prose poetry, Hotel Utopia and Orpheus & Echo, and a short story collection, And Your Bird Can Sing. A professor emeritus of English at Kent State University Stark and the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing, Miltner lives in Northeast Ohio.

      ~~~

      Ohio Apertures: A Lyric Memoir

      by Robert Miltner

      $22.00 Cornerstone Press

      ~~~

      Like this interview? Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network. Want more author interviews, book reviews, writing advice, and general Rust Belt goodness? Follow me here. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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