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

Maybe each generation has its gaze.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Rebecca Moon Ruark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R: I don’t know.

E: I need to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric LeMay

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

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

The First 649 Days: Essays and Other Acts of Love

By Eric LeMay

The Kent State University Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The (oft-ignored but essential) back cover

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

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

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

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

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

R: Yep, compost.

E: Right, how do we become good compost?

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

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

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

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

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

*Book images provided by The Kent State University Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 1:

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

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

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

Day 2:

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

Days After

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading rn…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Alternative History of Cleveland

By Jonathan Wlasiuk

Belt Publishing, 2024





Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 7 Comments

“This Woman”: an Essay by Melissa Ballard

Essayist Melissa Ballard contributes the fourth in our series of guest posts here at Rust Belt Girl, and, let me tell you, you’re in for a treat. Melissa has a talent for bringing the past to life and making her ancestors feel like our shared family. In this essay we meet Phyllis, Melissa’s grandmother, a woman of Northern Appalachian Ohio, whom Melissa writes about in a loving yet candid way, deftly delving into what makes personhood–class, sex, education, place and much more. (We also hope Phyllis is having the “time of her life,” Melissa.)

This Woman

by Melissa Ballard

This woman is my grandma, but not yet. 

In this black and white photograph, a small, dark hat of woven straw covers her hair and shades her forehead. She wears a walking suit: a jacket and skirt in a light wool pin check with a belt of the same fabric, over a silky, patterned, blouse. The tips of the fingers of her left-hand rest in the pocket of her slim skirt. Her only jewelry is a ring on the little finger of that hand. I can imagine her cropped left foot pointing out, her dark stockings and t-straps. She slouches just a bit and turns her body toward the unidentified photographer. She looks directly at the camera. Her smile is slight, but it reaches her eyes. 

This woman’s slight curves contrast with the riveted metal beam, perhaps part of a railroad bridge, that rises at a sharp diagonal behind her. In the early 1920s, her family lived on a side street a few blocks from the train station in Dennison, Ohio. Her father was an inspector for the railroad, so she had a free pass to ride. 

This woman could be waiting for the early train to Pittsburgh or Columbus, where she will walk the streets with confidence, on her way to a job interview. But she is not. Or at least I don’t think so. I know little about this brief period, but I hope she is having the time of her life.      

In 1925 she has a job in an ice cream shop, lives with her parents. Both she and her mother, who is preoccupied with social status, are named “Margaret.” This woman has already started to express her individuality and goes by her middle name, Phyllis or, on documents, “M. Phyllis.”

On June 18, 1925, eleven days before her nineteenth birthday, Phyllis and her neighbor, Harry, will travel 65.3 miles, maybe by train, to Brooke County, a tapering finger of West Virginia tucked between Ohio and Pennsylvania, where they can get a marriage license with no waiting period. Later that day, they will return to Ohio and be married at the home of the groom’s family. 

I wonder whether Phyllis’ parents even attended. They had a reception for her later, but I gather it was her mother’s attempt at saving face. I can’t imagine she approved of my grandpa or his family, and I can easily hear her saying, “He’ll never make a decent living. You’ll end up in the poor house.” 

Five months and five days later, their first child will be born. On January 14, 1928, their second child, my dad, will be born.

Phyllis c. 1920

The woman I remember, my grandma, was in her fifties. She had slim legs but a solid middle. She wore silver, cat-eye glasses before they were retro. Her short, dark hair was streaked with gray and white, her fingernails chewed to the quick. Wearing a well-washed cotton housedress covered with a flowered or checked apron and heavy lace-up shoes, she kept chickens and goats, grew vegetables and flowers, ran the laundry through a wringer before hanging it outside to dry, cooked meals from scratch. She kept a battered pan under the kitchen sink, filling it with food scraps. Every morning she fed it to the three hound dogs Grandpa had brought home from the dog pound, kept in a pen at the back of the yard. “Oh, hush up,” she said as they yipped and howled at her. 

When Grandma wasn’t busy with chores, she answered the phone for Grandpa, who was the dog warden. She wrote messages in her flowery cursive: the name, address and phone number of the caller, and a brief description of the stray dog. She followed him to his dark green truck, reading her notes out loud. Grandpa never wrote anything down. Before she finished talking, he was backing out of the long driveway, kicking up gravel as he went. 

They lived in a worn-out house on a liminal strip of land in Brightwood, part of Goshen Township, Tuscarawas County; my parents and I had moved to a suburb of Cleveland. Once a month, we made the two-hour trip down home to visit, and I spent more time there during the summer. 

On hot afternoons, Grandma and I often sat together on the front porch swing, she doing her mending and me reading, trying to catch a breeze. A two-lane road ran close to the front of the house. The cars seemed to fly by, and the exhaust from the trucks taught me to mouth breathe, a skill I perfected when I ran into the hen house to collect eggs.  

This route was nicknamed the “slow road” after a highway, the “fast road,” was built behind the house. One summer Saturday, Grandpa drove us into town on the slow road to get ice cream. Grandma and I sat on a bench with our cones, people-watching while Grandpa ran one of his mysterious errands. If Grandma asked him where he was going, he always said, “I need to see a man about a horse.” Which was odd, because my grandparents didn’t have any horses.

On the way home, I noticed a large house on a hill. “Who lives there?” I asked.

Grandma stiffened. “That’s the poor house. Where you go to live if you don’t have any money. It’s not a nice place.” 

I immediately pictured a nineteenth-century orphanage from one of the many books I read. Rows of rusty metal cots with stained mattresses, thin sheets, and scratchy blankets. Peeling paint on crumbling walls. I shuddered and looked away. 

…

The dining room at Grandma’s was small, with windows on three sides, some covered in plastic to keep out drafts. It was an afterthought tacked on to one side of the house next to the living room. It contained a water-spotted stand of neglected African violets, a treadle sewing machine with a clove-studded dried orange tucked in one of its small oak drawers, a large dining room table and chairs, and a handmade oak China cabinet Grandma had purchased for ten dollars with the money she made selling eggs.  

When Grandma made Sunday dinner for our extended family it was served at noon. Grandma removed elegant pieces of stemmed glassware and individual salt cellars from the cabinet and set the dining room table with her good silverware. As we passed roasted chicken with gravy, noodles, and side dishes, Grandpa arrived late (he was known for having “girlfriends”), threw his work cap in the corner, and took his seat at the head of the table. 

Only now do I realize how little Grandma wasted. Usually, she cooked one of her own chickens on Sunday, but she occasionally made a pork roast. After the meal, any scraps of meat were set aside, combined with corn meal mush (I can only imagine her reaction to polenta recipes in upscale restaurants) and baked in a loaf pan. For breakfast the next day, she fried slices and we covered them with butter and syrup. They were delicious. 

Over time, and with deaths and disagreements, our extended family grew smaller, and we began eating all our meals in the large kitchen. The food was still delicious. One time, Grandma asked how everything tasted. Grandpa was the only one who didn’t answer. She stared at him, and he finally grumbled, “If anything’s not good, I’ll let you know.” Already showing signs of Parkinson’s, he poured a bit of his coffee into a saucer with shaky hands, and leaned down to slurp it. 

Eventually, an old couch was jammed into a corner of the dining room, next to the china cabinet. It became my reading space when I visited. Now, as I sit down to read on my own sofa, I look at that same cabinet on the front wall of my living room in Oberlin, just two hours away from where Grandma lived. I have covered the top with family photographs. 

Phyllis and the author c. 1960

Grandma taught me how to tie my shoes–we were both left-handed–after everyone else had given up; gave me my first sip of coffee, strong but cut with generous portions of sugar and thick cream; slipped me some of her beer while we watched Gunsmoke. As I got older and visited less, we wrote letters.

Shortly after my twenty-first birthday, Grandma and I walk in her back yard. We stop under the hot sun to admire the clumps of purple, yellow, and white miniature pansies that flourish in the crumbling foundation of an old shed. I started college three years late; I tell her I am overwhelmed and don’t think I can do the work. She is quiet, removes a flowered hanky from her apron pocket, pats her damp forehead and the back of her neck. 

As we start slowly up the steps to the relative cool of the house, I link arms with her. I brush the cool copper of the bracelet she always wears because she believes it helps her arthritis. Her fingers are crooked, as mine are now. As I write this, I touch the copper cuff bracelet I bought years ago but have never worn. I keep it on my desk as a reminder of Grandma, and I wonder what happened to the soft, linked one she always wore. 

I open the back door with my other hand. Grandma suddenly stands as straight as she is able and says firmly, “You stay in school.” She adds this, which I will hear her say more than once: “You need to be able to make your own money.” 

…

After I’ve finished graduate school, married, and had a child. After Grandpa, who spent years in a nursing home with Parkinson’s, has died. On what will turn out to be the day my dad, her son, dies, Grandma moves into an assisted living facility.  With Dad being ill, no one has had the time to take Grandma to see the place prior to moving in. She’s been calling me several times a day, anxious about the change. 

She surveys the room: her favorite chair with an afghan she made folded over the back; her dresser, its top covered with a lacy scarf and family photographs, including several of my daughter; a large window that looks out on gardens; the new spread my mom placed on her bed that morning; a private bath.            

She leans close to me and whispers, “Oh, Melissa, this is beautiful. I was afraid it would be like the poor house.” 

Melissa Ballard has written essays for The Brevity Blog, Belt, Berea College magazine, and other publications. She is currently working on a book-length collection of essays about the women in her Northern Appalachia family. 


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

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

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

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Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 4 Comments

“…the holy and the ordinary rubbing shoulders…” Essay and images by Justin Hamm

A full-color folk art image depicting open mouths and a church with a cross on top

Poet, photographer, and model literary citizen, Justin Hamm inspires with his offering–the third installment of a series of guest posts here at Rust Belt Girl. Thank you, Justin! His essay about speaking in tongues feels especially personal, presented as it is from a child’s perspective. It feels “close” to me, in more than one way. Justin’s essay is accompanied by his original folk art, and I have to say, I didn’t see this coming. But I absolutely love it. Here at Rust Belt Girl, we know the American Midwest is vast and multitudinous, and so are its people, their inspirations, their stories, and their art.

Because Justin is truly “Midwest Nice” and humble, he might not brag to you about his TEDxOshKosh Talk, “The American Midwest: A Story in Poems & Photographs, but I’ll do it for him. This is a good place to start, if you’re new to Justin. In his talk, he asks some of the same questions we’ve been asking at Rust Belt Girl all these years. A big one: Is “flyover country” an appropriate term for the Midwest? Justin explores that vital question through inspection of the overlooked or the avoided, including rust (holla!), thunderstorms, everyday people doing everyday things, politics, social class, and more. It’s well worth a watch-and-listen.

But first. Let’s read and discuss Justin Hamm’s…

The Wind With a Secret Shape 

I was eight maybe nine years old Wednesday nights my grandparents used to 

take me to a small Pentecostal church that sat on a grassy rise just outside of 

town it had once felt isolated tucked out in the quiet but the town had crept 

outward now it sat beside a gas station a lumberyard and a row of fast-food 

joints the holy and the ordinary rubbing shoulders the church rectangular part 

brick part white siding a white cross stretching off the roofline like an arrow 

pointing to the shifting Illinois sky inside the pews angled toward a low 

platform where the preacher shouted and a four-piece band laid down rhythm 

the cushions a deep royal blue clean saturated almost regal I remember that 

color better than my childhood bedroom the building always felt old but never 

run-down the women cleaned it like a calling while the men kept it maintained 

it smelled of floor polish and breath mints old hymnals and hairspray a past 

preserved a place where time seemed fixed in place 

I wanted to be a good boy I tried to follow the sermons caught a phrase here or 

there but mostly folded handouts into paper planes or built hymnbook 

pyramids sometimes I curled up on the back pew and drifted off lulled by the 

rhythm of scripture and song until the spirit moved when it hit the preacher 

everything changed he’d leap down the steps whirling stomping at the devil 

howling Jesus’ name until his face went red and purple sweat soaking his brow 

and then the tongues came strange breathless syllables rolling out like a chant 

that bypassed the brain entirely the holy ghost made you do things that was 

just how it worked I accepted it the way you’d accept sunrise or gravity 

and I believed too believed fully if somebody said the spirit is with us tonight 

I’d scan the sanctuary up in the corners where wall met ceiling under pews 

between swaying bodies I didn’t expect to see it exactly but I wanted to know 

where it was it filled me with something like fear but not only fear there was 

longing in it too hunger a sense that something just out of reach might solve 

everything the holy ghost like a wind with a secret shape a bird made of breath 

maybe God’s own breath moving invisibly through the room I believed it 

entered through the mouth that explained what came out the old men would 

rise in their too-large suits limping loops around the sanctuary hands raised 

speaking in tongues the women would fall stiff to the ground eyes rolled back 

mouths twitching that’s how I knew the ghost was on the move I tracked it 

sinner to sinner and sometimes it came close the person next to me would 

sway eyelids flickering syllables rising up like springwater through stone my 

chest would lift my legs would buzz my mouth would soften and open almost 

involuntarily I’d think this is it just let yourself go let it take you I opened my 

mouth and nothing came I tried again wider harder I prayed the best I knew 

how I swallowed the air like it might carry something eternal and then I waited 

  • A full-color folk art image depicting open mouths and a church with a cross on top
    “The Hungry” by Justin Hamm
  • Full-color folk art depicting a boy with a green hat, crying over a red balloon
    “Balloon” by Justin Hamm
  • Full-color folk art depicting a hand reaching out and touching another person, while a cross glows in the background
    “Laying on of Hands” by Justin Hamm
  • Full-color folk art depicting angels and a person with a downcast face
    “Sinners Prayer” by Justin Hamm

Justin Hamm is the author of five poetry collections, including O Death (2024), Drinking Guinness With the Dead (2022), and The Inheritance (2019), as well as a book of photography, Midwestern. He is the founding editor of the museum of americana and the creator of Poet Baseball Cards. 

Like this post? Like this series? Let’s discuss! Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network. 

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

Check out my categories above for more guest posts, interviews, book reviews, literary musings, and writing advice we all cab 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 photos are already out there waiting for me…” Photography by Jason Irwin

A black and white photograph of a Westfield, NY, lake, featuring small houses along the water and bare trees that are reflected.

Thank you, thank you to Jason Irwin, who kicks off a series of guest posts at Rust Belt Girl, and to you, for being here! What is a Rust Belt place–and who defines the perameters? What does post-industrial mean today? What are a place’s histories, characteristics, and quirks–and how have they shaped its people and its art? How have they shaped the stories we tell, and what have those stories meant for Grit Lit and Rural Noir writing and for other mediums of creative expression? For this series, I suspect we will get some fascinating answers to these questions and many more I haven’t thought of.

A guest post by Jason Irwin

Though I have used film in the past, as well as digital cameras, I consider myself an amateur. I owned a flip phone for 22 years but finally gave in and bought a smart phone during the summer of 2024. Do I love my smart phone? Well, no, but it makes life easier, and I do love the camera feature.

I believe my photos are already out there waiting for me to stumble upon. I like taking photos of people naturally, most often without them knowing I’m taking their photos. I prefer them off-center. I also like wide-open, desolate landscapes and cityscapes: derelict, sometimes abandoned buildings, windows, doorways, big skies, fields, and bodies of water. My hometown of Dunkirk, New York, is a perfect place for such photos. I hope the three photos in this post show this. 

A black and white photo of a vintage boutique called Serendipity. There are headless, dressed mannequins in the window, along with a decorated Christmas tree.

Serendipity, the storefront boutique in Madison, Indiana, looked lost in time to me, as my wife and I drove past. Maybe not in the 50s but still lost in time. Using the grayscale setting on my Samsung smartphone ads to the notion that this photo is older than it appears. Madison is her hometown, or rather Deputy, an unincorporated rural community about 18 miles northwest of Madison. Just outside the borders of what the Britannica website’s map marks as the Rust Belt. Madison was first settled in 1805, five years before my hometown of Dunkirk. Though not a Rust Belt town, Madison, like Dunkirk, was once a railroad town. The Madison and Indianapolis Railroad was completed in 1836. The first train stopped in Dunkirk on May 15, 1851, and at the time it was the last stop on the New York and Erie Railroad. 

A color photo features a brick building adorned with a colorful mural. The mural features a young, dark-skinned girl in pigtails with a white dress on. Outlines of various African and Latine countries adorn the mural, as does a tree held up by many hands.

I chose color for the photo of the old Regent movie theater, which closed in the late 1980s, but still stands, minus its marquee, on the corner of Washington Avenue and Third Street in Dunkirk, because of the recent addition of the mural, which pays homage to Dunkirk’s Hispanic and African American communities. As a child I went to the Regent, owned by Mr. Burget and his sad-eyed basset hound, to see movies like Back to the Future, E.T., and Rocky II. Many nights my mother would have a craving for popcorn, and she’d park our car out front and send me in to the concession stand to buy a large tub with extra salt and butter and then we’d go home and eat it while watching TV.

A black and white photo features a harbor, located in Barcelona, NY, dotted with small buildings and lined by bare trees, which are reflected in the still water.

The harbor in Barcelona, New York (a former fishing hamlet a few miles north of the village of Westfield), was where one of the scenes from the 2020 movie A Quiet Place Part II staring Cillian Murphy was filmed. Besides its huge commercial fishing industry that died out in the 1970s, the area is home to various wineries and agriculture, including Welch’s Grape Juice. Just out of frame to the left, up a small hill sits the Barcelona Lighthouse. Built in 1829, it is the first gas-powered lighthouse in the world. My father was born next door in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage in 1941. The grayscale setting gives this photo an eerie presence, but I love how the trees reflect in the water.

Photographer and author Jason Irwin looking straight into the camera.

Jason Irwin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020), and the memoir These Fragments I Have Shored, forthcoming from Apprentice House Press. In 2022 he was a Zoeglossia Fellow and took part in the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Project. 

https://jasonirwin.blogspot.com/

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

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

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

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Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 13 Comments

Stay- and Play-WP: Creativity is the writer’s cure for FOMO

Last month’s AWP (the Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference & Bookfair—think writer-prom—wasn’t in the cards for me this year. My rational brain knew this, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t suffer from some FOMO. Writer friends, the warm L.A. sun, and the lure of the unknown—will I meet the literary agent of my dreams in the hotel bar?!—are attractive elements, for sure. But I decided to save my pennies and hold out for next year’s event in nearby Baltimore. (Who’s in?)

Really, that March weekend, I hardly had time to wallow in my FOMO (the name of my upcoming memoir, stay tuned, ha). But seriously, the indomitable Justin Hamm, poet and super solid literary citizen, created StayWP, an online poet and writers conference, to slake our literary thirst, as it were. What’s better than poetry in your pajamas!? Here’s a sampling of what us nearly 100 participants from around the country enjoyed from Friday evening through Sunday evening:

  • Readings from novelists including Mark Ostrowski and poets including Sean Thomas Dougherty
  • Generative workshops with titles like “Where the Poetry Rises like Dough Workshop” and “Rooted in Place,” led by former Missouri Poet Laureate Karen Craigo, which I attended, and “Like it’s my job. (‘Cause it is): Writing, Motherhood, and the (Re)Formation of Work”
  • Enthralling discussions, including “In Dialogue,” “Casting Spells for the Future,” and “Power of the Poet Posse” (that’s a gang I could get behind!)

Saturday, my super talented friend Shemaiah Gonzalez (whose debut collection of essays launches next week!) hosted a generative workshop over Zoom. The hook: How do you even begin to get ideas on what to write: let alone something joyful? Looking at three pieces of writing, we participants came up with our own. I got a couple really good starts for essays and even a prayer (for our sweet neighbor who snowplows our drive in the winter, even before he does his cousin’s drive next door).

One of the prompts was so intriguing I’ll share it, paraphrased, with Shemaiah’s permission. We were asked to draw a sketch of a place we knew well: a home, or place of work or worship. Then, we were to pick a specific spot to interrogate. I think about writing about place a lot here on the blog, but Shemaiah made that importance plain: “We write about place because place is where we keep our stuff.” And, of course, the stuff we choose to keep is important to us. I ended up writing about the rattan rocking chair—the best seat—my dad would often occupy when our family would go out on to the porch to watch rain showers. (My kids think it’s hysterical we did this. But then I also truly enjoyed The Waltons. It was a different time.)

My weekend of creativity continued on Sunday, when I took one of my sons with me to hear Akron, Ohio, native poet Rita Dove (who received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama—the only poet ever to receive both medals) at the Baltimore Museum of Art. (Thank you to co-sponsor Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth!) The little I knew of Dove, I learned from talking with Akron’s own David Giffels in an interview right here at Rust Belt Girl. This poetry reading was my son’s first, and so now he is ruined for all other poetry readings, I’m afraid. But what a way to go down!

As I’m wont to do, I took a notebook and jotted images I liked from the poems she read. Here are several lines from Dove’s beautiful work, which I smushed together like a found poem, a found Dove poem:

scabbed like a colt, our stuttering pride
my Cleveland cousins, hachety smiles
we were a musical lantern
tired of singing for someone else
what you bear is a lifetime of song
if you can't be free, be a mystery
  • Baltimore Museum of Art
  • Piece of art from artist Raúl de Nieves
  • Yes, I got it signed and it’s special. What should I read next?
  • Rita Dove and me (taken and posted with the poet’s permission)
  • Baltimore street scene–gotta love some row houses

There are few things that improve with age. Wine is one. Hutzpah is another, and don’t you know my hand was the first that shot up during the Q&A with Dove? Since I knew I’d be writing about this reading for Rust Belt Girl, I asked her what it meant to her poetry to be from the Rust Belt. Her answer was really interesting. She talked about understanding and appreciating work and its value from her family members and neighbors. She talked about the value of diversity, including a strong Hungarian presence among the immigrant groups in her part of town. A singular place, she also noted the term that makes Akron its own unique think: the “devil’s strip” for the tree lawn or berm between the sidewalk and the street. What do you call that strip, where you’re from?

Dove also talked about her journey from aspiring musician to poet. (She still plays the cello.) She noted that she was very shy and didn’t want to get up in front of people and so turned to words. Ha. There we were, all 200 or so of us. She later learned to play the viola de gamba and took voice lessons, and learned to sing opera, which helped her to “embody the words” in her poetry. She has worked with musicians on song cycles, collaborations that helped her feel “less afraid of being bold.”

I’ll end there. I know I wish for that. Here’s to words in poems and in song—and to being bold.

Now it’s your turn: tell me, if you’re a writer, have you been to AWP? Do you plan on attending next year? How do you quash FOMO in your creative life or otherwise? And how do you tap into your boldest self?

Hankering for Rust Belt author interviews, book reviews, and more? Check out my categories above. I hope you’ll follow me here, if you don’t already, so you never miss a (quite infrequent) post. Thanks! ~Rebecca

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