Refusing to bog itself down in any medical jargon or victimhood, Jason Irwin’s memoir “These Fragments I Have Shored” offers 265 pages of grief-writing that are as funny as they are unsparing. Irwin’s May 5, 2026, release is a memoir essay collection in accordance with his experience as caretaker for his mother over the last stretch of her life. With humor and humility, Irwin weaves two medical histories, placing his 1980s childhood—one spent in and out of surgeries, an ostomy bag fastened to his abdomen—in conversation with his mother’s cancer diagnosis nearly 40 years later. Not so much a chronology of illness but rather a family portrait of dysfunction, bodily decline and a mother-son relationship defined by mutual stubbornness.
It is Irwin’s refusal to stall in the dense medical digressions that allows him to move quickly from his own birth to his youth, all the way through his marriage and the death of his mother. His brevity is buoyed by a voice that feels conversational and cynical, without being glib. His pacing reflects the experience of chronic illness and its whiplash of appointments, argument and gallows humor.
Isolated and bullied for his surgical deformities, the sections of his childhood are vivid. But even in the passages of suffering, levity surfaces. In one tender anecdote, we learn of his childhood best friend Jojo, memorably described as “a phantom plucked from darkness.” The troublemaker with a good heart, the neighborhood delinquent who befriends and also protects Irwin, described as “threatening to kill anyone who made fun of my brace, the way I walked, or questioned why, at age twelve, my bicycle still had training wheels.” Inclusions such as Jojo render a whole image of instability—it can be destructive, but not without being formative.
In one devastating episode, a classmate punches Irwin’s ostomy bag. But the humiliation comes through plainly, without attempts of swelling authenticity. Not interested in being a victim, nor dignifying his younger self, Irwin details the destructive bravado of high school. He admits to drinking as a performance of toughness among many moments of cruelty. He confesses to his own actions as a bully, acknowledging, “I knocked books out of upper classmates’ hands as they walked the halls and made fun of those students I knew were weaker than me, like Ezra, a refugee from Central America, and Tammy, who chased after pennies I threw at her.” It’s here where the memoir’s humility lies and Irwin does not paint himself any kinder than he was. He calls it what it was: insecurity, and his candor is refreshing.
He approaches his deceased mother with the same clarity, depicting a woman with personhood rather than an archetype of maternal failure. Sixteen years after discovering a tumor in her nose, the cancer eventually spread to her bones, killing her just after her 75th birthday. We see her resist medical advice, refuse to stop smoking and grow petulant in doctors’ offices. In it, Irwin lets her read as irritable, even unpleasant, and we witness her unraveling along with him; from snide to exhausted, from a sick woman to a dying one. But, crucially, Irwin restores her to a fullness that posthumous portraits of motherhood tend to flatten. He shows us the mistakes she made, but also her agency: the late-in-life decision to enroll in college to study creative writing, her curt candor in the face of growing weakness. When her old friends try to reconcile with her upon her diagnosis, she dismisses it: “Fuck ‘em. If they can’t visit me while I’m healthy and alive, I don’t want them looking at my body when I’m dead, crying their fake tears.” She does not get reduced to the dying parent. Evidently, she was difficult. But Irwin makes sure we know she was a full person too.
Finally, Irwin gives us a self-referential depiction of being a creative. The fear of inadequacy and the suspicious longevity of art as a career is embedded in Irwin’s prose. The effect is intimate and locates Irwin among writers: “Sometimes I wondered if I was in over my head. Was I really a poet, I wondered.” Irwin struggles; he drinks; he creates. He falters and he keeps writing.
Irwin resists the manufactured epiphany. The memoir closes on a quiet image of his mother, still instructing him in how to endure. It is appropriate and true to the book’s spirit.
Emily Harris is a senior at the University of Pittsburgh studying History and Nonfiction Writing. She is Copy Chief at The Pitt News and has written criticism on contemporary memoir, narrative craft, and literary nonfiction.
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Marjorie Maddox’s new poetry collection, Small Earthly Space (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2025) accompanies a series of dreamy digital visual collages by artist Karen Elias. Together, they depict a world not only fraught with imminent disaster, but one of beauty and hope. Maddox’s poems, inspired by Ali Smith’s lyrical novel, Companion Piece, place the curlew as a central, and recurring figure in the collection. Like a canary in the coal mine, Maddox’s curlew warns about the environmental devastation that is happening now.
Known as the bringer of bad omens in Celtic folklore, forecasting bad weather, sorrow and death, the curlew, with its haunting cries, is also associated with the passing of seasons, rebirth, and renewal. “When our planetary conditions render even the saints tongue-tied and stuttering,” Maddox writes in the introduction, “the bird appears as guide, as psychopomp, as Beatrice in a kind of Dantean descent,” requiring us to “grow humble,” to “pass through the smallest of doors” and experience “the long, slow burn of loss.”
Maddox’s poems are also deeply religious and read like prayers or holy visions. “How far would you go for wisdom?” Maddox asks in “Dive Down,” where she links humanity’s fate with nature’s and invites the reader to dig deeper and discover those epiphanies hidden in daily life, to find “one drenched syllable of rescued hallelujah.” In “Tightrope Walker,” we are instructed to “unzip all our divisions” and position ourselves on the “fine line that binds sky and dirt” and “welds together every season of belief and reason.”
Known as the bringer of bad omens in Celtic folklore, forecasting bad weather, sorrow and death, the curlew, with its haunting cries, is also associated with the passing of seasons, rebirth, and renewal.
“Still Life: 1950s,” which opens section two, leaves nature and moves inward. The poem speaks of the fraught relationships of generations and the societal demands placed on mothers. “What can be said to the perfect mother?/Poised, she smiles beautifully but doesn’t hear.” In the accompanying collage, Karen Elias has created a powerful scene: the mother as a stone statue, sitting in on the sofa, elegant and demure, yet deaf to the needs of her daughter, who crouches on the stairs, doing her best to “protect… this beautiful sculpture,” not daring to speak unpleasant syllables, words that might cause her mother grief, or destroy the facade of their silent perfection.
Other poems speak of the uncertainty and allure of the unknown that lies just outside the boundaries of our perceptions and manicured lawns, and the anxiety of returning to a home that only survives in memory: a place full of phantoms, where picket fences turn to stone. “Strange Light,” the eerie black and white photo collage that accompanies the poem “Calling Hours: August 21, 2017,” has a bed that floats on water in an otherwise empty room. From the window the eclipsed sun, like a voyeur, peers in. The poem uses the eclipse (the first total eclipse since 1979 to be visible from anywhere in the U.S. mainland) as a metaphor for the death of a loved one. “What can harm us lingers there/beneath the bright posthumous display/of the body…” Maddox writes, noting that “looking directly or too long/into the face of the loved” could, like looking at the eclipsed sun, permanently harm us.
Throughout these poems of impending environmental and spiritual doom, a tempered hope permeates, a hope made possible by our faith and resilience, as well as our willingness to accept blame for the state of the world. In “Snapshot,” the dead arise and call for mercy. “Will you listen?” Maddox asks, like the prophets of old. “Will I?” she responds, before observing, “The earth/waits impatiently.”
The curlew returns in “The Witnesses” to see the devastation wrought by the 2018 wildfire in Curlew, Washington. “Smoke rewrites the sky,” Maddox writes, as “Flames attack its map and habitat.” The collection ends with a nod toward Emily Dickinson. “The curlew is the thing,” Maddox states in “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.” It is “The beak wildly waving its frayed/but flapping ribbons/of persistence, of hope.”
Throughout these poems of impending environmental and spiritual doom, a tempered hope permeates, a hope made possible by our faith and resilience, as well as our willingness to accept blame for the state of the world.
The poems in Small Earthly Space are a dire plea to take up arms against the “Chaos/of this human-caused catastrophic carnival.” With an “ecstasy of words” Maddox dares us to “Embody the action of verbs” and “Delete the expected ending,” to imagine a world where “IF” still exists. In Maddox’s vision, however, imagining isn’t enough. It is our responsibility in the here and now to do something to ensure a better future, a world brimming with the “intoxication of possibility.”
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.
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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.
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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
“The Hungry” by Justin Hamm
“Balloon” by Justin Hamm
“Laying on of Hands” by Justin Hamm
“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.
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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
I’m thrilled to present the second in a series of guest posts interrogating place here at Rust Belt Girl. Christina Fisanick is a champion for Appalachian writing–and Appalachian voices, young and old. (Read her whole bio below.) “Taking the Cow Path to Culture” appears in her book, Pulling the Thread: Untangling Wheeling History, which was published in 2024 by North Meridian Press.
Taking the Cow Path to Culture
by Christina Fisanick
Route 88 meanders through the Ohio Valley countryside, connecting the city of Wheeling, West Virginia, to Oglebay Park and small, rural towns and farms along the way. More significantly, for some, Route 88 is the lifeline that carries students, faculty, staff and visitors to two of the area’s oldest institutions of higher education, West Liberty University and Bethany College. This important role earned Route 88 the seemingly humorous moniker, “The Cow Path to Culture,” and is a standing metaphor for much of life in the northern part of the Mountain State and throughout Appalachia.
Route 88 was once an actual cow path upon which animals were herded across the farmlands of the region. Like many other places in the country, it made more sense to locals to pave the beaten cow path than to blaze a new trail as modes of travel advanced. But as has been somewhat painfully obvious over the last century, maintaining the well-trodden road might not be the best way to go.
In 1893, a minor New England poet, Sam Walter Foss, wrote a poem with a major message. “The Calf-Path” tells the story in verse of a path driven by a calf through Boston, which, after years of other animals, and eventually humans, following the path, was paved and became a major thoroughfare. The funny, yet poignant, poem takes readers on a journey through time and encourages deep thought about life decisions. Mainly, Foss wonders, why should we continue going down the same road in deed and thought when it might not be the most direct or even the best route?
Just like the calf path in the poem, Route 88 rambles and turns and plunges on its trek from Wheeling past Oglebay Park beyond the farmlands and homes and on to West Liberty University and then Bethany College. I commuted to West Liberty in the 1990s and cursed the winding road more than once during the icy winter months. My classmates and I anxiously wondered who would build a college on top of that hill? More so, we jokingly wondered how we made it to graduation.
We were not the first students to ponder such things. A 1972 Sports Illustrated article tells the tale of four student-athletes from Israel—Avraham Melamed, Moshe Gertel, Yoel Kende and Danny Stern —and their “250-pound Irish Catholic coach,” Tom Grall. The students were recruited for the West Liberty swim team. Avraham Melamed described their journey from the Pittsburgh airport along Route 88 in harrowing, awe-struck terms then concludes: “It was easier getting from Ramat Yohanan [Israel] to Pittsburgh than it was to get from Pittsburgh to West Liberty.” Writer Mortin Sharnik paraphrases Melamed:
“All roads do not lead to West Liberty, but one that does, Route 88, is called the Cow Path to Culture. The Israeli was taken on a more scenic route, a roller-coaster ride over a ribbon of cracked concrete, with no guardrails to prevent a car from taking a shortcut down a ravine. Melamed kept his nose pressed to the car window, looking for the bright lights. Instead, he saw farms, strip mines and hairpin curves.”
The effort, of course, was worth it. The Israeli students went on to make the swim team as winning as West Liberty football, which at the time the article was written had two consecutive undefeated seasons. More so, they earned great educations from the oldest institution of higher education in the state of West Virginia.
While Sharnik’s article is a fascinating and humorous look at the past, it is the title that catches my attention: “Wandering Jews in an Unpromising Land.” Clearly, Sharnik was playing on the students’ ethnicity and well-known Biblical references. Regrettably, the term “unpromising” is simply the same old stereotype of West Virginia arrived at by taking the same old mental cow path. Now, 46 years later, that cow path has been paved over again and again, and few people outside the state (and even within its borders) are willing to blaze a new trail. West Virginia needs to free itself of the shackles of presupposition that continue to hold us back from achieving greater success.
These stereotypes not only negatively color West Virginia, but all of Appalachia. We are told time and again by the popular media (and even ourselves) that there is nothing here. Appalachia is a wasteland, people say. A no man’s land of little possibility and less opportunity, they echo. And more often than not, this lack is blamed not on politicians or exploitive company owners, but on Appalachians themselves.
This blame goes back decades to early literature, TV shows and movies that exploit the region’s hardships for book sales, ratings and box office records. Few can forget The Beverly Hillbillies and their clueless, backwoods characters with hearts of gold or the psychologically deranged figures from Deliverance. Popular culture tells us that Appalachians are poor, willfully ignorant souls who are too lazy to improve their lots in life. These ideals have been further entrenched by presidential “poverty tours” conducted by presidents and other politicians throughout the 1960s to prove to the American people outside the region that Appalachians are poor, white trash that need their help.
Unfortunately, many of our own people have embraced these ill-conceived views of ourselves and live accordingly. Of course, we never see ourselves as morally-bankrupt, ne’er-do-wells, but we willingly believe it of our neighbors. J.D. Vance does this in Hillbilly Elegy, of course. He encourages the country to continue to blame Appalachians for our misfortunes. It is our own fault that we suffer from the world’s highest rates of opiate addiction, he argues. It is our own fault that many of our children live in poverty, he states. By continuing to claim that Appalachia’s poor are responsible for their own conditions, the nation’s eyes can be averted, not out of guilt but out of blame. Our country’s hands can be washed clean since Appalachians create our own misery and wallow in it.
It is easy to see why this particular cow path has been well-worn and paved over. It is to the benefit of politicians whose pockets are lined with money from the oil and gas industry to continue to shame and blame our people so that they never ask for more. Our land has been raped of resources while our people have been underpaid and exploited. None of this could happen if not for desperation and mentally following a well-worn cow path that leads to broad, self-defeating conclusions about poverty, drug abuse, and job loss.
Even now, young men fight for jobs in the dying coal industry for the promise of what they believe once was but will never be (again). Now is the time to take a different path. One that is not littered with stereotypes and preconceived notions. I am reminded, as I am sure you are by now, of another poem that urges readers to take the road “less traveled by.” I urge you, my fellow West Virginians, imagine a different life for yourselves and for generations to come. I’ll always take the cow path to culture to serve my alma mater. West Liberty University is in my heart forever. But my mind will be on a different metaphorical route that allows for new possibilities for West Virginia, Appalachia, and its people.
We no longer have to play the role of eager simpletons to keep our jobs. There are no jobs. Let’s create our own through education, new industries, and innovation. A change in mindset will make all the difference. In this moment we must abandon who we are told we are and become who we know we are. We are West Virginians. We are Appalachians. Toughened by adversity, wizened by necessity, and softened by empathy.
Dr. Christina Fisanick is the author or editor of more than 30 books and dozens of articles, essays, and poems. Her latest book, Pulling the Thread: Untangling Wheeling History, is a collection of essays focusing on little known stories from Wheeling’s past. She is currently working on an historic novel which takes place at Fostoria Glass in Moundsville, WV, in the years immediately following WWII and co-editing an anthology, “We Are Here!”: New Writing from Northern Appalachian (forthcoming for University of Kentucky Press). In addition, Fisanick is an English professor and an internationally recognized scholar in the teaching of digital storytelling as public history. Fisanick serves as the president of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia (WANA) and the co-host of WANA LIVE!: The Reading Series. Learn more: christinafisanick.com.
Doesn’t this essay just get you thinking? What are a place’s histories, byways, characteristics, and quirks–and how have they shaped its people and its art? How have they shaped the stories we tell? For this series, I suspect we will get some fascinating answers to these questions and many more I haven’t thought of. I hope you’ll join in and share your thoughts!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
We’re no longer tweeting, we’re xeeting—writer Amber Sparks might have coined that–and the literary landscape has changed, yet again. What used to provide a good social media home for the #writingcommunity now feels like a hut, maybe a hovel. The best writerly take I heard was from writer Anna Gazmarian (I think), who said the X logo that replaced the cute blue bird reminded her of some boutique hotel she couldn’t afford. I look at the new logo and can see nothing but the emoticon for “dead”: Xs for eyes. But so long as there are writers connecting, there will be a writing community. Really, the literary landscape is always changing, and one certainly can’t rely on a social media site for real connections (except for maybe this one).
I talk a lot about literary citizenship but don’t often talk about what it looks like in practice. It definitely has a lot to do with reading and reviewing the work of other writers, but that’s just the beginning. To be clear, it has little to do with getting an MFA, for that paper in a frame on my office wall has played no part in most of the connections I’ve made in the writing community. So, a few on-the-ground examples:
Not long ago, I braved the open-mic at one of my favorite literary conferences and read a prose poem I was working on, called “Jesus, My Son’s Buckteeth.” (Clearly I’m staking out the fertile publishing ground of: Is she religious or just ignorantly blasphemous? Let’s just keep them guessing.) The poem needed a little work but it was getting somewhere interesting, capturing a complicated mother-love characterized now by running the kids to ortho appointments and no longer by rocking them to sleep. After the open-mic, a writer friend who is also an editor of a wonderful poetry journal said I might consider submitting it. I re-worked the poem, with the help of my trusted writing group, sent it off, and crossed my fingers. It was accepted–but this isn’t where the story of literary citizenship stops. I made sure to attend the online issue launch, and as I scanned all the names and faces in Zoom boxes, I recognized the name of one of my undergraduate writing teachers, who is also a poet. I used the chat function to say hi, and she remembered me, 20+ years on!
Sometimes it’s about saying hi to someone who may or may not remember you. Sometimes it’s saying yes to the the next generation of writers when you might rather be making Christmas cookies. OK, I’ll back up. A writer friend of a writer friend asked if I’d judge the 2022 AWP Intro Journals Project awards for creative nonfiction. When I could have been making cookies over my winter break, I was reading essays from MFA students, more than 60 of them: reading, re-reading, and picking my winners from so many admirable essays. But that wasn’t the end of the connecting. Long after the winning essays were published in university-run literary journals, one of the writers reached out. She was in the throes of preparing to turn in her thesis before graduation, but she wanted to take a moment to thank me for helping her feel like a writer with that award. I remembered her essay: it was excellent and showcased her journalism chops. I fact, she’d had a career before retiring and pursuing an MFA in creative writing–a time where you’re always a student no matter your age or experience. I told her I’d love to see an essay about just that, and I hope I do.
So, sometimes literary citizenship is leaving the door open for more, is encouraging personal history and story to be shared. Sometimes it’s just saying: you’re writing, I’m reading, and I’m so happy to be sharing this connection. Love a book? Tell the author.
And then there are so many more examples: the blogging friendships that started right here and have turned into real-life and writing-life friendships and critique groups and beta reading relationships.
Like any deep relationship, cultivating literary relationships does take time. Being a good literary citizen requires that you know the writing world and its players. What time I once used to doom scroll on the bird site I hope to devote to this blog. In a few days, my boys and I leave for our summer break in Northern Ohio, and I have a stack of Rust Belt lit to bring with me. I hope to get back to you here with a couple reviews and an author interview this fall, so stay tuned.
If you follow me at FB or IG (@MoonRuark), you’ve been inundated with photos from my European vacation in July. The most Rust Belt-ish place: Vigo, Spain–industrial, historical, and wonderful. A few pics for those who haven’t had enough (in order: Paris’ Eiffel Tower (of course), a pretty shop window, the D’Orsay Museum, and us sisters by the Seine; Barcelona hills and palm trees and basilica; Vigo’s cathedral; and a view of the Spanish countryside from Valenca, Portugal:
This is a post about a community Christmas cookie.
***
Bear with me, and hello! Happiest of holiday seasons to you and yours!
And back to the aforementioned cookie…
It was Christmas Eve Eve, and I’d waited too long to secure anise seed, a necessary ingredient in my favorite Christmas cookie, one I make religiously, each and every year: German Springerle.
I visited four stores on my search for the elusive, black licorice-scented seed and found none. I lamented supply chain issues and the state of commerce in particular and the world in general. But not for long, because Christmas.
In a last ditch attempt to keep my cookie tradition alive, my husband suggested I ask for anise seed on our village’s FB page. Within the hour, I had offers of fennel seed and star anise–the latter of which I believed just might work.
Because this is not a baking blog (you’re welcome), I won’t bore you with the recipe–unless you want it (I don’t believe in secret recipes). But suffice it to say the cookie turned out great with the substitution. Yes, it takes a village.
You probably have your own community cookie story. Maybe it’s an actual cookie. Maybe it’s something a little more poignant.
As Epiphany approaches, the Wise Men in our nativity set inch closer to the scene. These smart guys (rightly) get a lot of press. They brought pretty important ingredients to that out-of-the-way stable.
Our nativity set also features some more colorful comers–a rough-looking fellow bringing a chicken and eggs; a woman bringing several loaves of bread balanced on her head; a drummer and a bagpiper bringing the tunes.
Me, I’ve been bringing the music, this year, my first full year as a cantor at my Catholic parish and for weddings and funerals. And this singing way of things has found its way into my home-life (working on a Von Trapp vibe over here!) and my writing-life. In my novel-in-progress I ask: Can our songs save us? And in my recent nonfiction, I try to bring my voice closer to my heart.
If you know me out on Twitter–land of snark–you’ll know that in addition to cookies, I am the one who brings the shrimp ring to a party. (My Midwestern child-self would be duly impressed.) Snark aside, I try to do my small part at a time when it seems we’re all pulled apart, party-less.
Because, we can’t make all the good stuff entirely on our own. It takes community.
Community is why I started this blog way back in 2017. And it’s why I will continue to hype the poets and writers and literary-scene-makers of the Rust Belt in 2022.
My most-viewed interview this year was that with Cleveland native poet Teri Ellen Cross Davis, whom I got to meet in person–and even break bread with–at Lit Youngstown’s Fall Literary Festival in October. A festival I helped to plan, along with so many other members of that literary community.
The literary world just recently lost Joan Didion. The places she wrote about and from are not my places. But she has a lot to teach us about writing about place. I’m taking this quote of hers into 2022 as inspiration:
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.
Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979
Whatever place you’re shaping, whatever community you belong to, thank you for being here.
All the best in 2022, stay well, and keep in touch!
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. ~Rebecca
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