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

By Emily Harris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These Fragments I Have Shored: A Memoir

By Jason Irwin

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

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

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

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

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

Image of cover of Ann Patchett's novel Tom Lake

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Harper Collins website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More from The Rabbit Hutch: Reflecting on a conversation with National Book Award winner Tess Gunty

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

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

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

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

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

Buy your own copy here

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

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

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

Like mine. Maybe like yours, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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To Dream of Curlews and Stars: A review of Marjorie Maddox’s Small Earthly Space

By Jason Irwin

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. 

https://jasonirwin.blogspot.com/

Small Earthly Space

Poetry by Marjorie Maddox; Artwork by Karen Elias

Shanti Arts $28.95

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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Ohio is Ohio, and I love it

You are forgiven if you’re not up on the middle school slang that has redefined the word “Ohio” (my beautiful native state) as cringey or weird.

Does that mean the writing from Ohio authors or about Ohio places is also weird? In some cases (and often my favorite cases) yes.

It has been more than a minute, Rust Belt Girl followers, and I appreciate you for hanging on. Busy days around here with a book project going and essays popping up here and there. And of course there’s work-work to contend with. And my teenagers who keep me hip (surely that’s not a word they’d use) through their generation’s reinvention of language, music, and fashion. (A whole wardrobe of hooded sweatshirts and oversized black jeans, anyone?)

But I’m thrilled to share with you my latest essay, which is part essay and part book review. The book? Matthew Meduri’s debut novel Collegiate Gothic. Part satirical campus novel, part crime procedural, and part Italian architectural treatise, this one is quite fun (and, yes, a little Ohio.)

I’d love it if you checked out my essay–“Campus Weird: Collegiate Gothic Skewers Academia (and Ohio) in Fine Form” at Belt Magazine. (Bonus points for identifying the Ohio college campus building in the photo. I only know because a friend told me.)

Then, go check out Matthew’s novel over at Bordighera Press.

What have you been reading and writing lately, readerly and writerly friends?

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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A review of Pittsburghese, Poems by Robert Gibb

By Karen J. Weyant

If you’ve ever visited Pittsburgh, you’ve likely encountered “Pittsburghese,” the local dialect of the people of Pittsburgh that distinguishes residents of the city from their Rust Belt neighbors. Pittsburghese is partially defined by dropping the words “to be” from certain phrases, such as The car needs washed instead of The car needs to be washed. It’s using words such as pop instead of soda, or buggy instead of shopping cart. Sure, many linguists may say that these examples are not pure Pittsburgh (my mother, for example, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, always called shopping carts, buggies). But there is one word that always seems to be on the lips of Pittsburgh citizens and on the t-shirts found in city souvenir shops. That word is the second-person plural vernacular, Yinz, a contracted form of “you ones” or “you’ins.” 

It’s the word Yinz that echoed through my head as I read the latest poetry collection by Robert Gibb. Pittsburghese is an elegy for a place: Homestead, Pennsylvania, a borough located about 11 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Homestead is rich with labor history, but like so many places, saw a huge economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. With every image, I am reminded of the tiny Rust Belt town of my youth and the importance of story and memory.

The poems in Gibb’s collection take us through an industrial world struggling to survive, and thus, the overarching images in most of these poems have to do with debris, or rust – a word that is celebrated in the poem “The Etymologies of Rust.” In this poem, the narrator describes the red-orange oxidation that appears in so many poems written about the Rust Belt as a “slow, remorseless kind of oxidation” that is “red, orange or tawny. The ferrous of flakes.” It’s a perfect description for those of us who know rust intimately as the corrosion that flakes metal mailboxes, parts of bicycles and chain-linked fences. For Gibb, the color of rust may be beautiful, but the effects of rust are devastating for it “cankers like corrosion on idled iron.”

Physical landscapes, often held together by rust, are at the heart of many of Gibb’s poems. As someone who grew up in a small factory town, I recognize some of the images while others are new. I don’t know the slag pots described in “Deskulling the Slag Pots,” but I know the descriptions of derelict phone booths and furniture being auctioned off from fancy buildings. No matter the image, there is a story. And for many readers, the stories may be a bit familiar. For example, in the poem “Elegy for the Park Theater” the narrator tells us about a time when “we’d be plunged into darkness/Beneath the beam of light figures rode/Onto the screen.”  In this world, the images are “mantis-like invaders from Mars” and “several avatars of Tarzan.” Later, he explains that the theatre became a roller skating rink. The transformation of space is common in places struggling to survive. In Gibb’s world, the theater turns into a roller skating rink – in my world, the single movie theatre found in my tiny hometown was turned into a hardware store before it was finally torn down. Other stories can be found in such poems as “The Play of Memory of Childhood Spaces,” where a narrator remembers a class trip to St. Anthony’s Chapel in Pittsburgh, or in “Voice-Over,” where the narrator recounts working different shifts in the mills when he “never got used to eating dinner/First thing in the morning, heading to work/At bedtime.” 

Clearly, the narrator is present in many of these poems, as if drawing from personal memory, but other poems reflect more historical memory, taking their inspiration from photos and works of arts. For instance, in “Homestead, ca 1929, Oil on Canvas,” the poet describes a John Kane painting where “Homestead/Is crowded rows of houses/Steel mills billowing/identical plumes of smoke.” The first lines may not be especially picturesque, but later, the poem captures the artist at work, “painting scenes on the sides of boxcars during the lunchbreaks/at work.” The final lines in this poem are a commentary on what is to come for this world, as the “slurry is just right” because the economy is “about to tank as if in another country.”  In another poem, “Worker, Steel Mill,” Gibb focuses on the human being seen in a 1955 photograph by W. Eugene Smith, by explaining that at first, he is “anonymous in those glare-filled goggles.”  Later, in the poem, however, there is praise for this man who is “garbed/to be garbed in fire” and who works for “weeks have been divided into shifts” all because “of the cost of production.” 

In spite of my love of story and image, my favorite poem is one that interrogates etymology, echoing the title of the collection. In “Pittsburghese” the poet explores the word jaggers which is “vernacular for brambles.” Jaggers are thorns, and if one is caught in jaggers, it is painful, but it is very possible to lift the thorns away. Still, there are the ones that “splintered beneath your skin” that are the most painful, even when the jagger is removed. There is a strong metaphor here: pain may be left behind, even when the source of that pain is removed, but resilience stands. And with this resilience is some kind of hope for a less painful future. It’s this type of hope that is found in every poem in this collection – even those poems that recall painful pasts. 

In the preface to this collection, Anita Skeen, Wheelbarrow Books Series Editor, quotes Thomas Wolfe by saying “You can’t go home again.”  She explains, “I would argue that in poems and in memory, you can.”  Skeen goes on to say that the images remind her of her childhood home located near Charleston, West Virginia. Anyone who grew up in the Rust Belt will be reminded of home, and perhaps inspired to write about that home through the lens of history, memory, and image.

Pittsburghese

Poems By Robert Gibb

Wheelbarrow Books $15.95

Karen J. Weyant‘s poems and essays have been published in Chautauqua, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Fourth River, Lake Effect, Rattle, River Styx, Slipstream, and Whiskey Island.  The author of two poetry chapbooks, her first full-length collection is Avoiding the Rapture. She is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.  She lives, reads, and writes in Warren, Pennsylvania.

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A review of Avoiding the Rapture by Karen J. Weyant

By Marjorie Maddox

In Karen J. Weyant’s first full-length book of poetry, Avoiding the Rapture, there is no avoiding the evocative and sometimes contradictory landscape and convictions of the Rust Belt. In a town defined by its bars and churches, river and railroad tracks, closed factories and forbidden swimming holes, Weyant gives us both the desire to leave and the need to cleave. No matter our background, she makes this space ours—ownership and rebellion a familiar if not always pleasant home.

We begin with belief so strong it takes hold of a town—“Every girl I knew got religion/at the same time they caught Disco Fever.” Salvation is a type of escape to be embraced or rejected. “Facing uncertain futures,” the poet explains, “we waited to be whisked away in [both kinds of] sparkle.” And yet by “avoiding the rapture,” she counters, “[w]hen everything disappears, everything you see will be yours,” a mixed motivator for a place that when you aren’t reveling in it, you’re scheming a quick departure.

Within this back-and-forth identity quest, the narrator looks for signs and visions in roadkill rising from the dead, in Jesus in dryer steam at the local laundromat, in “one of the Horsemen/in the hind leg of a Holstein cow,” and in “saints/in real estate signs buckling under buckshot.” There are also “man-made miracles” where the narrator­­ “dump[s] grape juice into Gallagher Run,/hoping the muddy swirl would turn into wine,/. . . [or] pretend[s] the stale angel food cake. . . was really manna.” 

Woven throughout the book is a sequence that often begins “The Girl Who…” and perceptively defines identity. “The Girl Who Parted Mill Creek with Her Toes” offers nature as one way to “ignore the grown-up talk/of factory closings, lost jobs, and foreclosures.” This path also allows for leaving the church while retaining its lore and, at times, alure. For example, the post-industrial mass exodus of families is linked to the narrator’s Exodus-like parting of the creek with her toes. Likewise, in another poem, an abandoned and deteriorating church evolves into a new type of sanctuary.

Throughout, insects swarm, dazzle, or sting. There is “the drone/of factories in a metallic round of cricket song” and “june bugs hurling against back doors.” Not unlike the town’s inhabitants, in “To the Girl Who Talked to Summer Insects” “[s]ome insects were silent, others angry or lost.” Elsewhere, mayflies—“ghost stories [come] alive”—become reminders “we lived among the dead.” The plague-like buzzing of blackflies usher in arguments over money and heat. “June/ [is] heavy with horseflies. . . .cicada shells. . .cracked under our feet.” In dreams, butterflies get “caught in backyard grills”; in real life yellowjackets die in/escape from a flaming nest; the narrator rescues grasshoppers from a ball of ice. Eventually, end-of-the-world prophesies drown out miracles.  

In this way, even the word “miracles” begins to lose its mystery. In family life, the word becomes synonymous with describing impossible situations: a truck that “would need a miracle to get through the summer,” a sister who “would need a miracle to get through high school,” and a father who “would need/a miracle to get a job at his age.” 

As tensions increase in the run-down town, so does the narrator’s desire for flight. “[W]e planned our new world. . . . we knew we had to leave,” she recalls. The coming-of-age departures are small and large: heels, makeup, drinking, boyfriends with the nicknames of beers, the recognition that, on many levels, “every ripple has danger” and that [r]eal girls learn to toughen/the soles of their feet. . . .Accept . . .fate.” 

That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t moments of daring and flight. Through sheer determination, the narrator “[spins] in the August heat until [she] could fly.” Bravely, she catches bees or reaches out to touch a two-headed calf. We watch as her father helps her bury a dead bird. Always drawn to water, she listens to rivers talk and “sw[ims] late at night/in the gravel pit pond.” She counsels, “Follow the fireflies.”  

In these ways and others, Avoiding the Rapture whoops and hollers with independence and survival. It is a stirring, well-crafted ode to place, where “girls still ride the beds of pickup trucks . . . .[and] learn how to catch maple seeds/in their teeth, and how to spit them out.” It is a depiction of individuals who, even if they don’t learn to fly, learn to balance while wind “comb[s] through their long hair.”

Here’s to the young women of the Rust Belt, fiercely and perceptively portrayed in Karen J. Weyant’s new collection, Avoiding the Rapture.  

Avoiding the Rapture

By Karen J. Weyant

Riot in Your Throat $17

Karen J. Weyant‘s poems and essays have been published in Chautauqua, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Fourth River, Lake Effect, Rattle, River Styx, Slipstream, and Whiskey Island.  The author of two poetry chapbooks, her first full-length collection is Avoiding the Rapture. She is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.  She lives, reads, and writes in Warren, Pennsylvania.

Professor of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 14 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (International Book and Illumination Book Award Winners); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a collaboration with her artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse) are forthcoming in 2024. In addition, she has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books. With Jerry Wemple, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. She hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU. See www.marjoriemaddox.com 

Rebecca here, with many thanks to Marjorie for this beautiful review of Karen’s poetry collection. I can’t wait to dig in! What are you reading and writing this month, as we start working our way through the new year? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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

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Emma Riva of Petrichor reviews WAYS OF PITTSBURGH

Rust Belt Girl readers, don’t miss the latest from Petrichor–Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s art scene magazine. Founder and Editor-in-Chief Emma Riva is doing an incredible job covering the scene.

Ways of Pittsburgh: Exploring and Painting our Skinny Streets captures the plein air painting of Pittsburgh’s own Ron Donoughe. Let me tell you, his work is like no plein air landscape painting I’ve ever seen! Donoughe paints the city’s narrow backstreets–even the graffiti. A real talent at capturing light, I think some of his paintings of houses resemble Edward Hopper’s work. See if you agree, when you check out Emma’s review–and give Petrichor a well-deserved follow!

review: WAYS OF PITTSBURGH

If Emma’s name seems familiar, you might remember her review of Tess Gunty’s National Book Award-winning novel: The Rabbit Hutch‘s Rust Belt Renaissance–published right here at Rust Belt Girl.

We’re closing in on the end of the year, friends, which means reading roundup time! So, tell me, what’s been your favorite book of the year? Let me know in the comments.

Let’s start a discussion! Comment below or on my FB page. And please share with your friends and social network.

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

*header image courtesy of Pexels Free Photos