event review – Rust Belt Girl

Posted on November 29, 2025November 28, 2025 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 10 Comments

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

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

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

Novelist Rachel Swearingen telling us craft session participants to, “Write towards change.” And “Stop thinking about characters and start thinking about relationships.” (Fiction writing changemaker right there!)

Me, getting to tell my story of my mom’s protesting of a nuclear power plant near my hometown when I was a kid (I wrote about it here) and detailing how that story turned into an integral part of my eco-novel (published someday, world!)

Exploring ekphrastic writing at the Butler Institute of American Art (great museum road-trip idea for you out of towners!) and exploring Youngstown writ large (getting to stay with friends and enjoying the local cuisine (there will never be enough pickle pizza, noggin-sized meatballs, and pierogis!))

Getting to be a student of Sandra Beasley, Ross Gay, Lawrence Coates, and so many other teacher-writers and getting to tell them over charcuterie and a glass of wine: “you wrote my favorite poem, essay, novella, thank you…”

Meeting writer friends (like the talented Melissa Fraterrigo) in person after years of reading her work (her novel Glory Days inspired a lot of what I’ve been trying to highlight at this blog these last nine years or so—stay tuned for a review of her memoir in essays, pictured). And meeting other friends year after year and weaving our stories—and lives—together.

The highest highlight? You. Becoming a member of the Lit Youngstown community through the fall lit fest has been incredibly rewarding for my literary life—and my life-life. Thank you, friends.

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

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

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

Day 1:

Narrative Medicine [definition: healthcare practiced with narrative competence]: A Generative Workshop, facilitated by family nurse practitioner and poet Dana Reeher. Imagine me taking furious notes for the anthology project I’m co-editing: Body of Work, essays at the intersection of dance and health. For a little workshop exercise, Dana asked us participants to respond to a writing prompt, “an expansive invitation to open the mind,” so I thought I’d write a very short piece about my own dancing and its impact on my physical and mental health outlook:

Maybe the mistake was I listened too well, that I pointed my feet too hard, that I really could feel that string coming out of the top of my head lifting me up to the studio ceiling. Maybe I postured too much, wanted too much. Maybe I turned out until I was turned in. Maybe all that looking in the mirror made me someone else. I can still spot a dancer, or an anorexic, from fifty paces.

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

The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolary Story of Academic Pandemic Pandemonium: The Musical. Based on the award-winning novel by Nancy McCabe, published by Outpost 19 in 2024, the presentation included a dramatic reading (with singing—who was expecting a musical at the lit fest? Not I. And it was such fun!).

Readings by David Huebert and Sean Prentiss in St. John’s (gorgeous limestone and stained glass) Episcopal Church sanctuary. Your girl provided introductions to both writers—thanks for putting up with my unorthodox investigative process to make sure they were exciting, guys!

Day 2:

Bengal Tiger Moments: Time Perception in Creative Writing, facilitated by Sean Prentiss. In this fascinating session, we talked about speed on the page, presented in five categories from fastest to slowest: Gaps, Summary, Scene, Dilation, and Pause. Sean presented examples of these techniques from creative nonfiction and explained the brain science behind our understanding of the movement of time—irl and on the page.

Rooting the Self: Writing as an Act of Person, Political & Environmental Transformation & Transcendence, a multi-genre workshop with (beautiful and talented) Rebe Huntman, author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle: Rebe took us through various stages/ways of honoring our voice and our writing by making space for it and celebrating it, including meditation, morning pages, repetitive activity (including list-making), “the writing cave,” and writing constraints and freewrites. My favorite prompt, a list-making exercise we did in this session, produced these lists, below. (From there I spun out a short prose piece, “Reasons to Revere Your Vagus Nerve” (we’ll see where that weirdness goes!):

5 Things I Consider a Miracle
High arches
Warm pie
The vagus nerve
Sweating carafes of water
Tanned leather

5 Recurring Obsessions
Ballet hands
Song
Accents, dialects, and regionalisms
Mom, mom, mom
Delight

Readings by poets Lauren Camp, Todd Davis & Kourtney Morrow: poems of cityscape to countryside to the night sky over the Grand Canyon left us audience members awed.

Days After

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

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

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

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

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Posted on November 11, 2023 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 14 Comments

Lit Fest ’23 Lowdown (with slideshow)

Much overdue, I’m back to recap Lit Youngstown’s 7th annual Fall Literary Festival. Who can put into words the inspiration and joy that happens when a couple hundred members of the literary community come together to create, share, and add to our towering TBRs, of course. (And did I mention nearly 50 sessions focused on various genres of writing and the writing process–how to choose, how to choose?) And, all in one fantastic Ohio city with the best Italian food around and against a backdrop of changing leaves for some extra fall magic. Well, I’ll give it a try…

Perhaps what I love most about this festival is that I can reinvent my creative self each time. I make it a habit to step outside my usual writerly lane and try something new.

Day 1

The first day of the festival I did just that. Parma, Ohio, Poet Laureate, workshopper extraordinaire, and friend Jeremy Jusek started off the day with a craft talk called “Verbal Alchemy: Visualizing Poetic Structure as a Formula.” If you couldn’t tell, Jeremy is a science guy in addition to being a poetry guy. He used chemical formulas and definitions to help “shake up” the structure of our poems. The ultimate goal: “To give structure to figurative language.” My major takeaways: the graphing of a reader’s reaction to a poem to illustrate the overcoming of a reader’s ground state to the point of truly feeling. Also, the idea of developing unit cells for a poem. (For instance a unit cell might consist of 2 similes or metaphors and one question. A poem might contain 6 of these units.)

Maybe it’s my uncertainty with writing poetry that makes me to want to learn all I can about poetic structure, but I stayed in the poetry lane that morning and attended superstar poet Sandra Beasley’s talk: “Lyric A to Z: Exploring Abecedarian Forms in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction.” If the term “Abecedarian” is new to you, you’re in good company. From Sandra’s handout: “In an ‘abecedarian,’ consecutive lines, sentences, or paragraphs lead with consecutive letters of the alphabet. Note that abecedarians can use any language system, not just American English.” (Abecedarian poetry and a Prince fan? Check out a fantastic example by poet Randall Man called, of course, “Alphabet Street.”)

Another highlight of the day was sitting in on the conversation between poet, essayist, and educator Ross Gay and poet and educator Jennifer Sperry Steinorth. Much of the discussion was pedagogy-focused. They discussed the MFA workshop, a process that has received close scrutiny in recent years. The traditional way, Ross feels isn’t “good for our soul or our work.” Instead he tries to stick close to what he notices on the page. His workshop goals are not a stellar poem or essay but are “care and imagination” in the class.

For my last session of the day, I moderated a roundtable led by author, editor and educator Meagan Lucas (whom I interviewed about her debut novel years ago for Parhelion and was excited to meet irl!). Called “I’m a Lit Mag Editor: Ask Me Anything,” the session allowed participants to get a behind-the-scenes on just what rises to the top of the “slush pile.” A couple tips I took with me: the fiction word count sweet spot for Reckon Review, where Meagan is EIC : about 3,000 words; and don’t forget the importance of a catchy title (when that’s all lit mag readers see in their queue!).

Last, if you’ve been around these blog parts for a while, you know Ross Gay’s work has inspired some of mine, including this essay. And so I was prepared to be moved by his reading at the beautiful, historic St. John’s Episcopal Church–much from his new book of essays, Inciting Joy. But reader, I wasn’t just whelmed but overwhelmed. Ross’s mission of joy has been a guiding light not just for my fledgling essays and poetry, but for a new path where my art and faith can live together. And (in 2023, as I’m sure you can imagine) that’s a lot.

With fellow VCU MFA grad, author, poet and educator John Hoppenthaler
With the fearless director of Lit Youngstown, Karen Schubert
With amazing writers and literary citizens, Jonie McIntire and R.W. Franklin
With writer, friend, and guest DJ, John Dyer
With memoirist, poet, educator and the sweetest of humans, Rebe Huntman
Ross Gay, reading at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Youngstown Ohio
Our end-of-festival party venue, Penguin City Beer
After the festival, I soaked up the Ohio fall with a friend and her family at a pumpkin patch and apple orchard.
Book and swag haul

Day 2

The next day started off with a fantastic author reading. One essayist, my friend and editing co-conspirator Renée K. Nicholson; novelist Jason Kapcala, whom I interviewed here; and two poets, Amy M. Alvarez and Randi Ward read from their creative work “set in the mountains and hollers of Appalachia and the hardscrabble steel towns of the rust belt.” Themes of place and displacement ran through these works and I found myself transported–just what a creative reading should do!

The next session found me back in my fiction-writing lane. Novelist Alison Stine focused on “the urgency of cli-fi as we deal with the worsening impacts of climate change” in her craft talk called “Writing Climate Fiction as the World Burns.” Alison has a really inspiring way of talking about writing, even if she writes dystopian stories that deal with tough stuff–like the end of the environment and nature as we know it. It’s clear writing has saved Alison time and again. Writing, she said “is making people sit up straight,” and is also something that can “give us hope” and “give us a way.” And my practical takeaway from her session: wait for your characters to start acting before you start to write your ideas.

My final session of the festival found me marveling at the difference storytelling and writing can make–not just on our spirits but on our whole selves and in the ways we care for one another. Dani Naffziger led an inspiring talk called “Collaborative Writing with Adults with Disabilities,” a writing service she says “provides tangible and rewarding benefits for all involved,” highlighting stories from a population “rarely represented” and introducing “new writing processes for established and emerging writers.”

Under the umbrella of The Healing Impact of Writing, for the other part of the session West Virginia University Humanities Center director Renée K. Nicholson and physician Ryan McCarthy talked about their Healthcare is Human initiative. Through a unique partnership between WVU Medicine and the WVU Humanities Center, the initiative promotes the work of narrative medicine and health humanities. Its seeds were planted during the pandemic, when Dr. McCarthy began journaling about his own experiences and then gathering the stories of his fellow front line workers. He has said: “…projects like this, which highlight the real human stories of healthcare workers, nurture our own humanity.”

My own humanity certainly nurtured, my writing self restored, I left the festival inspired by the work of my fellow writers and by what’s to come. Thank you to Lit Youngstown director Karen Schubert and all who make it happen, year after year. And trust me, you won’t want to miss next year’s festival. Details here.

Now, tell me in the comments, did you attend the festival? What was the highlight for you? Do you attend writing conferences in general, book fairs? What gets your creative juices flowing?

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