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Posted on June 20, 2026 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 2 Comments

“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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Posted on July 17, 2025July 17, 2025 by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 7 Comments

“This Woman”: an Essay by Melissa Ballard

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

This Woman

by Melissa Ballard

This woman is my grandma, but not yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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