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THE RABBIT HUTCH’s Rust Belt Renaissance

By Emma Riva

People in Pittsburgh will tell you where things are based on what used to be there. Most of the time, the landmark that used to be there is food related. A fancy seafood restaurant. An ice cream shop. In a small city, those are the sorts of things people remember. To out-of-towners, this might seem like a quaint practice, but something I’ve come to realize is that it is a profoundly human one.

As a fiction writer, I often find myself navigating the complicated narrative of how our memories and associations of the past interact with our experiences of the present. I look at a candle and think of my favorite candle store in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, which I went to for the first time because I couldn’t use the bathroom on the Y46 bus and I bolted in not expecting them to have a restroom, but they did. The candle reminds me of my desire to go back there, of the friends I know in Elizabeth. All of this interacts with the energy of the place, the former boating hub, the Monongahela River Valley that built Lewis and Clark’s boat. All of that comes from the split second of looking at a burning wick. 

Sharpsburg over the Allegheny River from the 62 St. Bridge; photo credit: Emma Riva

Tess Gunty’s 2022 debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is a master class in this mixture of memory and present, owing in part to its setting within the Rust Belt. The novel’s setting of Vacca Vale, Indiana, is a facsimile of her hometown of South Bend, though she’s fictionalized a car manufacturer named Zorn as the ghost of industry haunting the town’s abandoned structures. “I wanted to be able to pull from Gary, Ind., and Flint, Mich., and Youngstown, Ohio, and a number of other cities in the Rust Belt whose economic devastation was much worse, I think, than it was in South Bend when Studebaker closed,” Gunty said in an interview with the South Bend Tribune. 

The Rabbit Hutch is a genre-bending work that follows a cast of characters who all live in an affordable housing complex called La Lapiniére, nicknamed “The Rabbit Hutch.” Its central character is Blandine Watkins, née Tiffany, an eccentric former foster youth obsessed with Christian mystics to the point where she changed her own name to a martyred French woman’s. But the book switches between the past and the present and between the perspectives of different residents of the apartment complex, including one of Blandine’s roommates, another  former foster youth who serves as an omniscient narrator for several parts of the book which foreshadow some horror described as Blandine “leaving her body.” Though the characters’ Vacca Vale has its echoes of Gunty’s own South Bend, it’s an imaginary future where the University of Notre Dame didn’t fill the gaps in South Bend left behind by Studebaker. Here’s what Gunty’s characters say of Vacca Vale, while stoned and watching a commercial for a new apartment complex, much nicer than the titular complex they live in:

“Vacca Vale, Welcome Home,” scoffed Todd, but he looked sort of emotional to me. “What the hell kind of slogan is that?”
	“More like—Vacca Vale: Don’t Touch the Rust,” said Malik. 
	“Vacca Vale: Excuse Me, Sir, Are You Lost?” I added.
	“Vacca Vale: We’ll Clean That Up in the Morning,” said Todd.
        We laughed. We warmed. We didn’t know who we were trying to impress.
	“Vacca Vale,” joked Malik. “We Used to Make Cars Here!” 
	“Vacca Vale: Where the Churches Outnumber the Humans.” 
	“Vacca Vale: Where the Rabbits Outnumber the Churches.” 
	“Vacca Vale: At Least You Can Still Fuck Here.”

For many in the literary publishing world Gunty has ascended into, the Rust Belt is only a feeling, not a region. It’s an image from the movie Flashdance or a short chapter in a history textbook. So, it’s important to define what it is exactly we’re talking about when we say “the Rust Belt.” There’s some confusion among people who don’t live here about the categorical differences between the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and the Midwest. Pittsburgh and Buffalo aren’t exactly in the Midwest, but they’re still in the Rust Belt. The map in the Encyclopedia Brittanica looks like a gasoline blotch on a sidewalk or an oddly shaped hickey.

It’s a region defined by things which used to be there, sites of innovation and excess then turned to rot, now home to … what? Those of us who live there will be familiar with the exchange that takes place in one scene of The Rabbit Hutch. Blandine and Jack get into a heated argument in the loft of a real-estate developer who plans to “revitalize” their city. Blandine complains about how the real estate development is ruining Chastity Valley, one of her favorite parts of the city, and Jack shoots back: 

“Look,” says Jack. “I know what you want me to say. You want everyone to hate the Valley plan as much as you do. But I just don’t. A lot of people are excited about it, and I think you’re being sort of judgmental and shortsighted. I mean, a lot people say it’s going to help our economy and make jobs and stuff. And I’ve only met him a couple of times, but Pinky doesn’t seem that bad. From what I’ve heard, he grew up poor, he knows what it’s like not to have what you need, and now he wants to help Vacca Vale get out of the gutter. Sure, he’s making money off it. But so what, if it helps people at the end of the day? We need to get out of the gutter.”

Gunty then notes: “In the ensuing silence, Blandine spots a camera, situated atop a thick book called Rust Belt: The Second Coming.” There is much reference to Catholicism in The Rabbit Hutch, and “the Second Coming” refers to resurrection, that most American of impulses. It’s no coincidence that the nature park to be bulldozed for the buildings is called Chastity Valley. But The Rabbit Hutch is no hollow anti-gentrification plea. 

From having grown up in New York, I have a keen and nuanced understanding of gentrification and the ways in which contemporary activism often ignores its tangled nature. The Rabbit Hutch frames the Chastity Valley developments and the so-called “revitalization” of Vacca Vale as part of a meditation on the uncomfortable truth about change. One of the most gutting lines in the book is: “Six months after Tiffany/Blandine had submitted her court papers, proof of birth and $210, she discovered that the name Blandine is Latin for ‘mild,’ while Tiffany is Greek for “Manifestation of God.’”  I, too, went through long stretches of hating my own name, wanting to replace it with something more elegant and powerful. In those lines, Blandine reveals how, though her activism comes from a genuine love for Vacca Vale, there’s a deeper hypocrisy and insecurity there. Though she wants Vacca Vale to retain its grit, the scars that give it character, she is unable to deal with her own scars, to the point where she threw away her own name for a fantasy. 

The South Side from the Birmingham Bridge over the Monongahela River; photo credit: Emma Riva

There is much more to talk about in The Rabbit Hutch, and the only way to truly experience all of it is to read it for yourself. But here are a few sneak peeks. There’s the death of an aging child star and the vengeance of her bitter, angry son—another scar of the past opened into a wound. There’s the woman who moderates content on a site for obituaries, who spurns that son by deleting his callous comment on his mother’s obituary—a marker of the absurdity of how we deal with loss. 

The Rabbit Hutch is all about people on the margins, people who are orphaned by society in some way, regardless of their age or their circumstances. In the contemporary publishing industry, there’s a certain obsession with “marginalized” or “underrepresented” identities. It feels like a reduction, like generational oppression is a badge of suffering for coastal publishing executives to give out to those poor, unfortunate souls in quote-unquote Middle America. I’m perhaps one of the people Blandine and her friends might laugh at, who traded New York for this strange, desolate place. But I know exactly how Blandine feels about Chastity Valley, because I watched my childhood public library in Washington Heights get bulldozed to make space for an “affordable” housing complex with a supposed library inside of it, the skeleton of which now looms over Broadway like a dying animal. I know exactly how it feels to not care how many people get to live in that building or how many families get to make nicer dinners because of the paychecks the developer creates, because connecting to a sad, poor place makes you feel like your suffering matters in some grand story of socio-economic distress.

In the same conversation, above, Jack says to Blandine: “’I’m not judging you.’ The tenderness in his expression catches Blandine off guard, makes the room glitter vertiginously. ‘I just want to know what happened to you.’”

What happened to you? I hate the passive voice. As a literature tutor, my screed to my students is that passive voice makes them sound less confident. I don’t say weak but the implication is there. And of course, there are political and emotional implications. We’ve all heard mistakes were made or I was assaulted. Of course, it’s an important step in reclamation of your life and accountability to say You made mistakes or He assaulted me. But in modern American language, we are profoundly uncomfortable with the passive voice even when we overuse it. Being scarred by your history is a hard thing to admit. You have to admit that things affected you. That (how terrible to admit!) they damaged you. That (even worse!) you are damaged. The Rust Belt is one big, glaring scar of affectation and damage. Its very name is spoil and decay. We spend a lot of our lives teaching ourselves not to be affected by things. In The Rabbit Hutch, what Blandine seeks when she wants to leave her body, is truly to feel instead of simply to suffer. 

The Rabbit Hutch, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for fiction, is available from Penguin Random House or wherever books are sold.

 

Emma Riva is an author and art writer living and working in Pittsburgh. She serves as the managing editor of UP, an international online and print magazine covering street art, graffiti, fine arts, and their intersections in popular culture. She is also a staff writer at regional magazine Belt and a contributor to Pittsburgh-based art criticism site Bunker Review. You can find out more about her on her website and her Instagram and order her book Night Shift in Tamaqua wherever books are sold. 

Rebecca here, with huge thanks to Emma for her fascinating review.

What are you reading and writing this month, as we look forward to spring? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Are you a Rust Belt 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 categories above for more writing from rusty places.

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A review of The History of Our Vagrancies by Jason Irwin

By Marjorie Maddox

In his often haunting and unsettling poetry collection, The History of Our Vagrancies, Jason Irwin travels between neighborhood bars, churches, soup kitchens, diners, prisons, and county fairs. The real setting, however, is the grit and blur between past and present, hopelessness and hope—that often hard-to-define mix of place and identity just outside the obvious. “Aren’t we all living in the parentheses?” he asks. “One pine in a forest, in a forest in a forest.” In this way, Irwin examines our inner and outer landscapes, as well as what we reject or claim as “home”—with all its traditions, beliefs, and parentage. He holds up for us “our vagrancies, the histories of our comings and goings,/the doubts that invade our greatest aspirations, and propel our return.//Welcome home they say. Welcome home and don’t come back.”

Not surprisingly, then, several poems address and confront what has been passed down—both literally and metaphorically—from parents to son. In the book’s opening piece, “Poem about My Father Disguised as the End of the World,” Irwin lays out many of the book’s themes: landscape as “a façade,” “the unavoidable reckoning/of empty rooms,” both influence and suspicion of religion, and a childhood of mixed messages. “My father was an asteroid,” he states. “Some nights I caught sight of him crashing/through space. Other times he was the whiskey/in my glass, the voice crying ‘No.’” From the start, we understand there will be few divine or human saviors in these poems—“they’re only smoke signals in the fog”—the poet must find his own murky way.

Sometimes such recognitions occur while confronting parent/child relationships. In “Photograph of My Father, 1959,” Irwin confirms “I know we would not/have been friends.” While “still needing you,/needing to blame you,” Irwin as son can’t escape “all the words/that turn to smoke/in [his and his father’s] throats.” Likewise in “My Father Asks Me to Go to Church,” he acknowledges his father’s “own troubled alchemies.” Though they share a belief in miracles, their definitions vary drastically. Add to this the mother. When, in “Soothsayer,” a local evangelist demands to take the young Irwin to church to be healed, the mother counters, “’I don’t have time for this shit.’” Thus, each parent influences how the author paradoxically views the world. 

But let’s back up to how the author defines himself. In “The Condition of the Self as Related to Certain Trees,” he catalogs: “Small town, born and bred/my body…gnarled and irregular….Amputee, Dextrocardia….an old man’s hat….Son, lover, husband, fool.” In “Still Life with Leg Brace & Pontiac,” he juxtaposes his grandfather’s polished “’73 Grand Prix,” the possibilities inherent in his own first day of kindergarten, and how, underneath childhood’s fancy apparel, “[His] four-toed club foot fits/inside [his] shoe like the corpse of someone else’s foot.” Elsewhere in the book, he recognizes himself in a billboard at the county fair “advertising oddities” and as composing an alternate ending to life where “we’re happy with the people we’ve become.”

And yet in The History of Our Vagrancies, the poet also looks toward others—artists, authors, painters, philosophers, waitresses, old “codgers”—for insight. There’s the church visit to see rows of prisoners waving their hands, swaying, and singing “On Eagle’s Wings.” There’s Monk, Miles, and Bird and “a song/you find yourself riffing on/…all the colors/that kaleidoscope this dream/we keep dreaming….” There’s stealing Kerouac from the library, acknowledging the saint in Max at the soup kitchen, and recognizing in the silence and gaze of old men “the ruins of this company town,/where the sunbaked blacktop goes on/forever.” 

In a particularly poignant poem, Irwin describes phantom pain—“Hammer hits to the synapse. Blood thumping like a subwoofer in 4/4 time”—as well as how “[i]t no longer startles [him], like cruelty…” At poem’s end, he explains, “I shift in my seat, and scratch at the empty air.” Similarly, in “Things We Don’t Like to Talk About,” the pain and confession are familiar: regret, grief, fear. Both phantom and real, the hurt also is ours.

And yet, in addition to this sometimes “delirium of shadows and muffled voices,” The History of Our Vagrancies hints at moments of optimism. In the prose poem “Instinct,” Irwin insists, despite evidence to the contrary, “[T]here’s a room inside each of us where everything we’ve lost is/gathered.” Elsewhere, he carves “epitaphs into the sticky wood [of a bar],/believing, as only the doomed and pure of heart believe,/that we’ll be remembered.” At its end, the collection sounds a call to acknowledge and accept beauty where we are: “Look at the two of use sitting at the table drinking wine./Each moment of our lives has brought us here. Each moment/could have as easily led us somewhere else.”

Yes, look. On these rust-belt streets, on these ordinary corners, you, too, may imagine how “the sky transforms,” how once “God held us in his hands.” You, too, may gawk “at the Polish waitress/as she dances across the tile floor” and even join in. “Sometimes it takes a lifetime/,” explains Irwin, “…to let go of the torn shirt of our failures.” In The History of Our Vagrancies, Jason Irwin encourages us to do just that.

The History of our Vagrancies

By Jason Irwin

The Main Street Rag $14

Jason Irwin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020), and two chapbooks. He was a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow and has also had nonfiction published in various journals including the Santa Ana Review and The Catholic Worker. He lives in Pittsburgh. Please see www.jasonirwin.blogspot.com.

Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 13 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (Paraclete, International Book Award Winner), and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts), an ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist International Book Awards), A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry; I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book), and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press). In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, based on her daughter’s paintings (www.hafer.work) + works by other artists, will be published in 2023 (Shanti Arts). Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com. (Author photo credit: Melanie Rae Buonavolonta)

Rebecca here, with many thanks to Marjorie for her wonderful review of Jason’s latest poetry collection. I can’t wait to pick it up! What are you reading and writing this month, as we dig into 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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From Belgium to the Rust Belt

A guest post by John W. Miller

The genesis of the PBS film Moundsville and its companion blog Moundsville.org, about a classic American postindustrial town, was a mid-life crisis mixed with the 2016 election and a curiosity about the truth of Rust Belt communities. 

Six years ago, I was on staff at the Wall Street Journal, covering mining and the steel industry out of its Pittsburgh bureau. 

Like everybody else, I watched as the Trump-Clinton presidential election blew anger, confusion, and fear through the culture. 

Personally, I was going through my own crisis. I was about to turn 40, and experiencing mid-life’s deepening cravings for meaning and direction. That second mountain beckoned. 

After 13 years roaming the world for one of the world’s great newspapers, I simply wasn’t enjoying it anymore. So I quit, and started climbing. After some discernment, I decided to stay in Pittsburgh. 

Poking around for creative projects, I started driving to Moundsville, a small town in West Virginia on the Ohio River 75 minutes from Pittsburgh. In 2013, I’d reported on it for the Journal. 

photo of a 2,200-year old Native American burial mound in Moundsville, West Virginia
2,200-year old Native American burial mound in Moundsville, West Virginia

The town fascinated me. I grew up in Belgium, the child of American musicians who’d wandered around Europe in 1976 and dropped an anchor in Brussels. I’m fascinated by places in America that tell a deeper story about my ancestral homeland. 

In late 2017, I connected with filmmaker Dave Bernabo. We put together a proposal to tell the story of Moundsville in a documentary.  I thought that town was a perfect place to tell a deeper story about America because it’s built around a 2,200-year old Native American burial mound, it harbored a glorious industrial age including the world’s biggest toy factory (Marx Toys, maker of Rock’em Sock’em Robots!), and it now subsists on a service-based economy anchored by a Walmart. There’s also a lot of pain and grief in Moundsville. In a generation, the town lost 8,000 jobs. The population halved. Young people left for Pittsburgh and New York. 

Rock’em Sock’em Robots! first manufactured by Marx Toys of Moundsville, West Virginia

David and I spent most of 2018 driving down to Moundsville and interviewing people. At the end of each interview, we’d ask a question about Trump and national politics. Almost always, the answers lacked depth. It dawned on me: These people didn’t know about Trump. They didn’t live in DC. They weren’t very thoughtful about politics. But when we asked them about their work lives and their parents’ work lives, they engaged with depth and wisdom. Those questions, I realized, were actually loving. Almost always, I decided, asking about Trump simply wasn’t loving. 

After experimenting with a voiceover, we opted to tell the story without a so-called “voice of God” as narrator. The movie is an oral history, without any academics or outside experts. 

In our interviews, we heard about grief a lot, but we also heard and told tales of resilience, from a back-to-the-land farming couple, a small manufacturer of kitchen cabinets, and the leaders of a burgeoning tourism sector. The ancient burial mound looming above the town is a daily reminder that civilizations ebb and flow, and that time moves only forward. My hope is that we acknowledged grief in a healing way while pointing the way forward with stories of hope and perseverance. 

In December 2018, we premiered Moundsville in the town itself, a practice of sharing work that anthropologists recommend. Over 170 people showed up. A few grumbled about our portrayal of segregation in the film, but at the end, we received an ovation. 

A month later, we screened at America, the Jesuit magazine I had started writing for, in New York City, on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan across the street from News Corp., home of the Wall Street Journal. 

To my surprise–and gratitude–the movie holds up. People appreciate its openness and listening attitude. “This amazing project reflects a diversity of stories that I needed to experience to remind me of hope and resilience and kindness,” wrote Anupama Jain, head of a Pittsburgh diversity training group, on Twitter. 

The biggest lesson I’ve learned making and showing Moundsville is that every place carries an organic placeness that deserves respect for its uniqueness. You can find wisdom and thoughtfulness in people when you engage them over that place and recognize its differences from your place. We can’t love our neighbors as brothers and sisters if we expect them to be just like us.

I created the Moundsville.org site to promote the film, but quickly found an audience for pieces I was posting. It gets an average of 10,000 readers a month. So I keep writing and posting. I’ve written over 100 pieces for the blog, on everything from Lady Gaga’s mom, who grew up in Moundsville, to people going to watch baseball inside the prison in the 1950s.

I’m still on a journey of figuring out a new kind of journalism that suits my skills, and my heart. I’ve co-directed Out of Reach, a new movie about the American Dream. I’m developing a podcast called Philosophy with Strangers, where I go with an older friend to small towns and ask big questions. First episode: We went to Charleroi, PA and asked people: What is happiness? I contribute regularly to America, a monthly magazine run by Jesuits. I coach baseball. Lots of other stuff, too. But wherever my career takes me, it was forever changed by the road that ran through Moundsville, West Virginia.

John W. Miller is a Pittsburgh-based writer and filmmaker, and co-director of the PBS film Moundsville. 

~~~

What are you watching, reading, and writing this month. Let me know in the comments…

Are you a Rust Belt writer? What’s your story? Would you care to share? Do you write book reviews–or conduct interviews of Rust Belt authors? If so, think of Rust Belt Girl for a guest post. And check out the handy categories for more writing from rusty places.

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Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 21 Comments

A Distance Not Too Far to Fathom: My review of THE DISTANCE FROM FOUR POINTS

book cover of THE DISTANCE FROM FOUR POINTS by Margo Orlando Littell, with illustrations of plants

Picture London, Paris, or New York. Got it? Now picture Iowa farm country. How about Main Street USA? Easily imaginable places all, even in fiction. Right? Well, you can have them. I’m here to laud the lesser-known and in-between places in books, the fringes, places where the present hasn’t caught up to a promising past, where things are undefined, even messy—and the characters are gritty, trying to make a place their own. I’m here for the settings that remain open to interpretation, invention, and story.

Take Margo Orlando Littell’s recent novel from University of New Orleans Press, for instance.  The Distance from Four Points is set in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania, murky territory straddling the Rust Belt and Appalachia. Never heard of it? All the better stage for the author to play out that age-old question:

Can you really go home again?

Quick summary: “Soon after her husband’s tragic death, Robin Besher makes a startling discovery: He had recklessly blown through their entire savings on decrepit rentals in Four Points, the Appalachian town Robin grew up in. Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible—before anyone exposes Robin’s secret past as a teenage prostitute. Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she’d worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes.”

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, the poet says, “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.”

By this definition, Margo Orlando Littell is a poet. For me, it’s the setting of Four Points, a fictionalized version of the author’s own hometown, that makes the novel shine. Forty-something MC Robin’s hometown appears to her to be a “poor, indifferent place.” This setting is a lot like the places that dot the Pennsylvania landscape that separates my home in Maryland and my childhood home in Ohio’s Rust Belt, places where invariably my car radio loses NPR’s signal and tunes in only country music. Where tunnels through the mountains, tiled like giant bathrooms, are the highlight of the trip. Where mock-alpine ski resorts attempt to lure passersby off the Pennsylvania turnpike. I’ve happily sped through these places seeking finer points, the reinvented and cosmopolitan Pittsburgh, for one.

  • The Rural King, with an always-bustling gun counter
  • The author’s hometown
  • The house that inspired the fictional house on Whitstlestop Road, pre-renovation
  • Train car in front of old coke ovens in the hillside

The author paints a picture of Four Points from Robin’s perspective: “It was coal country, or used to be, and it wasn’t always terrible. Long before she was born, businessmen made millions here, gaining wealth from the coke ovens in the foothills. Now the crumbling mansions…were barely audible echoes of the town’s better years.” This is a place many leave, but enough stay for unemployment to be high; a place old industry forgot and new-wave industry, like medicine, higher education, and tech, haven’t yet found.

Still, a place like this, steeped in the glories of a crumbling past, isn’t past—but is fully present—to the residents eking out a living there, today. And, upon her return to Four Points, this is a reality Robin has to face, and quick.

The novel starts off rather breathlessly, and we’re thrust into Robin’s predicament. Her husband died and left her with nothing to keep her and her daughter’s heads above water—except some pretty cruddy rentals in her hometown. A hometown she had tried her best to forget, living in a monied Pittsburgh-area enclave, where she’d remade herself—or fooled herself into thinking she had. A “decadence,” of forgetting where she came from and what she did to survive, the author calls it, of forgetting the “familiar equation” of “sex plus money.” This isn’t uncharted territory for women’s fiction—a salacious past comes to haunt the MC’s present—but the author handles it well.

The details of land-lording, re-making this human-built landscape with her smarts and own two hands, raises this bookclub novel to a higher level. Robin, who only recently wouldn’t be caught without her “Va-Va Vino” nail polish, takes to ripping up ruined linoleum in her tenants’ places with those nails, breaking them to the quick. This kind of work, needed to sustain herself and her daughter, does a lot to renew Robin’s sense of self, even in grief. Work, as it often does, has a way of teaching characters (and, by extension, us readers) about their capacity for living: “Tonight, the paint would dry, and in the morning the apartment would be whole. Not new, not beautiful, but ready to live in.”

The author exhibits a local’s keen sense of the distinct sights, sounds, and tastes of this place, where Sheetz and Walmart serve as modern beacons in the wintry gloom. But this is also the kind of place where communities still come out for parades on feast days and fill the same ethnic church pews their grandparents did; at home, old recipes, like Eastern European Halushki, are still passed down to the next generation. Maybe it is in such in-between times, teetering between ages—when will these hills experience their next Gilded age?—when we cling to the traditional foods that comfort, the language (all the “Yinzes!”) shared. Maybe it’s in these moments that we find grace.

I would have liked a bit more rumination in these pages on the grace found in this novel’s place. We get a brief mention of it, and there are fleeting prayers for Robin, who won’t budge from the necessity of sending her daughter to Catholic school, even when money is terribly scarce.

That touch of grace and Robin’s role as landlord reminded me of the biblical parable of the wicked tenants (Robin does have one or two), but more loosely about the need to be worthy “tenants” in this life leased to us here, in the earthly communities we call home. Will Robin turn her back again on her home, on a hard-won livelihood “cleaved to boilers and shingles, sewage stacks and electric grids.” Or, will she waste her gifts, trying to run away from herself again?

I’ll let you read to find out.

In a bit of life imitating art, the author also tried her hand at being a landlord in her hometown during the course of writing this book, and her expertise shows in her prose. You can read about that backstory and everything else related to The Distance from Four Points at her website: margoorlandolittell.com

Paris in springtime? Let’s face it: none of us is flying anytime soon. So, how about Four Points at the turning of a season—from the pages of this engrossing novel:

Robin left Four Points at five, the magical hour when the light over the mountains turned fiery and lit every branch on the maple-blanketed hills. The world was wet and weary, winter pulsing deep as blood, but in the pink sky and dripping ice from the bridges, she sensed spring. It really would come, softening those bristly mountains and coloring the sooty landscape of steel and coal. Another winter was breathing to a close…

From Margo Orlando Littell’s The Distance From Four Points

Anyone from such a place will tell you that harsh winters are worth it for the release of spring that follows—springs worth a whole book, and many more trips home.

~~~

Margo Orlando Littell grew up in a coal-mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal for Mid-Atlantic Fiction. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Note: I received an electric copy of this book from the author’s publicist, in the hopes I would enjoy it, which I did. The book’s summary and the author’s bio, along with all the quotes, are from the book. The author was kind enough to supply photos (along with their captions) from her hometown.

Like what you read? Check out my categories above, with author and photographer interviews, essays, stories, book reviews, writing advice, and more. What are you reading and writing this week?

Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 12 Comments

Rust Belt Girl guest: Maresa Whitehead with “Layers”

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What’s this? A guest spot?

Yes! I am thrilled to introduce you to Maresa Whitehead, a talented writer and poet I met at Lit Youngstown’s Fall Literary Festival last month. From her website:

Maresa writes poetry which explores the beauty in darkness and dark images, particularly as they relate to nature and place.

Maresa currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing–Poetry from Chatham University. I count myself so very fortunate that Maresa agreed to share with us her wonderful Rust Belt-inspired poem. Whatever season you’re experiencing where you live, I’m sure you too will appreciate the unfolding and discovery going on here:

Layers

Once, this city forebode,
dormant, suppressed
by charcoal snow,
glaciated, atrophied,
bitter as if poisonous
until thawed.

Now, defrosted,
it’s pungent as it ripens,
unfurls petals, entreats
pollination from swarms
which spread its seed.

Each season peels its rind,
extracts the pulp of Pittsburgh,
succulent, unexpected
like the creamy black-specked
marrow eclipsed at first
by the green-tipped pink
husk of the dragon fruit.

          by Maresa Whitehead

Thank you again to Maresa for allowing me to publish your poem here at Rust Belt Girl!

All, please help me share her voice far and wide—on the social networks of your choice. Visit Maresa Whitehead’s site for her complete bio and more of her writing.

Have a favorite seasonal poem? One that celebrates all you love—or don’t—about your town? Share in the comments!

Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 16 Comments

My interview with author Amy Jo Burns

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Amy Jo Burns is the author of Cinderland, and her writing has appeared in Salon, Good Housekeeping, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Tin House’s Open Bar, Ploughshares Online, and in Roxane Gay’s anthology Not That Bad. Her novel Shiner is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

Amy Jo was gracious enough to answer a few questions from another Rust Belt girl–me–about her literary memoir, Cinderland, which I discussed in a previous post; about her Rust Belt upbringing; about juggling the responsibilities of writing and motherhood; and about her upcoming novel, Shiner, which I can’t wait to read!

Amy Jo–your memoir, Cinderland, is set in your hometown outside Pittsburgh. How did that particular post-industrial place inform your upbringing? Does your memoir’s title reflect the place in which you were raised, the abuse you suffered as a girl, both?

I chose the title Cinderland because it represents an inner fire that remains after old, unnecessary things have died away. I see so much of myself in the landscape that I grew up in. The abandoned buildings, overgrown lots, and empty warehouses of my youth were (and are) placeholders for new things to come, and they are so beautiful to me. The story of the Rust Belt is still being written, even if some people call it a dead zone. There is life inside! Rust and cinders aren’t dead things. They’re just in a state of transformation, and I think that became a powerful metaphor for me to explore my own coming of age in my memoir.

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In your memoir, you discuss your Christian upbringing and throughout the book use biblical allusions. (Your abuser you call Mr. Lotte.) In using the language of the Bible, did you feel like you were wresting some control over that part of your childhood? Something else?

The Bible was my first introduction to language, so it felt very natural for me to use biblical references as a way to represent how I see the world. This was such a good question for me to consider, because I just realized in borrowing some of that language, I was actually able to release some control over the painful parts of my past. For so long I tried to manage what had happened to me and my grief over it, and it only ended up suffocating me. I was afraid to let it be what it was.

Sometimes I think “religion” tries to manhandle who God is, and having faith is the opposite: letting God be God, and finding rest because of it. For me, that meant letting Mr. Lotte be held accountable for what he did. It was not “Christian” for me to try to hide away his transgressions, even if some people in my community swore it was. When I was writing the book, I came across this verse in Proverbs 17:15:

“Whitewashing bad people and throwing mud on good people are equally abhorrent to God.”

I’d never heard that before. It’s not an exaggeration to say it changed my life to see that God has no interest in camouflaging a man’s true character for the sake of fake peace.

You were a student of ballet, growing up. Had you known the true story you present in your essay, “Body on Fire,” of Emma Livry, a young ballerina whose costume caught on fire during a performance at the Paris Opera in 1862, or did you come upon it more recently? Can you talk about this idea of burning or “consuming” of women with respect to today’s #metoo movement?

I came across that story about two years ago, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Emma Livry had GUTS as an artist and as a woman, and I think she probably felt just as frustrated to perform for an audience full of men she didn’t trust as so many women still feel right now. Livry’s biographer, a male, seemed to suggest she was a victim of her own making, that it was her own vanity in wanting a certain kind of ballet skirt to wear that ultimately killed her when her tutu caught fire. I call foul! I think she knew her patrons saw her as nothing but a body for consumption. She fought to dance the way she wanted– wearing what she wanted–for herself, first and foremost. She paid a price for it. Livry wasn’t spared because of her talent or her drive. Instead, she was treated like a piece of machinery. That’s what resonates for me with today’s #metoo movement–she was blamed for choices that were never really hers to make.

Have you changed as a writer since becoming a mother, besides having less time and energy to write?

Yes! I wanted to finish Cinderland before I had children because I thought parenthood would make me overly sentimental. I didn’t want to write about my own childhood with too much nostalgia. It’s funny, though, because the opposite has been true. I’m much more raw as a person and as a writer now that I’m a mother, and I like it. My sense of self has totally shifted. I’m constantly becoming someone I’ve never been before, which is weird and wonderful and a little scary. There’s a new urgency to what I write now, like I’m trying to capture each meaningful truth before it disappears.

Also: now I write while Paw Patrol plays in the background. I gave up on trying to find the ideal working environment. It doesn’t exist. That helps me value my writing time without letting it become too precious.

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Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 2 Comments

The power of a shared place: revisiting my conversation with Rust Belt Boy author, Paul Hertneky

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Bridging the gap: a Pittsburgh bridge. Image courtesy of pixabay.com

Place is powerful.

This should come as no surprise to you that I feel this way. There’s power in a place’s sights, sounds, and struggles. We are shaped by our native places. We share a kinship with people who stomped the same stomping grounds of childhood. (Don’t believe me? I will immediately become besties with anyone, the world over, wearing a Cleveland Browns jersey.)

What better time to muse about our native places than Father’s Day? (OK, maybe Mother’s Day, but I’m biased.) As we in the U.S. approach the holiday with trepidation–how many gas grills can one man need?–I suggest another kind of gift for the father or father figure in your life (no, I don’t get a cut here):

I was thrilled to come across Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood.
And I was even more thrilled that the author, Paul Hertneky, agreed to talk to me about his native place (just a couple hours east of mine) outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

For those who missed it, or who would like to revisit it, here it is, my…

Author Q&A with Paul Hertneky of RUST BELT BOY: Stories of an American Childhood

Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 27 Comments

Whose side are you on, anyway? What’s in a name?

 

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The Cuyahoga River, flowing into Lake Erie, divides Cleveland into East and West sides. Photo credit: Kenneth Sponsler/Shutterstock

Does your town take sides? Take names?

Growing up in the Cleveland, Ohio, area of the U.S., the first question asked of a new acquaintance was: “What side of the city are you from—East Side or West Side?” Once that was settled (if you were still talking) and you exchanged surnames, then came the second question: “What kind of name is that?”

There’s a lot to the East Side/West Side rivalry this article delves into if you’re interested. But today I’m talking—and taking—names. What’s in a name? If you’re a Rust Belt native, a lot.

My husband, not a Rust Belt native, thinks the name question is gauche (okay, he doesn’t say gauche, but that’s what he means: tacky, uncouth, even rude.) I wouldn’t ask the question of my neighbors in the Maryland town where we now live, a town that was established in the 1600s. Here, talk of family names and countries of origin quickly gets really old—literally. (Of course, there are many exceptions—newer immigrants and many “come here’s,” like me, from other American places.) Still, for many longstanding Maryland natives, the Old Country—with its telling surnames—is a distant memory. They are Marylanders, plain and simple.

Being from the Rust Belt is a little more complicated. On a recent trip back to the Belt—the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area to be specific—I made it my mission to have pizza. (Maryland is known for blue crab, not pizza, for good reason.) It’s true, Beaver, Pennsylvania, doesn’t have a particularly Italian ring, but it has a lot of Italians—who, thankfully, know their pizza. The next town over still had their banners flying for a Serbian food festival. The local grocery store featured homemade pierogies from a purveyor in town. Okay, we’ve established that the way to my head is through my stomach. But, really, the Old Country feels a little less distant in the Rust Belt.

On that trip back to the Belt, I visited with cousins and an aunt, and we talked about old times. We looked at black and white family photos shot in the 40s and 50s. “Looks like the Old Country,” said my husband of photos of barely-clad kids splashing in a tin tub in their Cleveland yard. We also talked about names: Polish names in my family’s Buffalo, New York, area towns; Italian names in a cousin’s new Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area town; a lot of German names in my Ohio hometown.

Me? I am the granddaughter of a Rossenbach and a Heineman. Next year, my most famous (or infamous, depending on how you like your wine) German-extracted relations, will celebrate 130 years of Heineman’s: Ohio’s oldest family owned and operated winery. The Old Country making it big in the New Country!

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My paternal grandmother, born Martina Heineman, at left. My dad, the pouty boy, at top right.

Whether examined through the lens of food and drink or neighborhood or family name, we are—to a large extent—who we came from. And who you are matters a lot to me, a writer, curious to a fault.

So, I’m not apologizing before asking you, “What kind of name is that?”

Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 9 Comments

RUST BELT BOY & holy pierogi

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Cleveland and Pittsburgh have always enjoyed something like a sibling rivalry. Unlike the relationship between Cleveland and Akron, or Cleveland and Chicago, Cleveland and the ’Burgh are too close in size for one to take the other under its wing like a little sister city, or to aspire to big-brother city coolness. So, rivalry it is—or always seemed to be, to this Northeastern Ohio native.

Later this summer, I will travel through (or around) both cities on my way to visit my dad in Port Clinton, Ohio—home of the annual Perch, Peach, Pierogi and Polka Festival. Along my way on the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes, I will cross a lot of pierogi territory.

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