Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 14 Comments

My interview with author William Heath

William Heath, born in Youngstown, grew up in the nearby town of Poland. A graduate of Hiram College, he has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Case Western Reserve University and has taught American literature and creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, the University of Seville, and Mt. St. Mary’s University, where the William Heath Award is given annually to the best student writer. He has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, and Alms for Oblivion; three chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio, Leaving Seville, and Inventing the Americas; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Blacksnake’s Path; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram. He and his wife Roser live in Annapolis, Maryland. 

Let’s begin with a taste of “Steel Valley Elegy” from William Heath’s poetry collection of the same name. Here’s the first stanza:

I speak Steel Valley American. Once mills
lined the Mahoning River from Youngstown
Sheet and Tube’s Jeannette Blast Furnace
on Brier Hill to Republic Steel in Struthers.
Coal intensified to coke turned iron ore
into molten ingots that were rolled into slabs,
scarfed free of impurities, shaped for strength:
bridges to span waters, girders for skyscrapers,
tanks, ships, guns, and shells to win World War II,
machines and factories for our bounty.

What I love about this poem is how the poet unearths the beauty (and more obvious power and destruction) present in industry, a beauty borne by the transformation of a thing, like dirty coal, to another thing, like shining steel. 

The transformation is accomplished by people and fire, which always lends to these scenes of the mills a sense of the miraculous for me, something to be found among the gods of Olympus. And if I spin out this analogy, steelworkers are mini gods then, prone to falling from on high, of course—so much transformation and story in this history of our shared native place.

William, you are from one of my favorite adopted cities, Youngstown, Ohio (“Little Chicago,” as you call it in the above poem). Can you tell us about your Rust Belt upbringing and how it perhaps sparked your creative work? Or has informed it? Did you dream of becoming a writer and teacher when you were young? How did place factor into those dreams?

I was born in Youngstown in 1942, spent my first six years in Gerard. I have few memories of that other than a big snow that we kids tunneled under and riding a neighbor’s large dog. My parents, Oberlin graduates, were teachers; my dad became principal at Hays Junior High in Youngstown; my mom substituted a lot in a variety of subjects. The family moved to Poland, a small New England style town nearby where my memories begin. Like most boys I was interested in sports and girls, not necessarily in that order; the poems that start off Steel Valley Elegy are based on my boyhood. For better or worse, I was better at sports than girls, especially basketball and track. Poland High won the sectional tournament, which meant beating the best Youngstown teams, then lost to Warren in the next round (I was guarded by the future Ohio State and Cleveland Browns star Paul Warfield). In track I qualified in the high jump for the state tournament in Columbus, where I was an also-ran against that top competition (no small school/large school divisions then).

When I was a boy I wanted be a high school history teacher and a basketball coach, then at Hiram College I widened my perspectives: switched from Republican to Democrat, decided to become an English professor. Since teenage boys love to brag, what was most notorious about my area were Mafia wars to control a gambling game called “the bug,” resulting in many bombings, at least a dozen deaths; Youngstown was dubbed “Little Chicago.” I never witnessed first-hand any of that violence, but when I was visiting my cousin in posh Shaker Heights, I saw the aftermath of a shooting described in “A Hit in Shaker Heights.” I once was a suspect in a robbery at a boathouse where I worked in the summers that brought me to the dreaded Youngstown police station for a lie-detector test, see “An Inside Job.” In sum, I lived a fairly typical small town Midwest boyhood, with the usual teenage antics that feature in some of my poems, while next door was a thriving steel city with a lot of good-paying union jobs but also a gangland war between the Cleveland and Pittsburgh mobs.

Your literary influences are many. With a Ph.D. in American studies, you became a professor, poet, and novelist. Your 1995 novel, The Children Bob Moses Led, is about the civil rights moment in Mississippi. Mississippi is fairly far afield from your Ohio beginnings. Can you talk about the inspiration for this historical novel? 

After majoring in history with a minor in English at Hiram, I went to Case Western Reserve University in American Studies. As a college teacher, I realized my students knew little about the civil rights movement. I began my writing career as a poet, then switched to writing fiction, and decided to write a novel about Freedom Summer in 1964, when college students, mostly white, went to Mississippi where three young men were murdered by the Klan shortly after they arrived. That courageous effort was a moral high water mark of my generation, and I wanted to write a true account of it. Bob Moses (a charismatic Black man from Harlem who had studied philosophy as a graduate student at Harvard) was the key SNCC leader, indeed he was a legend in the movement; he died a few years ago and lamentably is largely forgotten. I had participated in the March on Washington in 1963, not Freedom Summer; I knew about the civil rights movement but not nearly enough. I devoted many years of research to the project, my most important archives were the SNCC papers at the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta and the invaluable Sixties files at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. My wife and I made several trips to Mississippi where I interviewed Black and white participants in Freedom Summer. I have a wealth of stories about those experiences, one is recounted in Alms for Oblivion, “Preacher Knox.” Several of my other poems about the South appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, my favorite name for a poetry magazine.

I like to think that my skills as a novelist, historian, literary critic, and poet enrich each genre.

The Children Bob Moses Led was published by Milkweed Editions who made it their feature fall selection and nominated it for the Pulitzer Prize. It did win the Hackney Award for best novel, was reissued as a paperback, and then re-printed by NewSouth Books (now a part of the University of Georgia Press) in a twentieth-anniversary edition. It has sold the most of my novels and has been used in classes from junior high to graduate studies. My multi-award winning history book, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest, has also sold well and remains in print. Both books epitomize my interest in American Studies, since I was able to draw upon my extensive interdisciplinary training to cover multiple aspects of the topic to make them valid history and vivid literature. I think my early years as a poet also served to give my prose a distinctive tone. I like to think that my skills as a novelist, historian, literary critic, and poet enrich each genre.

You began publishing your poetry in the 60s. Can you talk about the differences between writing the novel and writing poetry? Have you found that there are seasons of life for each, when you are drawn to one form or the other? Or is it that the subject matter demands the form? Can you talk a little about your creative intuition or your creative process, or both?

My first teaching job was at Kenyon College, then the epicenter of contemporary writing thanks to John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review, which drew a host of talented students and teachers to that lovely campus in rural Ohio. I attended his 80th birthday party and met several famous authors, including Robert Lowell, Kenneth Burke, Peter Taylor, et. al. Carl Thayler, an older student who had been a bit player in Hollywood films and was intensely interested in poetry, also brought writers to the campus—that is how I met Toby Olson and Paul Blackburn, who encouraged me to write. For the first fifteen years of my college teaching career I wrote mainly poetry and published some hundred poems in various little magazines, but that did not carry much weight when I came up for new contracts and tenure. Thus I went from Kenyon, to Transylvania (where my poetry writing improved markedly), to Vassar; in 1979 I was selected as a Fulbright professor of American literature at the University of Seville. 

During phase one of my poetry career, I was influenced by William Carlos Williams, James Wright, Philip Levine, as well as other poets who wrote free verse with a sharp-eyed realism about the gritty side of American life. I was drawn to the idea that poets should be grounded in specific images that evoke the world of the poem and resonate with readers. I read poetry widely in those days and had strong opinions about many poets. At some point, however, I made a major mistake: I decided that the next poem I wrote should be better than the previous one; not surprisingly that proved counterproductive. I also was frustrated that my focus on poetry stood in the way of obtaining a permanent place in my profession. At Vassar, I solicited comments from contemporary poets I admired, but did not know personally; as a result I received high praise from James Wright, Philip Levine, Richard Wilbur, and others that was certainly encouraging, although their kind words did not move the tenure committee at Vassar. 

More than one critic has noted your adept storytelling in your poetry. Do you come to a poem with a story in mind you’d like to tell? Or do you usually begin with an image and a story emerges from it? Can you point to a poem of yours I haven’t mentioned here that tells a particularly necessary or good story?

I like to tell stories, covering a wide range of topics; I think that is one of my strengths. My first poetry book, containing the best of my early work, The Walking Man, opens with “The Boy Who Would Be Perfect,” a true story based on a summer I spent as a counselor at a camp in the Adirondacks teaching boys from wealthy Jewish families in Great Neck, Long Island, how to play tennis. As it turned out, two of ten boys in my cabin were mentally disturbed, something I had not been told; they proved to be very difficult.  I conflate the two boys into one in the poem, which is true to what transpired. That summer I also took my campers at night to see black bears (they didn’t believe bears existed anywhere near them) feeding at a garbage dump—but that’s another story yet to become a poem. 

When I returned to writing poetry following my retirement in 2007, I realized that many of the stories I liked to tell had poetic possibilities—a particular focus and sharp images—so I turned them into poems. Steel Valley Elegy opens with autobiographical poems that tell stories; my next book, Going Places, features stories about the two years I lived in Seville, the next section contains poems based on the years (when you add up all the extended visits) I spent in or near Barcelona, where my wife was born. My most recent book, Alms for Oblivion, has narrative poems, a few several pages long. Some narrative poems are not from personal experience, rather on the experiences of my generation, such as “Chicago 1968,” “Bringing the War Home,” “Shut It Down,” “At the Commune,” and “Jail, No Bail.” As with The Children Bob Moses Led, they are designed to put the Sixties into critical perspective.  

Your most recent poetry collection, Alms for Oblivion, is broken into six parts. Part II is titled Flyover Country. The poem by the same name concludes: “We folks down below look up / and out … Beware of our resentment.”

Reading that poem, of course the notion of “flyover journalism” comes to mind, when a place’s stories are told by outsiders. As I am like you, a NE Ohio native living on the East Coast, I’m wondering, how do you keep at least somewhat rooted to your native region in your work? Through memory and history? Do you return to Ohio? Are there literary organizations, local news outlets, or podcasts you seek out for a current, local perspective?

What is your relationship now to the notion of Flyover Country, and why do you think it keeps popping up in your work, despite having lived on the East Coast for many years now?

As you note, “Flyover Country” tries to capture how people in the Midwest feel about the rest of the nation looking down their noses at them. This is not always true, but has become an article of faith; the resulting “resentment” helped lead to the disastrous, in my view, reelection of Donald Trump, who has no interest in or understanding of the Midwest but an uncanny ability to play upon people’s fears and anxieties. My parents have been dead for years, but my sister still lives in Delaware, Ohio, and I visit her every year or so. I have attended the Buckeye Book Fair in Wooster, the Midwest Historians Convention in Grand Rapids, the Youngstown Lit festival, and the Ohioana Book Festival in Columbus. That enables me to keep in touch with what is happening on the ground in Ohio and elsewhere (I also lived in Kentucky for five years).  I must admit I am delighted to do a Rust Belt Girl interview, because like you I love the Midwest (even if I sometimes weep for it). 

For better or worse I am not a high tech person; my cell phone stays in my car, I respond to Facebook posts but rarely post myself; I’m on Linkedin but never use it; I have never twittered; when asked for my twitter name I sometimes respond “Curmudgeon.” This dates me, I know, yet I really would welcome poetry lovers who are active on the internet, if they are so inclined, to promote my work. I would love to see one of my poems go viral! George Bilgere, a poet we both admire, did include “The Vet” on his wonderful Poetry Town recently. And Grace Cavalieri featured me on her “The Poet and the Poem” series from the Library of Congress. 

Before you lived in Maryland, you and your wife, the novelist Roser Caminals-Heath, lived in Europe and traveled extensively. While remaining rooted to your past, your poetry takes the reader to foreign shores, as it were. “The Starlings of Rome” is one I particularly like. Here are the first few lines:

At setting sun hundreds of thousands
swoop and swarm over the Vatican
and other vital organs of the city.

What I notice in these lines is a simplicity and a precision in the language and—and I might be reaching—a return to the body. We’re talking about starlings making their ethereal patterns in the sky; yet “organs” brings us back to ourselves, back to earth then. Do you see it this way? I’d love to know how you developed your poetic style that is at once reaching and reachable, if that makes sense.

I’m grateful you asked about my wife Roser, who as you mention is a distinguished writer in her native Barcelona. She writes in Catalan, a distinct language from Spanish, and has published ten highly praised novels, one won the prestigious Saint Joan prize. Steel Valley Elegy contains poems set in the United States, while its companion volume, Going Places, is set abroad. I met Roser when I was a Fulbright in Seville and she was at the University of Barcelona. For years we spent our summers at Vilanova i la Geltru on the coast, then her parents moved to Frederick, MD until their deaths. We love to travel, not only in Catalonia, which Roser considers a separate country from Spain, but extensively in Europe and elsewhere, including Russia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Mexico. Our most exotic trip was to Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesan Islands, for a Melville conference. A few poems in Going Places are set in countries I have not visited in person, only in my imagination. Especially in my poems set in Spain and Catalonia, I try to speak not like a tourist and more like someone with personal knowledge of a people and place.

As you mention concerning “The Starlings of Rome,” my poems are based on concrete images and thus have “body.” The starlings make marvelous spirals in the sky, suggesting a spiritual dimension, while their droppings present a major problem. It’s that double-sided nature of life that appeals to me.  The “Starlings” poem is part of a sequence detailing how strangely other creatures sense the world with its good and bad vibrations. Wallace Stevens once said “the greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world,” and William Carlos Williams added “No ideas / but in things.” Hence the human body and the “body” of the world are essential to me in poetry, which should draw on all of our senses—taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell. In my fiction, I also ground my work in a lot of physical detail, “How the weather was,” as Hemingway once said.  Hence I keep my characters in fiction, and the speakers in my poems, in voice, each with a distinctive way of saying things.  

With eco-fiction booming and nature poetry always compelling, I read with interest “The World at Low Tide,” which feels like a nature poem and cautionary tale all at once. Here’s the first stanza:

High above spruce trees
the rosy breast of a soaring gull
catches the glory of the risen sun.
Seabirds skim over tide flats
waiting to feed on what waves
bring in and leave behind.

Can you talk about the inspiration for this poem or other nature poems of yours? Does living on the crowded coast put into stark relief our relationship to the water and earth we call home? How does this place infuse your poetry?

Although I’m from the landlocked Midwest, I am very fond of coastal settings, especially the Mediterranean but also here in Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay where we have lived since 2022. Every summer we go to Lewes, Delaware, for a week at the beach; and in the winter to Key West (I have written poems about both places). As Melville wrote, “meditation and water are wedded forever,” which also brings to mind a haunting Robert Frost stanza:

They cannot look out far
They cannot look in deep
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep.

These lines capture the poignant, sometimes troubling, limited nature of us human beings. I must admit the lines are more troubling nowadays, since Trump’s re-election. I had hoped for more from my fellow citizens than they were able to give.  As I say in one of my yet to be published poems on the election: “we are not / who we think we are / or pretend to be.”

Coastal areas do draw out a meditative dimension in us, I think, we gain a deep sense of time since we know the ocean and its waves have been doing the same thing for eons, and will continue to do so. Not much seems to change in the short term, but in the long run we know that continents shift position, species come and go, and thanks to climate change and human limitations, our species may not be around as long as we like to assume it will. I try to write poems that capture something of the processes that surround us: how do I love thee / let me count the waves, as the poet might have said. 

As a professor for many years, what poem did you most love to teach—of your own, of another poet, either historical or contemporary? And why?

When I taught poets I admired like Whitman, Dickinson, Williams, Stevens, Frost, et. al., I used to look first for short poems—I call them “program poems”—that suggest what the poet’s sensibility and assumptions are. Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” poem, for example, is by no stretch a major poem, yet it is a concise introduction to what he is up to in terms of images; then I would move on to poems I did consider major like “To Else,” the one that begins “beat hell out of it / beautiful thing.” A favorite statement about what makes a poem good poetry is by C. S. Lewis, which goes something like “To Write a great love poem, you may or may not have been greatly in love, but you must love language.” “On Poetry,” in Alms for Oblivion, is one of my attempts to say what poets should aim for. I would place my own poems in a tradition that goes back to Catullus, whose blunt, often obscene poems broke through social and poetic decorum to strike us with an irrepressibly lively human voice. Another favorite, by the way, is Keats’ “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet.” While opinions will always differ, I do believe that some poems are much better than others, and I made an effort to teach poems I thought were a poet’s best (I often disagree with those selected for anthologies). As a poet I use the analogy of baseball: a single is a poem, a double is a good poem, a triple is a very good poem, and a homerun is, well, a homerun. The more students are taught to appreciate those “homeruns” the better. Value judgments are relative, but they not absolutely relative.

I’m enthralled by creative couples. How do you and your wife inform each other’s work or creative life?

Contrary to popular belief about literary couples, my wife and I are not jealous of each other’s work and we see ourselves as co-conspirators in our life and our writing. Unfortunately, because I know very little Catalan, I can offer her no help with her prose, although I do serve as a sounding board for her ideas as a novel is in progress. I hope that I am of help in that way. Roser, on the other hand, is of enormous help to me. She reads drafts of all my work. I try to give her what I consider a polished draft—when it returns from her red pen I realize how wrong I was—and this serves as a welcome stimulus to try harder, as revision follows revision. I believe that the best poetry and fiction are written in a kind of reverie, producing rough drafts that must then be revised with lucidity. Vladimir Nabokov used the analogy that his pencils outlive his erasures. Everything I write is revised numerous times, a process I find very satisfying, since I always feel even the smallest changes make a manuscript better. I am astonished and appalled by the notion that all works of literature are created equal and value judgments are of no value. Why would any author strive so hard to write as well as possible if that were the case? When I wrote fiction, Roser often accompanied me on my research trips, some quite memorable like our various visits to Mississippi—Indiana, not so much—and I always enjoy going with her to Barcelona for her media interviews and other PR events related to the publication of one of her novels. 

What are you reading and writing right now?

When I retired in 2007 to devote myself to writing, the first ten years of that resulted in a novel, Devil Dancer, begun during my Fulbright years in Spain then revised multiple times before coming out as a book.  During the decade I also published a historical novel, Blacksnake’s Path: The True Adventures of William Wells, and a history of his life, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (University of Oklahoma, 2015), which won two Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award for military history. It is still available in paperback and sells well at book fairs and my talks at history centers. I didn’t devote myself fully to writing poetry again until 2017. Since then I have published some 350 poems and three full-length poetry books plus three chapbooks. 

My next poetry book, Not My Country, will open with poems about the dangers Donald Trump presents to our democracy. While I think my poems stand out for my distinctive voice, the way I move a poem down the page, and the wide range of topics I dramatize, I believe poets are obligated to reflect what’s happening around them. The re-election of a person who is literally insane, with an acute case of malignant narcissism, presents a daunting challenge for our country that must be addressed; I plan a series of viable poems that depict the situation. Other sections of the book will deal with my usual topics: autobiography, meditations, Americana, travels abroad, and so forth. Some titles already published that will appear in my next book suggest that most of my poems won’t be about our dire political situation: “Killer Whales Attack Yachts Off Gibraltar,” “Trigger Warnings,” “Men’s Book Club,” “Walt and the Supremes,” “Prime Time,” “Bass Man,” “A Trip to Montreal,” and “Big Man on Campus.”

Since I’ve returned to writing poetry full time, my reading habits have changed. In my first incarnation as a poet I read as many poets as I could to find out whom to admire and emulate while keeping my own signature. I wrote a short poem about the process: “read a lot of poetry / until it starts / coming out your ears / then listen.” During the decades I was mainly a novelist, historian, and literary critic, my reading was in those genres, while now I read mostly poetry and books that I think might stimulate my poetic imagination. A good example of the latter is Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which inspired me to write a sequence of nature poems that appear in Alms for Oblivion. Some of the poets I’m reading nowadays are old friends, David Salner, Holly Bergon, Hope Maxwell Snyder, and Kit Hathaway, as well as new discoveries like George Bilgere, Bob Hicok, and David Stevenson. I also make good use of my extensive library that contains the selected or collected poems of many important poets. 

I always keep in mind the words of William Carlos Williams that “it is difficult to get / the news from poems,” as well as his lines addressed to an old woman: “I wanted to write a poem / that you could understand / for what good is it to me / if you can’t understand it?” Most people are baffled by poetry, and go into a sort of panic mode when presented with poems to read. My poems are not “obscure,” I write in the American idiom in lines that are concise, direct, and clear. My poems often, as we noted, tell stories, and their images speak to each other, providing coherence and resonance. This year I once again will be working to open my imagination to new poems and trying to find the best words to bring them to life.  

For more info, see www.williamheathbooks.com 

Signed copies of William Heath’s books can be at Bill’s Books, a part of abebooks.com.  

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

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*Images provided by William Heath

Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 15 Comments

Lit Fest ’24 Rundown

Or, the post you’ve been waiting for, maybe.

Last month, I attended Lit Youngstown‘s 8th annual Fall Literary Festival. From modest beginnings, the writing conference has grown to welcome some 200 attendees each year. Proud to be among them, I served on the planning committee for a couple years, have served as a session moderator, read my own creative work, sat on an editors’ panel, and, this year, engaged a featured writer in a conversation about her writing craft, process, and life.

I’ve met most of my writer friends through this literary festival. (You’re probably nodding your head, reading this. Such joy those in-between conversations, Elise, Susan, Jeremy!) Writers come to this conference for the genuine connections, the generative craft sessions, inspiring creative readings, and Youngstown pizza (or maybe that’s just me?). I was thrilled to walk away having experienced an abundance of all of the above again this year!

Can I entice you to make the trip, next year? Let’s hope this rundown does just that. (And, bring your friends.)

Day 1

My first day of the festival began with meeting Rachel Swearingen, Chicago-based author of the award-winning story collection How to Walk on Water. After reading through her stunning book, twice, I had a feeling Rachel would have a lot to teach fiction writers, like me, about the craft of writing–and the inspiration behind it. Her morning session, “The More the Merrier: Juggling Multiple Characters in a Single Scene” tackled one of those age-old fiction-writing conundrums: how to make the dinner party (or other large group) scene sing, rather than sink.

Main takeaway: big group scenes can invite drama and suspense (think: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”) but things can go awry when the writer hasn’t anchored the scene. Especially helpful to me was Rachel’s discussion of panning out and zooming in, as if we’re creating a scene on film. Featuring compelling examples from classic and contemporary stories, Rachel illustrated how great writers make scenes active to “write toward change.” For those of us (all of us?) who sometimes struggle to create a propulsive plot, these tips promised to help us give our stories the jhuzh they need!

One thing I love about literary festivals is the opportunity for literary escape. (And not just geographically.) I make it my mission to get outside my usual genres and comfort zones. I’m not joking when I say it’s only been a few years since I learned what ekphrastic writing was. So, taking part in an ekphrastic poetry workshop is far outside my usual lane. Of course, I jumped at the chance, when I learned that award-winning poet (and dancer!) Ama Codjoe was leading a workshop titled “Doorways into Ekphrasis” held at the Butler Institute of American Art, right across the street from our festival headquarters. (Confession time: I usually play hooky for one session of a festival or conference to visit a museum or gallery or other local arts hotspot; this time, I didn’t have to.)

Crowdsourcing time: help me find the name and artist of the piece I wrote about, please! Yes, I stared at a stunning piece of transparent, aqua glass sculpture–two rectangular columns, one larger and standing, one smaller, reclined–and didn’t write down the name of the piece or artist. The three minutes we took to examine the art we chose, without jotting a note–which should be 10 minutes, says Ama–honestly felt like hours. But this works, folks.

It’s fascinating now to look back at the notes I made after my examination and see how I went from describing the artwork’s material–ruined glass, panes shattered, shards–to the artwork’s position and pose–teetering, discarded, toppled–to what the pose might suggest: he has dropped his partner, who does not shatter, small glass tower sheared. Finally, I wrote a little in lines, inspired by the art:

How many the pains of art we 
layer and nudge and shimmy?
How shiny this body, this instrument,
until we lay it down, sharded,
but not discarded, dust to dust,
sand to glass to sand.

For my last session of the day, I caught up with a couple writers I follow on social media but had yet to meet in person, so I was thrilled (and got their books I brought from home signed–yes, I’m that kind of literary nerd). The prolific and super generous Sean Thomas Dougherty and Jennifer Sutherland (her debut collection is Bullet Points: A Lyric) are poets who spend some time writing in the “slipstream,” in between literary genres. They and Sarah Carson and Cynthia Maria Hoffman read from their work and talked about what writing in between genres (is it a poem, nonfiction flash, a prose poem?) means for their work and creative outlooks. I was so rapt by the writers’ creative readings that I didn’t take many notes, but I did take this gem down from Sean Thomas: “We push against genre” so forms can (paraphrasing here) dissolve and come together again to address neurodiversity, trauma, and more.

Day 2

I am often reluctant to read my creative work in public. Poetry is meant to be read aloud; not so fiction. However, I thought it might be instructive to read from a blog post I wrote here at Rust Belt Girl and then read the resulting scene that appeared in a story of mine published in Great Lakes Review last year. Like public journaling, I find blogging fertile ground for planting the seeds of story. Pro tip: keep your reading short and everyone will like it.

Thank goodness I read first, because there is no way I’d want to follow memoirist Kelley Shinn or poet Rikki Santer, whose readings were nothing short of incredible. Kelley is the author of the memoir, The Wounds That Bind Us, which I bought at the bookstore directly after her reading from it (I got the last signed copy: conference win!). Rikki read from her collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, her Tarot, and Me, which was inspired by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington–fascinating stuff.

Later that day, Rachel and I joined “in conversation” in a small theater to discuss her stunning debut story collection and its influences: from contemporary art to cult film to a creepy old radio program. I wondered if she went searching for inspiration or if it found her (both). I wondered how her growing up with her family in rural Wisconsin impacted her work (a lot). I am seriously kicking myself for not recording this conversation, but also it would have been a shame to interfere with the intimacy of the conversation. Those of us who write know that it can be a sacred space, and so to share a deep conversation about the inspiration behind the writing work can also feel so meaningful–you hate to break the spell.

Craft takeaways from Rachel: her process involves repeating steps: drafting, reverse outlining, noting of turns in the narrative, noting of where things get sticky or stick out–and here, an earlier Rachel might have smoothed those over, but now she explores them–and an opening up and rooting out of those interesting sticky spots.

In chatting, Rachel and I discovered that we’re both at work on novels set in Nordic/Scandinavian places (must be a Midwest thing). We shared inspiring writers: mine, Dorthe Nors; hers, Jon Fosse.

I was also inspired by Rachel’s fierceness when it comes to trying new genres on for size–in her case, the screenplay.

And the last big takeaway from Rachel, which I jotted during our conversation and aim to never forget (ahem, there’s been a reason it’s taken me three weeks to write this rundown): “Writing is energy management.”

Oh, and there was so much more I missed–next year, I will clone myself–on editing and writing and querying and “unlocking plot.”

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. Thank you also to Rebe Huntman for letting me use the beautiful photo collage she put together (now, go pre-order her gorgeous memoir).

Tell me in the comments, did you attend the festival? What was the highlight for you? What did I miss? 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

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Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 3 Comments

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.

Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 11 Comments

My interview with Amy Jo Burns, author of Mercury

Let’s begin with a sample paragraph from Amy Jo’s stunning literary (also mystery) family saga:

Spring was breaking through in lilac buds and daffodil shoots, but winter held on. Tufts of dirty snow clung to curbs, and porch steps, and parking lots. The heat had stopped working in the Citation, and Marley shivered. Theo was bundled in the backseat; she caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror. Then her eye snagged something else behind her–someone limping from a snowbank into the intersection. Marley slowed to a stop and turned around.

Whew. Good stuff.

Amy Jo, your main character in this Western-PA-set novel is Marley, whom we first meet when she’s 17. You left your Western-PA hometown for college around that age. What was it like to write this book and “inhabit” Marley’s character in a place (and time) similar to the one you were raised in? And how similar is your real-life family to Marley’s found family?

    Marley is a really special character to me. When I was creating her, I took the qualities I love most about my best friends from home and put them into her character. Her willingness to step into someone else’s messiness, her ability to tell the truth in such a loving way, and her desire to build a business with her own creative stamp on it are all qualities I really admire about my oldest friends. Marley showcases what I think real resilience actually looks like. It isn’t perfection or misery or loneliness—it just comes through in a big-hearted, flawed human who shows up for the people in her life. 

    The Joseph family in the novel is like mine in that we’re both a family of roofers—which means both houses were full of grand storytellers, brave hearts, and lots of tar-stained jeans. The house I imagined the Josephs living in was inspired by the old Victorian house my grandparents used to own in my hometown. I’d always loved that house and couldn’t imagine any other place a family of roofers would live. The characters in Mercury come from my imagination, but the bond they feel with each other—the sometimes too-close intimacy they have with one another is absolutely something any member of my extended family can relate to. When it comes down to it, I’d say both families care about the same thing—keeping people safe under roofs and on top of them.

    This novel is mostly set in the fictionalized town of Mercury. How did you go about constructing this place, this “forgotten Rust Belt town.” Did you use Pinterest boards or clip photos from magazines? Was there map-making involved to mark where the salon, post office, and library stand? And, as the daughter of real-life roofers, do you picture this town from an aerial/rooftop view?

    Mercury is heavily inspired by my own hometown, which I also wrote about in my memoir Cinderland. When I started writing the early pages of this book, I knew it had to be set in Mercury—a place I know, love, and left. So most of the early “research” came from my own memory, and then I squared it with pictures from the 1990s and also by talking with my parents. My dad drew a map of the church steeple and attic (which both play an important role in the story), and I talked with my mom about what it was like to help build a roofing business from an administrative perspective. It was really special to get to share a bit of this project with them, especially since so much of the book is about what it means to belong and how we claim home for ourselves.

    I hadn’t imagined my hometown from any aerial views until I started putting characters on roofs pretty early in the process of drafting the book, and it was the coolest thing to envision this place anew from an entirely fresh perspective. I was able to find a few aerial videos of my hometown to watch, which really helped me fill in the landscape for what these characters find when they’re up higher than everyone else.

    I’d call this book a literary family saga; however, there is also a lot of romance—some steamy! What’s your best tip for writing romance or sex that deepens character and moves plot?

    I would say my best tip is that sex is never just sex. Falling in love is one of the most monumental things we experience as humans—it shows us at our best and our worst—and I think it’s really important to reflect it in literature. When I’m writing romantic scenes, I’m always considering what each character is risking about themselves in a very unique way—are they sharing something no one else knows? Are they saying one thing and thinking another? What is it about falling in (or out of) love that changes how they see themselves? What past events have shaped how a person approaches their most intimate moments? Those scenes are such a great way to show what a character deeply wants and what they fear, whether they’re aware of it or not. And when all that juicy backstory collides with someone else who is just as complicated—it’s fictional gold!

    Like in your last (gorgeous) novel, Shiner, you explore profound female friendships in Mercury. Can you talk about how you developed the friendship on the page between Marley and Jade? When you’re writing, do you do character studies/background/backstory with detailed info–any that doesn’t make it into the book?

    Mostly what I do when I’m building relationships between characters is think about it A LOT. I write many drafts over a long period of time and throw out a lot of material, usually because that’s how I’m getting to know the characters. Scenes will start off as sketches and they get more detailed as I learn who the characters are. Many of the scenes between Jade and Marley felt very cliché for a long time as I was working, and I’d have to go back in and re-work them to go deeper so they felt earned and true. 

    I am such an impatient person (what a terrible trait for a writer!), so character studies always feel like they’re detracting from the real heat of the story I’m working on. The only thing I usually do outside of drafting itself is create a playlist for each book that I write, and I’ll include songs for each of the characters. It helps me track down their psyches, their moods, their secrets. You can learn a lot about a person if you know what songs they’re listening to when they’re alone.

    In this novel you touch on dementia. What kind of research was involved there? As this book is set in the 90s mostly, was there any other, historical research you had to conduct for verisimilitude?

    I had a family member with a form of dementia (though under different circumstances than those in the book), so I used that as the basis for building it in the novel. I decided not to do much clinical research on it because I wanted to portray it through the eyes of a family who isn’t sure what is going on. So often we don’t get the answers we are looking for in real life when it comes to medical diagnoses, and it was really important to me to give that truth a lot of space in the novel. 

    Motherhood is portrayed in a very real, and sometimes heartbreaking, way in this novel. Marley’s mother-in-law says, “This life is unmerciful to mothers.” You’ve got two young children at home. How has your writing practice (and product) changed since becoming a mom? And, follow-up, what is your favorite novel for exploring themes of motherhood?

    The biggest difference in my writing practice is that I have to keep my working hours to match my kids’ schedule. It is GIGANTICALLY easier now that they’re both in school, though I rarely get done what I’d like to in the course of a day. I remember when my son was an infant and my writing sessions were so short, I thought I’d never finish the book I was working on, which turned out to be Shiner. Sometimes my writing sessions would only produce a few hundred words. I had to learn to talk myself through it and say, “Maybe no one will ever see it, but I’d still like to try.” And I’d repeat that to myself over and over when my daily frustrations came. And the book got done!

    In terms of my favorite book about motherhood, I once attended a talk by Nicole Krauss just after she’d published Great House. Someone in the audience asked her how she was able to write and be a mother, and she said, “I wouldn’t have been able to write this book if I hadn’t become a mother.” It was so encouraging to me, as I was contemplating how I might have kids and continue to write. That story inspires me still.

    A lot of the plot of Mercury centers around the family’s church—but not necessarily around worship. No spoilers, but can you talk about how religion, faith, and or belief works in the world of this novel—and maybe also in your own life?

    My faith is a huge part of my life and my creative process. I think maybe writing books is a form of prayer for me. What I love about it is that the page becomes a place for my uncensored thoughts, my questions, my frustrations, and—most powerfully—the things that I love and I think are worth fighting for. It feels like a quiet place where I can meet God without judgment, where I don’t have to be any other version of myself but the real one. Also, I do a lot of listening when I’m writing which feels very peaceful.

    In this particular story, many of the characters have an idea of what “religion” is, but what they’re all hungry for is faith. Faith in a God who loves them just as they are, and faith in each other. I like to think each of them encounters God in an unexpectedly meaningful way in the book, and usually it’s through they way they learn to love each other.

    For those of us who aren’t just readers but who are also writers, what’s your favorite generative prompt for a writing day when the words just aren’t coming?

    I absolutely recommend starting with a memory from childhood you can’t get out of your head. Try retelling it to yourself from an adult perspective (which you can interpret any way you like). I actually began Mercury in just this way—the opening scene of the book is a memory of mine from a little league game when I was around nine years old. This exercise was how Waylon’s character first came to life.

    Tell us how the reaction to Mercury has been on your visits to libraries, bookstores, etc.?

    It’s been really wonderful. When Shiner came out in spring of 2020, there were no stores open, so getting to visit libraries and bookstores has been the best thing about publishing Mercury. My favorite thing is hearing about readers’ favorite characters and how they saw themselves in the story. I love it when that happens in a book I’m reading, so getting to provide that experience for fellow readers is a real gift.

    What are you writing and reading right now? And what are your kids’ favorite children’s books, lately?

      I love this question! This year I’ve been trying to take my time and read longer books (which I’m calling “biggies”), so right now I’m reading two—Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I’m really enjoying them both. Right now my son, who is nine, is loving the entire Percy Jackson universe by Rick Riordan, and my six-year-old daughter is very into Dog Man by Dav Pilkey and the Max Meow series by John Gallagher. I love seeing them read!

      Writing-wise, right now I’m working on a novel about the true story behind a famous country-folk singer’s disappearance. I don’t know if it will be my next book or not, but I’m really enjoying the work itself. Thank you so much, Rebecca!

      Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and the novel Shiner, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, NPR Best Book of the year, and “told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal,” according to The New York Times. Her latest novel, Mercury, is a Barnes & Noble Book Club Pick, a Book of the Month Pick, a People Magazine Book of the Week, and an Editor’s Choice selection in The New York Times. Amy Jo’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Elle, Good Housekeeping, and the anthology Not That Bad.

      You can find her on Instagram at @burnsamyjo.

      Mercury

      By Amy Jo Burns

      Celadon Books

      Many thanks to Amy Jo Burns for sharing her insights and time–and kid book recs– with us here at Rust Belt Girl. I know I can’t wait to read what’s next from Amy Jo!

      Like this interview? Comment below or on my fb page. And please share with your friends and social network. Want more? Follow Rust Belt Girl. Thanks! ~ Rebecca

      *Photos provided by Amy Jo Burns

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      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 12 Comments

      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.

      Find me on FB and on IG, Twitter, and Bluesky @MoonRuark

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      My interview with David Giffels, author of The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio

      David Giffels is the author of The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio, coauthored by Jade Dellinger and published by University of Akron Press in 2023.

      …this is a story of five spuds from an industrial wasteland with big ideas. It never should have happened. But it did. And in its wake, it leaves a parable.

      Hold onto your energy domes, readers! I spoke with award-winning author, Akron Ohio’s own David Giffels, about all things Devo–and much more.

      David, how did your Devo fascination begin? How much did you know about the band before you started writing about it?

      My first encounter with Devo was when they were on Saturday Night Live in 1978. I remember it being this spectacle of a rock and roll band, like something I hadn’t seen before—and being equally freaked out and intrigued. This was in their yellow suit era and they were doing their robotic stage moves. My parents were watching with us, and my mom said something about them being from Akron. I don’t know how much that resonated with me then. But I recognize now that I did associate them with the place I was from, and that meant something abstract but important to me then. And it means something very specific to me now, that in their era, Devo really did define what Akron was.

      What made you want to go down the Devo rabbit hole, conducting scores of interviews with Devo members and Devo-tees to write this—and your last Devo book? And what changed between your last book and this one?

      My coauthor Jade Dellinger and I met in 2000 at one of the first of the Devo fan conventions, called DEVOtionals. I was there covering the story for the Akron Beacon Journal and Jade was an independent art curator. I had been dabbling with the notion of writing a book about Devo, because there was no biography of them. At the same time, Jade had been compiling research. We were introduced and immediately hit it off and combined forces.

      In 2003, we published the first serious biography of the band: Are We Not Men? We Are Devo, the title taken from the band’s first album. The book went out of print, and for years we’d wanted to bring it back. When we approached the University of Akron Press about publishing it, we hit on the idea of reshaping it into what we really felt was the heart of the book. The original book covers Devo’s entire career. But the most interesting part is everything that happens up until they become a famous, commercial band: the ten years that takes place in anonymity in Northeast Ohio.

      The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio is revised to tell the story of these outsider artists, who found each other in an unlikely industrial landscape and started to explore all forms of media, art, and music, and what it was like for them to not only be ignored but also almost universally reviled. And yet they stuck to it and found a way into the mainstream. What’s so fascinating is the moment of them making it is also the beginning of the end. I don’t want to spoil the book’s ending, but there’s this moment of: ah, we’ve arrived, and here at the arrival is the specter of doom.

      This book includes so many wonderful photographs of the early days of Devo. That’s a change from the first book, right?

      Yeah, by creating a tighter focus, there was room for more than 80 new photographs that had never been seen before. It’s an amazing collection of memorabilia that we were able to showcase in this book that we couldn’t in the last book. Most of the photos were taken by Bobbie Watson Whitaker, who was a Kent State student and there from the very beginning of the band. She was always taking pictures and really documented Devo’s whole first decade—it’s just amazing.

      What was it about the Rust Belt of the 1970s, and specifically Northeast Ohio, that was the perfect petri dish to birth Devo?

      I make the argument in the intro to the book that Devo couldn’t have come from anywhere except Akron and Kent, really. There are factors in their development and aesthetic and philosophy that are directly tied to their environment. The most important is that the key members of Devo were students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the national guard murdered four students and wounded several others. Two of them were friends of Devo co-founder Jerry Casale. He witnessed the event, and it changed everything. Devo’s dabbling with the philosophy that humans are evolving in reverse—de-evolution, where they got their band name—became something much more real. Here was an inhuman act by the government that happened right before Casale’s eyes, and it changed his life.

      Then there’s the waning industrial backdrop of Northeast Ohio, the factories and the monochromatic gray polluted skies, the monolithic blimp hanging overhead. It almost had a German Expressionist feel, and it worked like an art-directed backdrop for the music Devo was making. Early on, they were working with mechanical sounds, and while they are not an industrial band, they have a strong industrial aesthetic. The yellow suits, their defining uniform in the early days of the band, came from a janitorial supply company that supplied the factories—so they were picking up on these industrial elements.

      Another very important factor specific to Northeast Ohio was a guy named Ghoulardi, who hosted a Friday night B-horror-movie show out of Cleveland. He wore a weird wig and sunglasses and performed in this hipster schtick way. He was this anti-authoritarian guy, who played primal rock and roll in the background while he was doing his monologue in between segments of the movies he made fun of. Out of Cleveland, he was seen by vast numbers of teens in the 1960s, who were also watching Ed Sullivan and the Beatles. Many artists and musicians who came from Northeast Ohio site Ghoulardi as a key influence for their twisted sense of humor and rebellious natures, and that was the case with Devo.

      And then there’s the work ethic of a working factory town. Devo stuck to this not-very-commercial art project for a decade—and that’s really the heart of the book—before they got any validation. That comes from that stick to it attitude that is baked into the nature of an industrial landscape. 

      What’s a favorite story of yours from Devo’s early days?

      One of my favorite stories is the way they would get gigs around the local music scene. Most of the bars would only hire cover bands. So the guys from Devo would call up the owner and say, “Hey, we’re this band called Devo and we play covers,” and they’d get booked. And they’d go on stage and say, “Here’s one by Bad Company,” and then they’d play one of their tuneless songs. They were using a homemade electronic drum kit at the time that made these atonal sounds of metal on metal. So this was clearly not a Bad Company song. And they’d get through one song and then say, “Okay, here’s one by Foghat,” and they’d do it again. By about the third song, they’d get the plug pulled or be paid by the club owner to leave. But they just fed on that. It was a total punk rock move—without the glamour of punk.

      Do you label Devo punk rock or new wave?

      I think Devo is new wave, and Iggy Pop makes the case too that they are the defining new wave band. Their quirkiness, the colorful presentation, the use of new technology, they embraced and embodied all of that. Not only would I call them new wave but I’d say they are the quintessential new wave band. 

      Devo was made up of art majors and outsider artists who were just as interested in Art Devo and related artistic theories as in music. How much of this was real artistic statement? Performance art? Something else?

      The first two people who started playing around with this were Jerry Casale and his friend Bob Lewis, who met at end of 1960s as freshmen at Kent State. As often happens with curious people when they make that big step from high school to college, every new idea seems like a bolt of lightning. Those two started having these late-night, pot smoke-fueled conversations about the fact that humans were devolving, and they started to write poems and manifestos about this, and I’m sure it had a serious intent, but it was also theoretical and philosophical. It was something they were trying out, as one does at that stage of one’s life.

      I don’t think it was a joke, but until May 4, 1970, I don’t think there was as strong a political and social intent behind it. But the Kent State shootings changed this from theoretical to graphically real, right in front of them. Everything changed going forward.

      One thing Devo did well was to mix up the joke with the serious intent in a way that one can’t be extracted from the other. So many songs that could be taken on the surface one way have something completely other underneath. Take for example “Whip It,” which has been cited among the Top 5 songs about masturbation, but it’s also a song that’s very much Dale Carnegie-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps: “When a problem comes along, you must whip it,” as a serious self-help statement. As I write in the book, if the intent was serious, it was meant to be laughed at, and if it was a joke, it was meant to be taken seriously. 

      Devo’s costumes are iconic. Can you talk about the importance of the masks and uniforms they made into their costumes?

      Masks go back to their very first performance in 1973—50 years ago—at an art festival at Kent State. Mark Mothersbaugh by default became the singer, and he was not at all comfortable on stage. The band was almost anti-music; they were making really atonal, mechanical kinds of sounds. Mothersbaugh wore a mask because he was terrified to be on stage. So it began with that, but as they went on and began experimenting with a performance art kind of presentation of their image, they started to adapt—first of all this sense of a uniform. They wanted to be seen as indistinguishable as individuals; that was part of the philosophy of Devo. It was part of the aesthetic, but also the philosophy that the individual is not important.

      One thing they were trying to do was to undermine what had become part of established rock and roll culture. Men with beards, wearing faded jeans and leather—Devo wanted to reject that. The way to do it would be to put on a uniform and confront what rock and roll was. Of course, the first splash they made was by taking the quintessential rock and roll song, “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones, and turning it completely inside out. Musically and visually, that’s what they were doing to a rock and roll culture that thought it was radical.

      How about the red, cone-shaped hats?

      If you were going to have one new wave symbol, it would be those red energy dome hats they wore for the Freedom of Choice campaign of 1980, which are almost always referred to as the upside-down-flowerpots. And that seems like a silly, cartoonish, tossed-off gimmick. And yet you could write an academic thesis about what the energy domes really are. First of all, they’re drawn from an early image in Jerry Casale’s imaginative mind as a student at St. Patrick’s Elementary School in Kent, Ohio. He would walk down the hallways, and above him were these light fixtures that were art deco ziggurat shapes. Something about them stuck in his artistic mind.

      Devo had a new look for every album and was very much about their visual presentation. So, when the members were designing the Freedom of Choice look, Casale went with this art deco, ziggurat shape. But it wasn’t just that. Devo also decided to call them energy domes, and the idea was that this would be a way to concentrate the psychic energy of the universe into the mind of the wearer. And of course nobody knew or cared—they were just the red flowerpot hats. But again, if it’s a joke it was meant to be taken seriously, and if it was serious it was meant to be taken as a joke. And I think the members of Devo are quite happy that the people who get it, get it, and the people who don’t, don’t.

      Devo left Ohio in the late 70s and didn’t play in Akron again until 30 years later. Did you see them perform?

      Yes. The last show they’d played in Akron was their homecoming tour in 1978. Then in 2008, they were invited to do a fundraiser for the local democrat party. It was Devo, Chrissie Hynde and the Black Keys—the three most iconic musical acts from Akron’s rock history—and they played together and it was an amazing night, to see those artists on the same stage. They jammed at the end, all playing together, which was really cool. 

      We all know Devo’s 1980 MTV pop hit “Whip It,” but what Devo songs do you think we should be listening to today?

      The most interesting Devo music to me has always been what falls under the tag of hardcore Devo, which is their early demos of what became their early albums. It’s the pre-Warner Brothers recordings. There’s a new hardcore collection that just came out. [50 YEARS OF DE-EVOLUTION (1973–2023), a retrospective collection, also released in 2023.] I would recommend that more than their mainstream commercial releases, because I think it captures their rough edges. To me that’s the true spirit of Devo.

      Devo has been on tour this year, what’s being called their farewell tour, though they don’t like it called that. Part of it is that they’ve been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame the past few years. This is another one of those ironies of Devo. An outsider band being put in the museum for rock and roll—that would be very Devo.

      What’s the current Northeast Ohio music scene like? In addition to writing, you play in a band. Can you tell us about it?

      I’m currently playing bass in a band called Dave Rich and His Enablers. It’s sort of indie rock power pop. The drummer is Chis Butler, who was the founder of The Waitresses [“I Know What Boys Like”], another Akron new wave icon. He had a lot of interaction with Devo, because they were in the scene at the same time, so he has lots of Devo stories to tell, himself. As far as the Northeast Ohio music scene, it feels like things got splintered with Covid. Over the pandemic everything was done alone in isolation, and the music is just now creeping out of the basement and back into the light of day.

      What is the Devo parable, and what can we learn from their story? One of the parables is that if you mess with the system, the system will devour you. It’s better to know that it’ll happen and do it anyway than fear it’ll happen and not do it. That’s very much what happened with Devo. At some point they changed from wanting to be pure artists to wanting to join the music industry and get signed to a commercial label. As they were undergoing that transition, they were very aware that they were just meat in a world of vultures. That’s the main parable. They knew they were going to get scalped, but they did it anyway.

      The second lesson is that their own theory also defined them. Their belief that evolution is working in reverse applied to them. Their music was so vibrant and new when they began, and then they slowly fell into some of the cliches of the rock and roll world: drugs, infighting, and problems with the record label. All of that started to pull them apart and they devolved from being bold iconoclasts to having to play the game. As they devolved, their music devolved—as they had predicted it would.

      David Giffels is the author of eight books of nonfiction, most recently The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio, coauthored with Jade Dellinger. His 2020 book Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America, was described by Publishers Weekly as a “trenchant mix of memoir, reportage, and political analysis,” and selected as one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2020. His other books include the memoirs Furnishing Eternity and All the Way Home, both winners of the Ohioana Book Award, and The Hard Way on Purpose, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice.” A former columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal, his writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Parade, The Iowa Review, Esquire, Grantland, and many other publications. He also wrote for the MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is a professor of English at the University of Akron, where he serves on the faculty of the NEOMFA creative writing program.

      The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio

      by Jade Dellinger and David Giffels

      University of Akron Press

      Many thanks to David Giffels for sharing his insights and time with us here at Rust Belt Girl. Can’t wait to read what’s next!

      Check David out at his website. And be sure to pick up The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio for all the new wave fans on your holiday gift lists!

      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

      *Photos provided by David Giffels

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      Posted on 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

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      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 14 Comments

      My interview with Mitch James, author of Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale

      For my Appalachian lit aficionados, Grit Lit fans, and readers who aren’t afraid of the dark … I’m thrilled to share with you my conversation with author and professor Mitch James about his debut novel.

      From the back cover, an intriguing blurb:

      A dead mother. An auctioned childhood home. Loss in the womb of a coal mine.

      Seldom Seen follows main character Brander, who encounters a “specter of a man who promises him that the answers to life are in Seldom Seen Mine, the largest coal mine in the United States.

      With nothing holding him back, Brander … takes a job at Seldom Seen Mine, and fails at every attempt to amend his life, losing a friend, a lover, and maybe his mind.”

      Reader friends, how does an author make good on such a blurb? I’ll tell you. With prose like this. I’m prefacing my first question for Mitch with one of my favorite passages in the novel. This is from early in the story, when Brander first enters Seldom Seen Mine:

      Brander was surprised. The road was rather smooth and well-lit, the air stale but not dirty. They rolled along, everyone quiet. Brander stared around. The mine’s back had a skeletal structure of beams and crossbars and cribs, packed tight with backfill in places and all sealed up with gunite. It was surprisingly silent beneath the earth, the hum of the transport, the crunch of residue below the tires, the occasional whoosh of an air course. If not for the forced mechanization, there would be no sound, not like on the surface. Noise is life. But even free of men, the mine wasn’t dead, exactly; there was something, a kind of energy present in the long back road, an innate awareness, like the womb of a pulse-filled thing.

      Mitch, welcome to Rust Belt Girl! Let’s dive in. The mine in this story works as much more than a compelling setting but a real character. I’d say we readers end up knowing as much about the mine as we do about Brander. How did you decide where to set this story? How did you learn so much about mines and mining? What kind of research did this entail?

      I’m so happy to hear you’re engaging with the mine in that way because it is very much its own organism. It felt that way when writing the book, and it means a lot to hear that it felt that way to you as you read it. When I wrote the novel, I was up to my ears in rural Pennsylvania, working on farms, mountain biking old logging roads, kayaking rivers, and clearing land. I couldn’t get enough. I lived not far from the real Seldom Seen Mine. The research I did that allowed me to accidentally stumble into the idea for the novel also happened there. It was a perfect recipe—the need to express the region as I had experienced it as a transplant who had been there awhile, the need to tell Brander’s story, the need to imagine others’ lives and suffering alongside my own.

      As for research, I read literary books on mining. There aren’t many. And I read short stories about mining in the U.S. and abroad. I read historical writing about mining at different periods in the U.S. in microfilm and microfiche. I watched a lot of YouTube videos, read instructional handbooks on mining equipment, found out who sold it, and found videos on how to operate it. I was friends with a mining engineer who guided me some.  A little bit of everything.   

      Here at the Rust Belt Girl blog we’re a little fascinated with how place works in story. Place helps plots turn. Place also helps form characters. While a rural setting, I’d say that your Seldom Seen mine situates your novel squarely in Rust Belt lit territory. There are other commonly-appearing aspects to Rust Belt lit (or contemporary Grit Lit, writ large) that feature in your story: teenage pregnancy and the meth crisis for just two examples. Can you talk about how you explore such aspects of Rust Belt life and the characters living these lives without resorting to stereotypes in your novel (you do this well!)? 

      I’m relieved to hear you don’t think my characters are stereotypical. I would never want that. That said, though, if I’m being honest, I think all fiction runs off a little bit of stereotype. I think most readers need to see characters that are somewhat familiar and that present themselves as equations they believe they can calculate, at least at the start. Lucky’s the gruff, crude, masculine man. Brander is the wounded, self-loathing Midwesterner. But beneath the stereotypes that reveal a small percentage of what makes up who we are is the rest of us, the best of us, the parts of us that are unique. Brander and Lucky also have these qualities within them. It’s my job to complicate their stereotypes by fleshing out the rest of their characters, for they drive the story. I see stereotypes everywhere, including in myself. But by seeing them, I can perceive their limits, their boundaries; I can peer around them to what else presents itself, and that’s gold as a writer, the stories everyone tells but doesn’t mean to.

      Basically, look for the people within the people and write about that. Then be prepared to conscientiously employ a little stereotype to get the ball rolling.     

      For those of us who are writers, ourselves, I wonder if you could take us through the process of crafting this novel. What was the first idea/image that came to you? When did you know you had to write this story? How long did it take? What’s your writing process like? We craft junkies want all the details!

      The idea for the novel came to me when I was reading a translation of a Russian short story from the early 1800s, a story about a miner who encounters a ghost in a mine. The ghost starts manifesting in his life outside the mine until he goes insane and, if I remember correctly, kills himself. The story was so short. I wanted so much more. So I made it. 

      When did I know I had to write the story? Immediately. I can always tell the difference between something I could write and something I must write. I had to write Seldom Seen.

      As for the process, I woke up at 3 a.m., wrote a 1000 words a day five or so days a week, and had the first draft in a few months. Then it took me 10 years to publish the book, so you can imagine the revisions, drinking, and self-loathing that occurred after repeated failures. Brander had to get it from somewhere!  

      I often wonder how Rust Belt lit will appear in American Literature textbooks a hundred years from now. Since you’re a college professor—maybe you wonder about this too? For me, my most formative American Literature course introduced me to William Dean Howells, the father of American realism. I’m not going to draw a perfectly straight line from American realism of the late 19th century to Southern Gothic of the early 20th century and the Grit Lit of today, but somebody could try. All that’s to ask where you see Seldom Seen fitting into the canon of American Literature? What are your reading/literary influences? What literary characters informed Brander, who—despite hard work and, yes, grit, fails, fails, and fails again?

      It makes me feel a little pretentious to think of my work in any kind of canon. But my writing, including Seldom Seen, is influenced by myriad Appalachian, Midwestern, and American Western and South-Western writers, all rural and spread across the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. I would hope Seldom Seenwould be welcomed by the Appalachian literary community and rural literary communities more broadly. 

      As for character influences, I have to be honest, I don’t know that I’ve ever consciously (though certainly subconsciously I have) created characters based on other characters about whom I’ve read. The characters begin with me, but they take over their story, and I just try and keep up and do justice through my writing to what they show me. I know that sounds mystic and woo-woo, but it’s the truth. For example, Lucky wasn’t a character I intended to have in the story, but when he showed up, he had plans, and I went along with them. Now, I can’t imagine the novel without him. 

      As for the last part of your questions, I don’t need to read a book to see hard work, grit, and abundant failure in a person. I’ve witnessed it in the working poor rural communities I’ve lived in my entire life. But I want to make something clear; I’m not saying the working poor are failures or that their efforts are in vain. I was working poor until I was thirty-two years old. I worked fifty hours a week with multi-billion-dollar industries and still had no healthcare or money, and couldn’t afford a vacation or a car that could make it out of the county. Goals like a home instead of a rental, good health insurance, the ability to take a vacation or have a safe vehicle all create comfort and stability in one’s life. The working poor are grinding but failing to reach important thresholds like these and others. There are many reasons why, but amongst them are certainly socio-economic and political barriers. These folks, my mother and father, cousins, aunts, uncles, neighbors—they’ve taught me how to create characters with grit that fight and fight and fight.

      This world has shown me how to write characters who fail.

      And final question: What are you teaching, reading, and writing right now? What’s next?

      I’m teaching various writing composition courses. I’m reading, gosh, so many random things. I feel like I read and read and finish nothing. I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By; Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead; Adam Grims’ The Art and Science of Technical Analysis; Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, and a textbook on world history because I screwed around too much in school when I was younger. I’m ashamed by how much basic knowledge I missed out on for being too stupid to know better. 

      As far as writing goes, I just finished a book of poetry that a press requested and for which there is a promising chance of publication. I’m pitching a couple of short story collections and two novels and am kind of tinkering around on a new one, so if there are any publishers/agents out there who think my work and I might be a good fit, reach out. I’m doing some final revisions on two peer-reviewed articles due out soon as well. Keeping busy. 

      Upcoming? I’m excited about the Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival. It’s one of my favorite events all year!  

      Mitch James is a Professor of Composition and Literature at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, OH and the Editor-at-Large at Great Lakes Review. Mitch is the author of the novel Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale (Sunbury Press) and has published works across the genres of short fiction, poetry, and academic scholarship. You can find his latest short fiction in Made of Rust and Glass: Midwest Literary Fiction Vol. 2, Red Branch Review, and Bull; poetry at Shelia-Na-Gig, Watershed Journal, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices; and scholarship at Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Find more at mitchjamesauthor.com and on Twitter @mrjames5527. 

      Like this interview? 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

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      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 24 Comments

      Literary citizenship alive and well, Twit*er as ‘dead’ emoticon, and bonus Europe pics for playing along

      We’re no longer tweeting, we’re xeeting—writer Amber Sparks might have coined that–and the literary landscape has changed, yet again. What used to provide a good social media home for the #writingcommunity now feels like a hut, maybe a hovel. The best writerly take I heard was from writer Anna Gazmarian (I think), who said the X logo that replaced the cute blue bird reminded her of some boutique hotel she couldn’t afford. I look at the new logo and can see nothing but the emoticon for “dead”: Xs for eyes. But so long as there are writers connecting, there will be a writing community. Really, the literary landscape is always changing, and one certainly can’t rely on a social media site for real connections (except for maybe this one).

      I talk a lot about literary citizenship but don’t often talk about what it looks like in practice. It definitely has a lot to do with reading and reviewing the work of other writers, but that’s just the beginning. To be clear, it has little to do with getting an MFA, for that paper in a frame on my office wall has played no part in most of the connections I’ve made in the writing community. So, a few on-the-ground examples:

      Not long ago, I braved the open-mic at one of my favorite literary conferences and read a prose poem I was working on, called “Jesus, My Son’s Buckteeth.” (Clearly I’m staking out the fertile publishing ground of: Is she religious or just ignorantly blasphemous? Let’s just keep them guessing.) The poem needed a little work but it was getting somewhere interesting, capturing a complicated mother-love characterized now by running the kids to ortho appointments and no longer by rocking them to sleep. After the open-mic, a writer friend who is also an editor of a wonderful poetry journal said I might consider submitting it. I re-worked the poem, with the help of my trusted writing group, sent it off, and crossed my fingers. It was accepted–but this isn’t where the story of literary citizenship stops. I made sure to attend the online issue launch, and as I scanned all the names and faces in Zoom boxes, I recognized the name of one of my undergraduate writing teachers, who is also a poet. I used the chat function to say hi, and she remembered me, 20+ years on!

      Sometimes it’s about saying hi to someone who may or may not remember you. Sometimes it’s saying yes to the the next generation of writers when you might rather be making Christmas cookies. OK, I’ll back up. A writer friend of a writer friend asked if I’d judge the 2022 AWP Intro Journals Project awards for creative nonfiction. When I could have been making cookies over my winter break, I was reading essays from MFA students, more than 60 of them: reading, re-reading, and picking my winners from so many admirable essays. But that wasn’t the end of the connecting. Long after the winning essays were published in university-run literary journals, one of the writers reached out. She was in the throes of preparing to turn in her thesis before graduation, but she wanted to take a moment to thank me for helping her feel like a writer with that award. I remembered her essay: it was excellent and showcased her journalism chops. I fact, she’d had a career before retiring and pursuing an MFA in creative writing–a time where you’re always a student no matter your age or experience. I told her I’d love to see an essay about just that, and I hope I do.

      So, sometimes literary citizenship is leaving the door open for more, is encouraging personal history and story to be shared. Sometimes it’s just saying: you’re writing, I’m reading, and I’m so happy to be sharing this connection. Love a book? Tell the author.

      And then there are so many more examples: the blogging friendships that started right here and have turned into real-life and writing-life friendships and critique groups and beta reading relationships. 

      Like any deep relationship, cultivating literary relationships does take time. Being a good literary citizen requires that you know the writing world and its players. What time I once used to doom scroll on the bird site I hope to devote to this blog. In a few days, my boys and I leave for our summer break in Northern Ohio, and I have a stack of Rust Belt lit to bring with me. I hope to get back to you here with a couple reviews and an author interview this fall, so stay tuned. 

      What are you reading and writing this week, this weekend? Want more stories from me, or author interviews, book reviews, guest posts, more? Follow me here:

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      If you follow me at FB or IG (@MoonRuark), you’ve been inundated with photos from my European vacation in July. The most Rust Belt-ish place: Vigo, Spain–industrial, historical, and wonderful. A few pics for those who haven’t had enough (in order: Paris’ Eiffel Tower (of course), a pretty shop window, the D’Orsay Museum, and us sisters by the Seine; Barcelona hills and palm trees and basilica; Vigo’s cathedral; and a view of the Spanish countryside from Valenca, Portugal:

      Posted on by Rebecca Moon Ruark · 5 Comments

      Building thriving post-industrial cities, one story at a time

      We talk a lot about place here on the blog. While I’m usually talking about place or setting in literature, I’m also interested in the real places that inspire—especially Rust Belt places.

      I never gave much thought to England’s rust belt, until a conversation with a good friend, who is English, last summer. Born a “southern softie,” a not-very-nice term for a person from the South of England, my friend recently moved to Sheffield, in the North of England. It’s basically smack dab in the middle of England’s rust belt, she told me.

      As coincidence—or bots—would have it, I learned of a symposium hosted on Monday by the University of Sheffield featuring writers, community organizers, academics and the like from the UK and US. I found it fascinating and thought I’d give you a taste, here. 

      An “across-the-pond conversation,” the symposium featured four panels that explored how to build “thriving, integrated post-industrial cities.” There was talk of architecture, anthropology, heritage, history and more. Panelists discussed new ways of connecting with the past, such as through urban explorations and art—including writing.

      Thanks to Zoom, I was able to check in on the first panel of the half-day event, which included a presentation by award-winning author, essayist, and journalist David Giffels—dubbed “the bard of Akron” [Ohio] by the New York Times. If you’ve been here at Rust Belt Girl for a while, that’s a name you’ll recognize. David has graciously talked with us before about a couple of his books: The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt and Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life.

      As a featured speaker, David touched on the idea of our place’s “story.” He talked about sometimes feeling like our place isn’t worthy of story because it’s a humble place. But, of course, every place is worthy of story. He talked about pushing back against a prevailing narrative that comes from the outside (see: flyover journalism) by championing the local voice and lived experience.

      David dug into his own past lived experience, as a student at the University of Akron during a time when the city’s downtown was full of abandoned buildings. “As young people we didn’t see it as failure,” he said, but as a place of promise. “You could reimagine the built environment”—a bookstore here, an art gallery there. 

      Just don’t call it a “dying” city. Rather, cities evolve. David’s story of Akron is important to tell, because “it’s the story of hard times”—and hard times can be instructive. Take the COVID-19 pandemic. Ohio was ahead of the curve, David noted. The reason? The state had been dealing with a public health crisis—the opioid crisis, with Akron at the epicenter—for years. The realigning of emergency and social services necessary to deal with such a crisis, Ohio was on it. “Our hard times had something to teach,” David said.

      Let’s not “fly over” the stories of lived experience—the hard and good times—in places like Akron and Youngstown, like Sheffield and Liverpool. It’s important to get cities talking, David said. “Dialogue between cities can remind us of the value of our narrative.”

      Thanks to the symposium organizers and participants, especially David, for spreading the word about this symposium. It developed from new-genre artist Jennifer Vanderpool’s social practice art exhibitions, called Untold Stories, a series of exhibitions taking place in the post-industrial Midwest region of the US and the industrial North of England. Maybe catch one of the artist’s exhibitions if you can? 

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

      Want more Rust Belt writing, author interviews, book reviews, writing advice, and more? Check out the handy categories above. 

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