The topic was whether or not there’s too much boosterism in writing about Cleveland, so perhaps unsurprisingly, the discussion felt less like this:

and more like this:

which makes me wish I’d come prepared to be more confrontational: if there’s one thing I’ve learned from pro-wrestling it’s that people like fights, and maybe it would’ve raked in a little more $$ for Ohio City Writers if I’d pulled someone’s hair or bestowed upon them a particularly obscene epithet.

(Frank, if you’re reading this, that means next time buy me a couple more drinks beforehand.)

As I said during the event, I’m less concerned with portraying Cleveland (and the Rust Belt) as a good place or a bad place, and just simply as a place that’s real and full of people whose lives may or may not be working. I am more interested in exploring the region’s relevance (or irrelevance) in a broader national (and international) context.

To be honest, I’m not even that concerned about Cleveland getting portrayed as a place where ambitions go to die (as it was on 30 Rock) or as a place where it’s cool to be a big fish in a small pond (Hot in Cleveland). (At least not in a fictional context.) My friend Kate Norris and I don’t agree on this point. If you would like to watch us cage fight about it, there will be a $5 cover charge.

And as far as unflattering stories on 60 Minutes, I fall more into the “any attention is good attention” camp because you don’t know who’s watching. A wealthy businessman who grew up in Slavic Village, perhaps, and who’s riddled with a fear that he’ll go to his grave with too much money on his hands, much like the fear that drove Andrew Carnegie.

(Sitcom idea: wealthy businessman who’s riddled with guilt about dying with too much money on his hands opens novelty candle factory in blighted Rust Belt neighborhood, employs sassy black woman as floor manager. Hilarity ensues.)

This is the best book on small town life in America.

After the panel, someone asked me if I really thought we had a unique enough regional culture to support our own literary voice. My beady little eyes glittered. Of course we do! So over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a series about what you need to do if you want to write Rust Belt fiction. In addition, we’re (at long last) starting a Cleveland Review blog, where you can expect to see even more content devoted to this subject. Stay tuned!

1. I was extremely fortunate to be the recipient of a Creative Workforce Fellowship offered by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the third largest public arts funding agency in the country (after New York state and Minnesota). Along with 19 other talented individuals, I have been awarded a tidy sum of $20,000 to finish my novel, Coming Home to Die: How Robbie Brennan Gave Up His Dreams and Slunk Back to the Rust Belt, which I workshopped with Karen Shepard at the Tin House Summer Writers Conference last summer. I am humbled and honored at the vote of confidence in my work, which has been on hold for nearly two years as I attempted the unenviable feat of working 60 hours a week at two jobs.

As a former public employee, I take the use of such funds very seriously and as such I intend to document my activities on a regular basis. Here. On the internet!

2. I gave my blog a name. Yes, it’s a line from a Camper Van Beethoven song:

and it used to be my nickname, back when I drove this rusted out 1992 Corolla that fell apart under my feet while I was negotiating my way through a traffic circle on the Jersey Shore. I dumped it at the mechanic and when he called me the next morning he was like, what happened to this car? Has it been underwater at some point? And I sighed and said, no, it was just Cleveland that happened to it. Anyway. Camper Van Beethoven. If it makes me a poseur, I’m sorry.

3. I fucked up the CSS when I installed this new-to-me WordPress template, so if this site looks like it’s been awkwardly pawed at by someone whose web design skills are ten years out of date, it has. It’s on my agenda. I’ll fix it! Just after I singlehandedly fix everything about Cleveland.

4. I’m really excited at the possibility of using my fellowship year to nurture and develop the Cleveland Review, to which we’ve had an overwhelming response from Buffalo to Detroit to St. Louis and beyond*. I came back to Cleveland in 2007 with foolheaded ideas and good intentions, and I’ve wandered through the dark junkyards of doubt and regret, coming to the conclusion that if I want to stay here, I just am not going to have the kind of life or job I could have in another city. It’s different here, and if I have to cobble together bits and pieces of part time jobs with my own pursuits, then that’s what has to happen. For this realization I am immensely grateful to my boss, Harriett Logan, proprietor of Loganberry Books. Harriett took a chance on hiring me after I’d been laid off for nine months, despite probable misgivings that I’d bolt the second a full-time job opened up. Her support has made a world of difference to me.

*Well, just Canada.

Being called a hater gives me airplane ears.

Airplane ears are what a cat does when it gets angry. They look like this:

Whenever I see women with small children on the bus I worry. I worry about those kids’ futures. I worry when I see boys who can be no more than twelve getting on the bus with their 4 year old little sister in front of the projects. I worry when they do not look well taken care of and I worry when they are clean and dressed well because they have more to lose. I worry about their mothers because these women can go missing for years without anyone bothering to find them. I’m not sure trendy restaurants and boutiques ever fix these things.

And so on.

Does it make you less of a Clevelander to know which exits off I-77 are closed, but not where the #11 or #15 goes? I don’t know. It makes you see less of the whole picture, makes you less aware of the reality of most actual Clevelanders’ lives, the ones who live in poverty and don’t graduate from high school. You know, those people. The people who are ruining Cleveland. When I lived on West 25th I saw a white guy in Dockers and a polo shirt get out of his car to yell at a black female panhandler: “You’re the reason why Cleveland is ruined!”

I am guessing he wouldn’t have shouted that at his grandmother, who probably moved out of Buckeye or Slavic Village when those people started moving in.

Weekend recap: I had a lovely evening last night at Blossom, listening to Russian composers courtesy of the gracious owners of Loganberry Books. My favorite part was when this hipster couple sat down in front of us and started getting all lovey-dovey and then this sort of crazy woman wandered over and asked them if she could have some of their wine.

Jim made me pancakes for breakfast this morning. According to the label, Log Cabin syrup contains NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP but it does contain “corn syrup” and “liquid sugar” so I guess I should feel virtuous!

Speaking of virtuous, I’m slowly but surely plowing through Elmer Gantry for my book club. I’m not getting as much out of Elmer Gantry as some other of Sinclair Lewis’s works, except irritation that the same shenanigans that went on a hundred years ago are still going on. (I felt this a lot while working on the Howard Metzenbaum project — I kept finding news clippings from before I was born that said things like “Poll: 70% of Americans favor universal healthcare.”)

Except of course now Elmer Gantry and Sharon Falconer would have the internet and television to help them be frauds. Maybe I should just be a mega-evangelist. I mean, I’d be a fraud too, but at least my money would go to worthy causes like homeless gay teenagers, kitten rescues, and RTA.

Anyway, here’s some Throwing Muses for you.

Lots of fantastic people helped me do this!

According to my calendar, it’s August and that means I’m in the home stretch. I have five months left of working six and a half days a week, and then woohoo! it’s 2012, The Year of Fucking Around. And by The Year of Fucking Around, I mean the year of being underemployed but working sunup till well after sundown on projects I don’t get paid for (yet).

Like this one.

I’ve also decided to go back to school, which has been a very hard decision given that I’ve already been back to school once. But the opportunities promised for my profession just never panned out, and I need to do something that I like better anyway.

In other news, I just came back from a three-week trip to Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and back again. I took the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago because it’s been 10 years since I drove back from Montana, and I feel like you have to take an overland trip across America at least once every ten years. Well, I felt like that at first, but after two days’ worth of Amtrak toilets you sort of lose the romantical notions you had when you bought the ticket. Although I may have set the record for how many times someone has listened to Zen Arcade straight, at least in the lady category.

Things I did on my trip include: the Tin House Summer Workshop, where I enjoyed the wit and wisdom of Steve Almond, Pauls Toutonghi, and Karen Shepard, among others; the Seattle Mystery Bookshop; the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine; and the ever-interesting Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. I came back to Cleveland feeling much better. Or maybe I just feel better because I finally got an iPod and can just block out most of the world, like everyone else has been doing for the last ten years.

Well, let’s see. I still have 14 jobs. Jim and I went to Minneapolis in April, after a long time daydreaming about being friends with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer and Grant Hart — or at least being friends with people who have those same daydreams.  We went to see Joan Didion at the University of Minnesota but her talk was canceled due to illness.

Still, it was nice to be in Minneapolis because there was development along the train line, people talking about books in the street, people in the street, and a definite music culture. I also liked it that you could ask any random person on the street about which bus you should take and they did not recoil in horror and say, “the BUS?!?! But that is dangerous.”

I was accepted into the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, which I’ll be attending in July. After that I’m going up to Seattle to see a friend, and I’m thinking about coming back home via the Empire Builder. It’s been ten years now since I’ve gone overland across the country, and I feel like you need to do that at least once every ten years.

I’m planning the annual Author Alley at the Larchmere Festival, so if you’re a published author residing in Northeast Ohio and you want to come sell some books, check it out. I’m also still running my classics book club: June 23 at 7 pm we’re discussing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and July 28 at 7 pm we’re discussing My Antonia.

Our cat died. She was 15 years old, and she’d been with me for my entire adult life. I acquired her during my ill-fated year at Oberlin — there was a spot behind the conservatory where feral cats went to have their kittens. She actually traveled overland with me twice. She was never a sweet-tempered cat, but we loved her.

This weekend we went to Pittsburgh on the Megabus. I’m not going to get too attached to this route because there were less than 10 people riding each way. (The bus driver said the Columbus-Pittsburgh route is always full.) I liked Pittsburgh — it actually feels really far away, like it doesn’t quite belong to any definite region of the country. It feels like Shangri-La.

Otherwise, I’m still at the same-old, same-old, peering through the blinds and hoping to get by unscathed.

Now normally I object to the overuse of the word “amazing,” but it really does amaze me that anyone would think they can be a good writer without also being well-read. My friend Kate, the glossy-maned workhorse behind The Cleveland Review, and I have discussed this at length. Perhaps Ray Bradbury explained the relationship between reading and writing better than either of us could:

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful.”

Now when they say you should read as widely and as broadly as possible, they mean it. Read Proust but also trashy, forgettable YA paperbacks from 1991. Read Dostoevsky and then nothing but cat-based whodunnits for a month. Read newspaper columns written by people you can’t stand, if only to make yourself feel something.

And why stop at reading! Broaden your media tastes all around. Watch Glenn Beck, and watch him with gusto. Watch him with autotuning. In fact, watch gobs of YouTube videos — especially the ones with only 200 views. These, along with anonymous news site comments, are a brilliant wellspring from which to create new characters.

You need to do this because you never know what you’re going to pick up and when you’ll need it. Being confined 40 hours a week with a Rush-obsessed coworker has allowed me to flesh out a secondary character in my Rust Belt novel. Would I have written that progressive rock funeral scene before? Probably not. I probably never would’ve even went there. But now I have, and now I welcome all of you who arrived here by googling “progressive rock funeral.”

If you are serious about being a writer, it’s my firm and high-handed belief that you should never have a single answer to, “who’s your favorite author?” Favorite for what? Favorite for making me understand a culture I’d never experienced before? Favorite for taking me to that mystical, atavistic state known as “it’s funny cuz it’s true”?

If someone asks who your favorite author is, you should be insulted. They think you are a hack! The proper way to respond to such a question is to sigh, take off your glasses, and start rubbing your forehead in extreme consternation. Don’t say anything until the other person starts squirming.

Last spring the Catholic church in our neighborhood closed. It was one of a dozen or so churches closed by the diocese, a casualty of our continuously declining population. Remember, a church is more than just a building, they told the parishioners. But a church is a building, and empty buildings change neighborhoods.

I’m not Catholic, but I miss the church’s presence something fierce. I miss the chiming of the bells at noon and six, something that gave structure to my day while I was out of work. I miss a sense of activity on Sunday mornings. And of late I miss the three-storey statue of St. Rose of Lima that once adorned the front of the building:  three Saturdays ago I was walking to the train station on my way to work and there was a crane sitting in front of the church. That night, she was gone. Where she goes nobody knows. Like the old woman who gives shelter to the Partisan, she died without a whisper.

Though it’s been bought by a charter school — which is good — the church now looks like it’s been in a bar fight, like someone knocked out its front teeth.

So at six o’clock tonight when I opened the windows, though I heard the far-off freeway traffic, the train, the sounds of someone’s car stereo, there was also the in-rush of loss, the absence of church bells, fifty years’ worth of constancy and comfort to people I never knew.

This is what I've been doing.

Hi there. Should I make an excuse for my absence from the Internet, or should I just skip it?

My excuse is good: between my two paid jobs, I’ve been working 50-60 hour weeks, and on top of that I’ve somehow managed to nurse Issue 1 of The Cleveland Review into being. Which was about 30 times more work than we thought — and we knew it was going to be a lot of work.

As I’m sure all of you busy folks know, it’s when you’re most pressed for time that you realize what’s most important to you. So I’ve mostly cut out Being on the Internet (preferring to just use the Internet when it’s useful, like when I need to find a plumber or an ISBN number). Most of my spare time is spent reading books, which I love; writing, which I am compelled to do; editing, which is the only thing I am good at; and listening to music, which keeps me from going all fists and elbows. If you’re interested in what I’m reading — and trust me, I am interested in what you are reading — you can follow me on Goodreads.

Anyway, I’ll be doing the 6.5-day workweek through December 2011, so if you don’t hear much, remember: it’s not you, it’s me. I guarantee you’ll hear more from me when I’m starting to look for money again!

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

I went to the Society of American Archivists conference. I met Tukufu Zuberi and stayed in a room that normally costs $700 a night. I talked to archivists from Canada who were excited to meet someone from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Then I went to Chicago to hang out with my ersatz gay stepson Mark, who greeted Mama Hen with piles of pennies and Coco Roos. While in Chicago I met Ted McClelland, author of The Third Coast &c (which I reviewed here). Ted is writing a new book about the history of the Rust Belt, and I gave him some haphazard and probably sourpussed research advice.

When I got home I made a 2-page list of regrets that I hung on the fridge. I’m extremely proud of it.

Ted came to Cleveland to research his book and after accidentally taking him to DJ Kishka’s Polka Happy Hour, Jim and I entertained him and Bridget Callahan with homemade banana chip wine on our front porch. How’s that for Rust Belt hospitality?

Let’s see. In September Jim and I saw Grant Hart at the Happy Dog, after sitting through about four hours of opening bands. During which time I nursed a 7-Up and fell asleep twice. (Once when I woke up Grant Hart was actually taking pictures of the wall behind us.) The show was totally worth it, despite a) the tender young hipsterlings who kept trailing in and out in front of the stage while he was playing, as if they didn’t know who he was, and b) the people who kept yelling for him to play Bob Mould songs. At any rate, the show reminded me why you need to see good music performed live: because it’s uplifting to be in the presence of creative people who are really excellent at what they do, and not just trying to be.

We’ve launched The Cleveland Review. Please submit your Rust Belt fiction.

And last but not least, I went to New York for the first time in three years. It was the anniversary of My Greatest Regret, and while my traveling companion may have wanted to do more exciting things, I forced her to haunt those places I loved which are no longer there: the Manhattan Mall Arby’s, the library on 53rd Street, the former site of Eddie Boros’ tower of toys. The trip was good, cathartic. Now I’d like to spend some time writing, exploring my problematic relationship with this place I come from.