Articles about Ohio protesters pushing the Klan out of their community to the founding of Ebony Magazine, the sulphury flames beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania and the radioactive waste buried in Bridgeton, Missouri, the wooden skyscrapers of Wisconsin and the Frank Lloyd Wright trail in that same state, actress Colleen Moore’s magical fairytale castle delighting generations of Chicagoans and discovering Northern Appalachian literature. Along the way, we picked some fresh apples and enjoyed the Appalachian delicacy of the pawpaw.

By Ed Simon

Explaining what Belt is to somebody who hasn’t been lucky enough to make it part of their regular reading can be difficult.

“Is it journalism?”

“A lot of it is – award winning investigative shoe leather journalism! – but not all of it.”

“Is it literary?”

“Sure, we publish incredible poetry and essays, but we’re not really a literary journal.”

“Wait, and what part of the country do you cover?”

I’ve got my standard spiel for the last question, about how we range from Western Pennsylvania and Upstate New York all the way to the thousand lakes of Minnesota, everything north of the Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes – the Industrial Midwest, the Rust Belt. I’ll add Northern Appalachia and mention some places we venture into outside of our normal purview – West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri. We should do Maryland more. But more than a circumscribed region, what Belt covers is a mentality, a disposition, a state of being. The feeling of living in this broad, incredibly historically significant swath of the country that was marked by post-industrialization but has never been reducible to it. A place that’s diverse and complicated, sometimes infuriating and always fascinating.

The past twelve months have seen us publish some of our favorite writers while discovering new ones; our coverage ranged over history and politics, literature and advocacy, and as always, our thousands of unique readers every day had certain stories that they were perennially drawn towards. Articles about Ohio protesters pushing the Klan out of their community to the founding of Ebony Magazine, the sulphury flames beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania and the radioactive waste buried in Bridgeton, Missouri, the wooden skyscrapers of Wisconsin and the Frank Lloyd Wright trail in that same state, actress Colleen Moore’s magical fairytale castle delighting generations of Chicagoans and discovering Northern Appalachian literature. Along the way, we picked some fresh apples and enjoyed the Appalachian delicacy of the pawpaw.

All of this is, of course, only made possible through the generous support and contributions of our subscribers and partners. These stories are funded by you, the subscribers, with matching grants from NewsMatch; as well as financial support from the Ohio Arts Council, the Institute for Nonprofit News, the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, and the generous contributions of James Babcock. Next year promises even more in the way of stories, ones that I believe will catch the public interest, drive the conversation, and most importantly, be interesting to read.