The Art of Vacancy: Cleveland’s Rooms To Let
Rooms to Let: Cleveland returned to the Slavic Village neighborhood in Cleveland last Sat., May 16 and Sun., May 17. Artists created a temporary art exhibition using vacant homes as their medium.
An Interview with Sarah Carson
Sarah Carson’s new collection of prose poems, Buick City, begins with freight trains rattling past Flint’s closed automotive plants, and ends with a mechanic spitting on the city’s grave.
Reading The Midwest: Space Aliens And Police States
In late March, novelist Marilynne Robinson caused a stir after a reading when she casually let slip that she was working on a fourth novel set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa.
Sitting Ducks: The Mystery of the Cleveland “Duck Factory”
Abandoned, in a Cleveland building slated for destruction, ducks sit, waiting. Rubber ducks, that is.
In Detroit, Turn to Crime Finds Its Rhythm
In 2009, Derek Stanton and his band Awesome Color had just moved back to their native Michigan from New York City.
Redevelopment by Numbers in York, PA
Fueling vibrancy in a postindustrial city is a daunting task. Economic redevelopment, no matter how you slice it, can be exorbitantly expensive, snail-paced, and risky. Like many of its industry-starved brethren across the Rust Belt ...
Scenes from the Cleveland International Film Festival
Between March 18 and 29, over 100,000 people attended the 39th Cleveland International Film Festival. For this photo essay, we hung out outside the theaters and related venues, watched the filmgoers, directors, queuers and workers come and go.
Ballad of a Pencil Junkie
In the old days at The New Yorker, when your pencil point got dull, you just tossed it aside and picked up a new one. There was an office boy who came around in the morning with a tray of freshly sharpened wooden pencils.
Harvey & Me: Uninteresting Phone Call
Harvey & Me, a comic series appearing in Belt about Harvey Pekar, written by Anne Elizabeth Moore and Illustrated by Melissa Mendes. This installment, "Uninteresting Phone Call"
God, Baseball, and the Mystery of the Disappearing Novel: Nancy Willard’s “Things Invisible to See”
In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner plays Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer who plows down a section of his cornfield to build a baseball field that’s soon populated by the ghosts of players past.
Put a Smokestack On It: Lansing’s 517 Shirts
Ty Forquer got the idea for 517 Shirts in the men’s room of a Lansing, Mich., bar. Forquer had just moved to Lansing from Portland, Ore., to pursue a doctorate in music at Michigan State University.
Being Ernie Krivda
“Play me something” says the tenor master during our first lesson together. I squirm uncomfortably in my socks, having left my shoes at the door of the immaculate if modest music studio.