I was intrigued when my old friend Bill told me he had gotten a new job as an editor at a magazine based in Cleveland. I was more intrigued when he told me the title of the magazine and its subject matter -- the “Rust Belt.”
“I’m going to be working from Germany for the summer,” I told everyone this April. “Ooh, Berlin?” was the universal reply. “No,” I would reply, savoring the weirdness of the word I was about to pronounce: “Gelsenkirchen.”
During the years I lived away from Detroit, group bicycle rides became a popular pastime in my hometown. When I moved back, I gave such outings numerous tries ...
The Browns are on. There was a time when that meant I would have been on the couch in front of the TV or in a sports bar in front of a TV or at a friend’s house in front of a TV.
My great-grandfather was nearly 60 years old when he dug a basement in his backyard and built part of a house on top of it.
As we prepare for our second birthday party, we are reliving our past. So too have many of Belt's essayists. Here are just a few of our favorite essays about growing up in the Rust Belt.
“This is just a simulation, but you’ll lay there in the bed, and we’ll slide you into the tube,” the technician points at the fMRI bed and motions for me to lay. But it’s not a real fMRI, it’s just a big, cheap-looking model of one.
The first thing that Ellen Vinson wanted to tell me about her aunt, physicist Melba Phillips, was that Phillips was the only person from Pike County, Indiana, to ever have an obituary in the New York Times.
I had a literary agent when I was 23. My agent represented John Knowles, Garrison Keillor and me, among others. The agency had even handled Churchill.
Last year, when driving back from Detroit to his home in Fraser, my dad took a detour. Dad is by nature an anxious man, but that anxiety spiked when he turned down an ice-and-snow-covered street.
On a glorious Saturday morning, Erika Harrison pulled up to her house in East Cleveland, bounced out of a sparkling red Chevy Equinox minivan, and walked briskly to her front door ...
It has been more than four decades since money problems forced Jerry Schlueter to cut short his broadcast degree at Ohio University.