Creative Work Samples
Literature
Literature
Is Ohio Literature a Thing? Should it Be?
No one flatly states that they can’t sell books with Midwestern settings, but it isn’t hard to notice that the flaws they do mention—too tragic, too many characters, not up-to-date—seem perfectly acceptable for novels set in an eastern urban environment or somewhere in Europe.
A Northern Appalachian Syllabus
Today’s generation of Appalachian writers has been able to find outlets for an array of work that delves deep into the complexities and nuances of a geographic region larger than many nations in both area and population.
The Pittsburgh School
Yet part of what defines the Pittsburgh School, from Brackenridge onward, is the mystical kernel of something beyond mere matter that animates any consideration of this place: the transcendent in the prosaic, the sacred in the profane. An intimation of beauty amid a kingdom of ugliness.
Reading “The Goophered Grapevine” on the Farm
Charles W. Chesnutt was a serial transplant. He found the ancestral North Carolina inhospitable. And in the North--Washington, New York, Cleveland, he was always homesick, from his earliest departures.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Appalachian Epic
It took a long time for Kingsolver to be able to write a book that goes right at the hardest parts of her home. The notion that everybody in Appalachia is hanging out on their porch, eating cornbread and drinking moonshine is certainly a stereotype, but there is some truth to it.
Langston Hughes’ Radical Ohio Youth
To Hughes, America has never achieved its potential. Never reached the supposed promises enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
Charting the Pittsburgh Novel with Jake Oresick
"I do appreciate titles that use the terrain instead of making their characters sit inside. I also enjoy titles that reveal the parts of our region that outsiders are unlikely to see, like Homewood, Butler, or old school, residential Oakland. Yinzers don't gaze down from Grandview Avenue all day like the movies would have you believe."
Megan Giddings Reimagines the Rust Belt
Reimagining the Rust Belt in Megan Giddings' "The Woman Could Fly."
James Purdy’s Outrages Against the Establishment
Purdy’s harshest words were consistently aimed at the literary apparatus that he felt was inherently unable to appreciate his formally deliberate but thematically audacious fiction.
Ohio in Toni Morrison’s Words
As much as Ohioans like me and others want to claim Morrison, her words belong to the world.
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