The Girl in the Mall
Growing up in my rural Ohio town, the mall was our refuge. It could also be dangerous.
There Is This We
Portraits and reflections on the legacy of Black women artists and arts workers in Chicago.
My Summer of Steel
Before my junior year of college, in 1972, I worked at the manufacturing plant where my father was a foreman. It was an education.
Grasping at Shifting Sands
On the eroding shores of Lakes Michigan and Huron, a buried eighteenth-century lumber port, and the stakes of inaction.
Fire in Steubenville
"Each time I come back home / something else has burned."
A History of the Pride Flag in My Doorway
Notes on living and moving as an out queer person in the Rust Belt.
Around Lake Michigan on the Circle Tour
Sixty years ago, my parents took us on a driving tour of Lake Michigan, the quintessential Midwest road trip.
Trouble
"The jukebox at Pizza King didn’t bump any songs past / 1978 but we fed it quarters anyway"
Ode to Olcott
Olcott, New York—"The French Riviera of Lake Ontario"—has sunk and rebounded in a way so minor, yet major enough to feel like a triumph.
Great Dams on the Land
"When my son rides the Switch Back Gravity Rail over coal lines in Jim Thorpe, I hope to God the mountains are His and my boy might believe in his ancestor clans."
Lancaster is Burning
"The landscape of Fairfield County, Ohio sprouted the seeds of my imagination, helped them take root." [Excerpt]
meditations in the decline of western civilization
"this is how i ground myself. / i follow the writing on the wall."