![]() Sometimes you come across an essay that's so original in its writing and construction it puts you on the floor, and that's how I felt when I read "We Were Hungry" by Chris Dennis (originally published in Astra Magazine). The piece is about growing up poor, what the author on Twitter calls "rural consciousness," and addiction and recovery. The central conceit of the piece is the narrator writing a letter to McDonald's, which is the place he went when he was hungry, strung out and looking for love or simply a bathroom to do drugs in. The narrator introduces the essay by asking "What is a third place when a person has no first or second place?" (referring to "a place that is not home and not work but still wants us to stay awhile, to feel, even, a sense of belonging," according to his friend who has to define it for him). This question, of trying to find belonging when you've grown up with adverse childhood experiences in an unsafe place, haunts the essay. The hunger that drives the narrator and his sister is both a physical and a spiritual one, and ironically, when they have nowhere to go, McDonald's takes them in. "Is this what love looks like?" he asks in a kind of mock-awe. "Neither of us was able to recognize it." Even as the writer finds a semblance of safety in McDonald's, with sympathetic workers giving him and his sister free food, Mickey D's is a stand-in for love and their hunger is never satisfied, because after all fast food always leaves you wanting more, is designed to hook you, in fact. "When we were young, you dressed yourself up like a clown," he writes. "We longed to crawl inside of that clown, into a place where we could eat and be eaten forever ... A craving only leads to another craving." In the midst of this semi-serious ode to the Golden Arches, the author suggests that he and his sister will never get well as long as they're caught up in cycle of poverty and part of a broken family. The narrator's relationship with his sister is one of the sweetest, most wrenching aspects of the piece. They act as each other's family, as protectors, when their own parents can't be there for them. "My sister and I stood in the way of so many things that might have damaged the other: car rides with strange men at 3 a.m., drugs from people too eager to sell them, loneliness," he writes. "My sister stood between me and danger." He describes their relationship as "like a dream of childhood. Drugs were a way of pretending we had no body at all, or that we were just a body and nothing else, or that our bodies were a third place where anyone could come and go without paying." And perhaps my favorite line of all: "What is a sibling but proof that you weren't alone through the worst of it? A witness. A fire wall against the gaslight of childhood. 'I was there, too,' she says." I think that's so true of siblings and the people that we grow up with -- they remind us of the hard times, the stuff we want to forget but need to remember to heal. Siblings ground us, take us back to who we were and always will be. And like the narrator says, they protect us, too. At the close of this essay, the narrator, his sister and McDonald's make up a kind of beautiful, dysfunctional family. Sadly, while the writer is in recovery from addiction (his bio lists him now as a social worker who helps people in addiction recovery), he describes his sister as still "in a crater on the moon of chaos." What an image. Great essay.
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![]() For the past couple years, I've been involved in a community journalism program at The Land, and for the past six months or so, I've been teaching it and helping manage it. Why are we doing this? The main reason is to try to increase the community's capacity to tell their own stories. For years, Cleveland has been defined by the stories that professional journalists tell about us, whether good or bad, indifferent or kind, skillfully reported or parachute journalism. There are many great journalists and news outfits in town. But there's no denying there's fewer of them. And there's no denying Cleveland could use a boost in civic engagement. Enter The Land's community journalism program. Through training and paying residents to write about their own neighborhoods, and issues and communities across the city, we're trying to build the civic muscle for telling our own stories. It's been a hard process, but it's been rewarding. So far, we've graduated more than 75 people from our community journalism program, most of whom have gone on to write and publish stories with The Land. The program is free and we pay all community journalists $300 for their first story, then we invite them to join our network of community journalism grads and continue to write for us and get paid (rates start at $200). We also host events, Zoom sessions, networking nights and the like to keep connected. None of this would be possible without the dedicated mentors and staff who help power the program. Last week, I tagged along with a community journalist from Old Brooklyn, Anna Maria Hamm, to cover an event at East Clark School in South Collinwood being held by Cleveland Public Library, which is revamping 20 of the city's little free libraries. The power of the community journalism program was evident. Anna confidently interviewed folks at the event (once we figured out how the recorder on her phone worked, of course!) and she got great material. Thanks to her own smarts and dedication, as well as the 6-week training program and mentoring, she wrote a powerful story about this community project. Here's the result: Little free libraries: Where community comes together to increase childhood literacy – The Land (thelandcle.org). My role with The Land, which I helped start three years ago, has changed in the past year, as I've chosen to focus exclusively on editing, teaching, and writing. (I also continue to teach with Literary Cleveland, and will next year, too.) I believe in what we're doing and think we're starting to make a difference. Find out more about our community journalism program here, and consider joining the next cohort (or inviting someone you know to apply): Community Journalism Program – The Land (thelandcle.org). Also, it's fundraising season, so we urge you to also become a member: Support The Land (thelandcle.org). Early this year, I posted that Katherine and I had bought the house next door from an investor, who had in turn bought it from the previous owner. Our goal was to do a historic rehab and fix it up. Well, 9 months after buying it, and about six months after construction started, we largely finished the interior. It's up on Airbnb right now, and I thought I'd post some photos here. From cleaning out the house to tuckpointing the basement walls to helping design a new kitchen to picking paint colors, what a wild ride it has been. It turned out beautiful and we're excited about it. If you know anyone coming to town, please share this Airbnb link with them: The Queen Anne at Gordon Square. https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/998349242597093217?guests=1&adults=1&s=67&unique_share_id=e8842474-792c-425e-8e5b-e87421c672bb Also, if you or anyone you know is looking for a realtor to buy or sell, have them contact me. Gotta get that plug in!
![]() Exciting news! I was recently awarded an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Ohio Arts Council, along with dozens of other artists from across Northeast Ohio and around the state. For the project I submitted, dubbed the "Fairfax Neighborhood History Project," I'll interview Fairfax residents and past residents and help document the collective history of that community. (I am from Cleveland Heights, not Fairfax, but have long been interested in the historically Black neighborhood as a Clevelander and also because my grandfather grew up there before his family moved to Cleveland Heights in 1918.) Thank you to the Ohio Arts Council for this amazing opportunity! I'll post more updates here as soon as the project gets started. Click here to check out the full press release: Ohio Arts Council Announces Approval of 182 Grants Totaling $587,902 | Ohio Arts Council ![]() This fall, I taught a class called “Writing About Nature” at the Stone Cottage at Hines Hill Conference Center in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, held in partnership with the Conservancy for CVNP. In the class, we talked about the virtues of noticing our environment and using keen observation to ground your writing in place and sensory details. We lauded noticing – using one’s five senses to make one’s writing vivid and real for readers – as a writing practice, yes. However, we also talked about the power of noticing to calm our souls and selves during times when our attention is stretched, our lives are filled with distractions, and we are separated from nature. The class shared a lot of laughs around the shared table in beautiful Stone Cottage, some short walks in the woods, and discussions of nature writing. One of the pieces we read was an essay called “Cliffrose and Bayonets” by Edward Abbey from his memoir Desert Solitaire. Abbey worked as a park ranger in Arches National Park in Utah in the 50s and 60s, and in the interconnected essays in Desert Solitaire, he writes about living alone in the wilderness and exploring the natural and human history of the area. He also rails against the federal government for building roads into the park to make it easier for people to explore – and destroy – Arches. Ultimately, the book is a powerful argument for wilderness, for the need to maintain and retain it as something that is separate from humans, and for the virtues of noticing. Abbey, always a provocateur, begins the essay with the words “May Day,” indicating not only that it’s May 1st, the start of spring, but also that there’s something revolutionary, something pro-worker and anti-capitalist, about taking a walk in the desert. He refers to this desert as a “garden” that is “uninhabited” and sets off to explore it. The first thing he does is take “inventory,” which is exactly what we talked about doing in the nature writing class, that by taking inventory of our surroundings in nature, by stopping to notice what we might otherwise pass by in ignorance, we not only learn something new and gain insight into our environments, but we also might gain insight into ourselves. And that, in turn becomes powerful material for our writing. Abbey catalogues that plants and flowers of the desert, showing us in equal parts their biological features – how they survive and have adapted in this harsh environment – as well as their natural beauty. Along the way, again, his essay is a provocative argument for the separateness of nature, not that it’s separate from us, but that it should be given its own place free of human intervention. “I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous,” he writes. “(Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!)” There are some amazing descriptions here – the honeybee “wallowing drunkenly” in the pollen of the cactus flower and refusing to leave “until the flower wilts, until closing time,” the “bayonetlike leaves” of the yucca, the juniper tree “glittering shaggily in the sunrise.” He goes on to explore the flowers, return to his trailer for breakfast, then head out to describe Arches National Park itself. Yet a few pages in we get one of my favorite paragraphs in Abbey’s memoir, one that exemplifies his theory not only of nature but a kind of moral philosophy for life. In his writing, he calls on us not only to stop being narcissistic and to notice the nature around us, but also to free ourselves from capitalistic, acquisitive behavior, from our obsession with possession. Instead, he suggests that we should live as part of natural systems, we should question capitalism and herd thinking to reconnect ourselves to our surroundings and develop our own ideas and thinking. The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom. |
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