Q. When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

A. I’ve been making up stories as long as I can remember, daydreaming myself into basically every TV show I ever watched. I have a huge catalog of Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 fan fiction that no one is allowed to see, ever. The first storyline I remember being really obsessed with was this 1970s Japanese cartoon called Battle of the Planets (or Gatchaman in Japan). I was really little, maybe five. It was very emotionally heavy, with a lot of the traditional samurai themes. I can’t imagine parents today letting kids that young watch something like that, and to be honest I think that’s to our detriment.

My favorite thing to play with was my mom’s electric typewriter. I had this wonderful olfactory memory the other day of the way it smelled while the motor was running – hot metal and ink. I learned to type when I was about four. I don’t think I could write letters at that time, but I could type.

I’ve really had no formal training as a writer, save for one class in Fiction Writing with the late and wonderful Sheila Schwartz at Cleveland State, about thirteen years ago. She said I had a good ear for young, alienated people, and I’ve carried that around with me ever since.

Q. What inspires you? Where do you get your ideas?

A. Here’s a quote from a very famous Midwestern author that I love:

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful.” -Ray Bradbury

I’d also add that if you want to be a writer you should find day jobs that expose you to lots of different ideas. For example: museums, libraries, bookstores. I had a job in reference publishing that involved me reading encyclopedias in every subject, 8 hours a day, 4 days a week. Well after a while you start making these connections between, say, the life of Charlotte Bronte and the ghosts of evolution and medieval Serbia that you never would have made before. I have enough material left over from that job to last me until I die, if I never have another idea again. It’s actually a little overwhelming.

It’s just as important to me – perhaps more important – to immerse myself in film and music as it is in literature. I’ve learned just as much, if not more, about how to set up a story arc from watching Mad Men as I have from reading books, and how to set a scene and build characters from listening to Bruce Springsteen, how to create a mood and metaphor by listening to punk rock. Grant Hart, the greatly underappreciated Midwestern songwriter, has this wonderful piece called “You’re the Reflection of the Moon on the Water” which works brilliantly as a backhanded insult or a backhanded compliment. I want my own work to have that quality.

I also think it’s important to get out of your element. As a writer of fiction you need to empathize with people who are not like you, so that you can get your reader to understand people who are not like them, and maybe not be so quick to judge. I think this is especially important in times of economic hardship.

Q. Tell us about what you’re working on right now.

A. The novel I am working on now is (for now) called Coming Home to Die: How Robbie Brennan Gave Up His Dreams and Slunk Back to the Rust Belt, which is set in a fictitious Rust Belt city that’s of course loosely based on Cleveland. It’s full of people who feel stuck and trapped by circumstance, by ambitious dreams that they never really developed the skills to manifest. There’s a common Hollywood narrative where the native goes off, becomes glamourous and successful, and then comes back to their hometown to realize the importance of community, family, “home is where the heart is,” that their successful life is really shallow and all that greeting card schmaltz. I don’t subscribe to that idea of a romanticized Heartland: a friend of my mother-in-law once described a certain Cleveland suburb to me as “the only place in America where you still find lawn jockeys.” We want to hear a lot of “good news” about people moving back to Cleveland or the Rust Belt but sometimes it isn’t all good news. My protagonist feels very ambivalent, and isn’t sure whether his hometown has changed or he has. It’s a book I’d very much like to get out of my system so that I can move on to more important things, such as a cozy mystery series featuring a wiener dog detective. I realize I’m doing my literary career backwards, but there you go.

Q. What do you like best about Cleveland?

A. I like that it’s a weird place that no one’s writing stories about. It feels a little undiscovered in that regard. I like Loganberry Books, where I work. I like that I can go to the Literature Department at Cleveland Public Library and get any book I want, or just sit there and work in absolute quiet with no one bothering me. I used to be a librarian, and it’s not PC to say this, but I absolutely hate it when libraries become raucous community centers where you can’t go when you need quiet.

If you want to write American stories, you have to stuff yourself full of American history. If you want to write Cleveland stories, you also have to stuff yourself full of local history. It’s something that isn’t taught well, and what we end up with are people who are full of not the history of Cleveland, but this mythology of Cleveland, handed down by word of mouth, spoken about in hushed tones. With the city of Cleveland proper usually being this HERE THERE BE DRAGONS kind of hole on the map. As a writer, this disconnect is interesting to me.

Q. What can Cleveland do to enhance its artistic community?

A. If Cleveland wants to attract artists, we need more than just cheap rent and a positive attitude. We need decent day jobs. We all like to think that if we do what we love, the money will follow, but the truth is that probably some money will follow and for all other life expenses we need a backup plan. I think the lack of day jobs is a real weakness here. Sometimes I daydream about the entire publishing industry moving from New York to here.

I also think the best thing you can do as a local artist is not to be a local artist. By all means, explore regional themes in your work, but make sure your work is making it outside the region. I think that’s the biggest thing we lack in the Rust Belt: an incoming/outgoing flow of ideas. I think the best way to attract artists is to make Cleveland or Detroit or Youngstown or wherever look interesting to artists. Show yourself to be an interesting person, and people will want to be around you.

When I read them I transport myself back in time to where I can see them in the cafeteria, or out on the football field, back during those long-ago days when Bill Clinton was president and everyone was wearing flannel and warn them they only had five or twelve or eighteen years left to live. That they would leave grieving parents who’d have to go on for decades, or small children. It doesn’t matter if we were friends, or if we knew each other very well. I was a watcher from the shadows back then, a lurker in corners. No one knew who I was but I knew who they were.

From where I sit at work I can see a rack of greeting cards – there’s one that says “What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?” To be honest, a lot of things. What I think it should say instead is “What would you attempt to do if you knew you would die at age 36?” but no one would want to open an envelope they got in the mail and see that.

I hate it when people, especially women, turn thirty and act like that’s old. It’s not. But it’s not 20. When I read the obituaries of people I went to high school with I realize I am 34 and I don’t have my whole life ahead of me anymore. I have spent sixteen years on my own and I haven’t done quite what I always thought I would do with that time. I used to have a 2-page list of regrets hanging on my fridge. My husband took it down when his brother came to visit because he thought it was embarrassing. The last time I heard about someone I went to high school with dying, I looked at my list of regrets and realized that while I still have regrets and will undoubtedly continue to accrue them, I don’t have the luxury of time to give them such careful consideration anymore.

There were these two elderly people flirting on the train today:

“How many babies you have?” he asked.

“Two.”

“Nothin like when a handsome man looks into the eyes of a beautiful woman like yourself and then the magic happens that brings life from life.”

“Mmm mmm. It ain’t like that anymore. Not with young people today.”

(Actually, I’m sure it is pretty much the same, except we get to watch TV while we’re doing it.)

For my book club we’re reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, in which elderly historian Lyman Ward, becoming wheelchair-bound, finds time to reflect on the personal papers of his ancestors. His son Rodman has no patience for this: he’s a product of the 1960s and has no use for the past, only the now, only the future. This really grinds Lyman Ward’s gears:

My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

I’ve been reading obituaries since I was 16 and I am totally sure we can’t afford all these abandonings.

A few years ago I went through this vintage lingerie phase, probably because I was unemployed, sans car, and lived within walking distance of three stores that sold vintage lingerie. I was interested in old bras and slips as a sort of memento mori, the begetting part of whatever is begotten, born and dies. I’m an archivist, and I feel most at home among old things. Or at least things that remind me that I’m not the first or only person to ever go through the less pleasant tollbooths of life’s highway: I can see how the crush of history might make someone feel insignificant, but knowing that people felt heartbreak in Byzantium is an enormous relief to me.

Archival work, for those who are unfamiliar, involves sorting boxes of miscellaneous papers, photographs, and other unpublished material that may not have seen the light of day for decades or centuries, and even then may only have been seen by a handful of people. It’s like being privy to thousands of extremely boring secrets. And an occasional couple of really juicy ones that you get to stamp with a red stamp that says RESTRICTED.

When I worked at the Western Reserve Historical Society I processed the collection of a large, longstanding architectural firm. The collection was by no means a comprehensive corporate history, with the bulk of the collection dating between 1940 and 1975. During this period they mainly built warehouses, small factories, and office headquarters around the Midwest.  The collection, therefore, comprised approximately 200 unsorted boxes of memos and photographs of office interiors, warehouses and factories in various states of construction.

Though (if I’m not mistaken) this particular collection is closed to researchers, you can probably see pictures of these same warehouses and factories on the internet, taken in less prosperous times by bored kids with iPhone cameras. The office headquarters, some of them, the ones I’ve Google mapped, have been reused as social service agencies or old folks homes, usually for the indigent kind of old folks. They are in neighborhoods that “aren’t nice” anymore. The rows of identical desks equipped with identical ashtrays are long gone, as is the oak-paneled executive office. I have no idea what has become of his moose head or his liquor cabinet.

When people ask me where I get my ideas, sometimes I say that if I can find inspiration in 200 boxes of pictures of warehouses and office interiors, I can find inspiration anywhere. (I use this in job interviews too, to answer the question “Tell us about a time when you were assigned a particularly tedious project. How did you manage your time?”) I don’t think you can look at pictures of manmade environments and not imagine the people in them or wonder where they went.

Everyone has been telling me for  years to watch Mad Men, but I haven’t, mostly because I still haven’t seen the last episode of The Sopranos. (I know everyone was pissed about the way it ended, though it can’t have been worse than the way Roseanne ended).  So anyway the thing that made me start watching Mad Men was that I am wrangling a novel manuscript right now, and I thought how better to study character development than to watch the first four or five episodes of hit TV dramas that everyone has seen but me.

Mad Men has been unsettling for me to watch because of how accurately I’d daydreamed the people into those photographs, to see Joan and Peggy made flesh instead of relegated to a “pjo” or a “jlh” after a “DD/” or an “RS/” at the end of a memo.  When I watch Mad Men I don’t just see Madison Avenue glamour, I see what will become of the trappings of Don Draper’s life: the crisp new memos when they are brittle, yellow and stained. The expensive new leather binder that you, fifty years later, have to isolate because of red rot. The stink of vinegar that pervades boxes of negatives. I see all those account executives as old men dying of emphysema and liver disease, and when I see Betty and Midge and Joan I can only smell that particular must that fifty-year-old acetate slips and nighties give off. All of the accessories of daily life, the things that will spend years in a box in a damp basement or a poorly-ventilated storage room after the company goes out of business.

It’s like watching ghosts, or watching your dreams come alive and act according to scripts provided by someone else.

“Well, I’m a crazy person,” I tell her. “And trying to do this for the last five years has made me crazier.”

She orders a second glass of riesling. “Why don’t you just get a Smart Car?”

This is the moment in the script that I always dread. The moment where I have to explain that my foolhardy commitment to public transit in the Rust Belt has nothing to do with the environment, and has everything to do with my deep-seated resentment that we’ve arranged modern American life in such a way that all but forces you to own something you probably can’t afford.

It might be doubly uncomfortable to explain to this to Ruth, who grew up in nearly identical middle class circumstances as me. Our respective sets of parents were both tight-fisted with cash, and we grew up in a size of house that kids don’t seem to grow up in anymore: the size where  you have to move out at eighteen because if you don’t, you and your parents are going to drive each other to homicide. We took the same classes, got similar degrees. But Ruth became a young professional and I became…I didn’t become anything. I stayed the same person I was at 19, eating canned beans and granola bars and obsessing about loose change I found in the street. Middle class in income, yes, but without the trappings.

Five years later, the plausibility of living in Cleveland without a car turns out to have been the biggest thing I was kidding myself about when I decided to move back here from New York. It’s possible, yes. What isn’t possible, however, when you depend on public transit in a shrinking city, is something that is easy to do in New York: you can’t turn a blind eye to human suffering.

Cleveland is a city built for a million but which is now home to about a third of that. A third of the people left in the city proper live in poverty. It has a public transit system that was used by the middle class at one time but is now largely used only by the poor, except when the Indians or Browns or Cavs are playing. I now live sans car in the neighborhood where I lived fifteen years ago as a college student, sans car. Fifteen years ago the bus ran every eight to twelve minutes. Now it runs once an hour and not at all on the weekends. It’s hard to depend on a bus that only runs once an hour. One time, the bus broke down near the beginning of the route, and I waited an hour and half for the next one. It was 20 degrees. I was suitably dressed, but teenage girls who live in Section 8 housing aren’t always, and picking up a ride from a stranger can seem like an attractive option. That’s a problem in a city where 11 women can disappear into one man’s house and never be heard from again.

I am in the middle class, and I do not have a single friend who does not own a car. I don’t go to Young Professionals networking events because getting around at night is difficult and oftentimes dicey. I don’t hang out with my friends much at all, because it’s inconvenient for me to get to where they are, and I feel like a burden asking them to pick me up and drop me off. I haven’t been to most of the trendy places the blogs and glossy magazines talk about, because I can’t get there. I go to the Bi-Rite that is three blocks from my house, where the green peppers are packaged on styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic, and not Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods like everyone else who shares my skin color and educational background.

It occurred to me once as I was riding to work on a Saturday morning, on a nearly empty bus through a neighborhood that always makes me think of the Tom Waits song “God’s Away On Business,” that the whole reason I was having such a struggle with living in Cleveland this time around, why everyone was suddenly accusing me of being so negative, was that I was expecting to have a normal and typical city experience in a place that wasn’t a normal and typical city anymore. It occurred to me that the Cleveland seen by people who I was supposed to have turned out like was not the Cleveland I was seeing at all: I had watched Peter Weir’s film The Last Wave on television the night before, a film in which a white lawyer (played by Richard Chamberlain) takes on a case where four Aborigines are wrongly accused of murder. He forms a strange bond with one of the defendants, a bond which allows him access to the Dreamtime, the eternal, parallel world where you lived before you were born and where you go after you die. As I watched a drug deal happen on a street corner under sunny blue skies, not far from where my grandfather’s mother once lived, I wondered if I lived in a parallel Cleveland from the ones my should-have-been cohorts did.

(At the end of the film, Richard Chamberlain dies in a watery apocalypse.)

All it would take, really, for me to be #happyinCLE would be to just forget about this bus nonsense and do what a good samaritan suggested to me from their passing vehicle as I walked down Van Aken Boulevard: get a car. Presto change-o, Cleveland would become easy to love. I could forget all about the young woman with the stroller who has to wait on a dark, empty corner for a bus that comes every 45 minutes, in the kind of neighborhood where the roadside memorials don’t memorialize victims of traffic accidents or accidents of any kind, except maybe birth. I could forget about the dad in transit worker coveralls who’s falling asleep with his daughter on his lap. I would never have to think about what it must be like to be a young black transexual surrounded by a crowd of people who in one breath are threatening to beat the fucking shit out of you, faggot, and in the next breath are talking about God.

I am afraid that if I had a car, I would do that: I would never see these people, so I would forget about them. It would be easy to. And I can’t.

Instead, here’s a plea to car-having readers who do not wish to live as I do: understand that your car is a luxury. Understand that when you get in your car to run a ten-minute errand, the same errand might take someone without a car two hours on the bus. When you turn your key in the ignition, please feel the same sense of wonder and good fortune that I feel every time I take my dirty clothes down to the basement instead of hauling them to the laundromat: what a lucky person I am to not only live in a world where someone was smart enough to invent this thing that makes my life easier, but that I, by some additional happenstance of good fortune, can have one.

I can’t remember if I tell any of this to Ruth at the bar. It sounds like the kind of thing I’m likely to say while drunk, so I probably do. When she goes to the bathroom I steal her iPhone out of her purse and page through the dozens of people we grew up with who she is friends with on Facebook and I am not. At the end of the evening she offers to drive me home but the whole reason I asked her to this particular locale was because the train station is twenty feet away, so I take my leave. When I switch trains downtown I realize I am drunker than I’d thought. A Cavs game has just let out and the train, which is only two cars long, is jammed with middle class white people who don’t realize they’re not supposed to clog the doors, and who don’t realize there’s such a thing as a public transit voice. Is this the real Cleveland, then, or the Dreamtime Cleveland? If I close my eyes and fall asleep, I’ll end up at the end of the line, which is the airport, where I can buy a one-way ticket back to New York, a city that never compels me to ask myself such questions.

But I don’t fall asleep and I don’t buy that ticket. I never do.

The topic was whether or not there’s too much boosterism in writing about Cleveland, so perhaps unsurprisingly, the discussion felt less like this:

and more like this:

which makes me wish I’d come prepared to be more confrontational: if there’s one thing I’ve learned from pro-wrestling it’s that people like fights, and maybe it would’ve raked in a little more $$ for Ohio City Writers if I’d pulled someone’s hair or bestowed upon them a particularly obscene epithet.

(Frank, if you’re reading this, that means next time buy me a couple more drinks beforehand.)

As I said during the event, I’m less concerned with portraying Cleveland (and the Rust Belt) as a good place or a bad place, and just simply as a place that’s real and full of people whose lives may or may not be working. I am more interested in exploring the region’s relevance (or irrelevance) in a broader national (and international) context.

To be honest, I’m not even that concerned about Cleveland getting portrayed as a place where ambitions go to die (as it was on 30 Rock) or as a place where it’s cool to be a big fish in a small pond (Hot in Cleveland). (At least not in a fictional context.) My friend Kate Norris and I don’t agree on this point. If you would like to watch us cage fight about it, there will be a $5 cover charge.

And as far as unflattering stories on 60 Minutes, I fall more into the “any attention is good attention” camp because you don’t know who’s watching. A wealthy businessman who grew up in Slavic Village, perhaps, and who’s riddled with a fear that he’ll go to his grave with too much money on his hands, much like the fear that drove Andrew Carnegie.

(Sitcom idea: wealthy businessman who’s riddled with guilt about dying with too much money on his hands opens novelty candle factory in blighted Rust Belt neighborhood, employs sassy black woman as floor manager. Hilarity ensues.)

This is the best book on small town life in America.

After the panel, someone asked me if I really thought we had a unique enough regional culture to support our own literary voice. My beady little eyes glittered. Of course we do! So over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a series about what you need to do if you want to write Rust Belt fiction. In addition, we’re (at long last) starting a Cleveland Review blog, where you can expect to see even more content devoted to this subject. Stay tuned!

1. I was extremely fortunate to be the recipient of a Creative Workforce Fellowship offered by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the third largest public arts funding agency in the country (after New York state and Minnesota). Along with 19 other talented individuals, I have been awarded a tidy sum of $20,000 to finish my novel, Coming Home to Die: How Robbie Brennan Gave Up His Dreams and Slunk Back to the Rust Belt, which I workshopped with Karen Shepard at the Tin House Summer Writers Conference last summer. I am humbled and honored at the vote of confidence in my work, which has been on hold for nearly two years as I attempted the unenviable feat of working 60 hours a week at two jobs.

As a former public employee, I take the use of such funds very seriously and as such I intend to document my activities on a regular basis. Here. On the internet!

2. I gave my blog a name. Yes, it’s a line from a Camper Van Beethoven song:

and it used to be my nickname, back when I drove this rusted out 1992 Corolla that fell apart under my feet while I was negotiating my way through a traffic circle on the Jersey Shore. I dumped it at the mechanic and when he called me the next morning he was like, what happened to this car? Has it been underwater at some point? And I sighed and said, no, it was just Cleveland that happened to it. Anyway. Camper Van Beethoven. If it makes me a poseur, I’m sorry.

3. I fucked up the CSS when I installed this new-to-me WordPress template, so if this site looks like it’s been awkwardly pawed at by someone whose web design skills are ten years out of date, it has. It’s on my agenda. I’ll fix it! Just after I singlehandedly fix everything about Cleveland.

4. I’m really excited at the possibility of using my fellowship year to nurture and develop the Cleveland Review, to which we’ve had an overwhelming response from Buffalo to Detroit to St. Louis and beyond*. I came back to Cleveland in 2007 with foolheaded ideas and good intentions, and I’ve wandered through the dark junkyards of doubt and regret, coming to the conclusion that if I want to stay here, I just am not going to have the kind of life or job I could have in another city. It’s different here, and if I have to cobble together bits and pieces of part time jobs with my own pursuits, then that’s what has to happen. For this realization I am immensely grateful to my boss, Harriett Logan, proprietor of Loganberry Books. Harriett took a chance on hiring me after I’d been laid off for nine months, despite probable misgivings that I’d bolt the second a full-time job opened up. Her support has made a world of difference to me.

*Well, just Canada.

Being called a hater gives me airplane ears.

Airplane ears are what a cat does when it gets angry. They look like this:

Whenever I see women with small children on the bus I worry. I worry about those kids’ futures. I worry when I see boys who can be no more than twelve getting on the bus with their 4 year old little sister in front of the projects. I worry when they do not look well taken care of and I worry when they are clean and dressed well because they have more to lose. I worry about their mothers because these women can go missing for years without anyone bothering to find them. I’m not sure trendy restaurants and boutiques ever fix these things.

And so on.

Does it make you less of a Clevelander to know which exits off I-77 are closed, but not where the #11 or #15 goes? I don’t know. It makes you see less of the whole picture, makes you less aware of the reality of most actual Clevelanders’ lives, the ones who live in poverty and don’t graduate from high school. You know, those people. The people who are ruining Cleveland. When I lived on West 25th I saw a white guy in Dockers and a polo shirt get out of his car to yell at a black female panhandler: “You’re the reason why Cleveland is ruined!”

I am guessing he wouldn’t have shouted that at his grandmother, who probably moved out of Buckeye or Slavic Village when those people started moving in.

Weekend recap: I had a lovely evening last night at Blossom, listening to Russian composers courtesy of the gracious owners of Loganberry Books. My favorite part was when this hipster couple sat down in front of us and started getting all lovey-dovey and then this sort of crazy woman wandered over and asked them if she could have some of their wine.

Jim made me pancakes for breakfast this morning. According to the label, Log Cabin syrup contains NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP but it does contain “corn syrup” and “liquid sugar” so I guess I should feel virtuous!

Speaking of virtuous, I’m slowly but surely plowing through Elmer Gantry for my book club. I’m not getting as much out of Elmer Gantry as some other of Sinclair Lewis’s works, except irritation that the same shenanigans that went on a hundred years ago are still going on. (I felt this a lot while working on the Howard Metzenbaum project — I kept finding news clippings from before I was born that said things like “Poll: 70% of Americans favor universal healthcare.”)

Except of course now Elmer Gantry and Sharon Falconer would have the internet and television to help them be frauds. Maybe I should just be a mega-evangelist. I mean, I’d be a fraud too, but at least my money would go to worthy causes like homeless gay teenagers, kitten rescues, and RTA.

Anyway, here’s some Throwing Muses for you.

Lots of fantastic people helped me do this!

According to my calendar, it’s August and that means I’m in the home stretch. I have five months left of working six and a half days a week, and then woohoo! it’s 2012, The Year of Fucking Around. And by The Year of Fucking Around, I mean the year of being underemployed but working sunup till well after sundown on projects I don’t get paid for (yet).

Like this one.

I’ve also decided to go back to school, which has been a very hard decision given that I’ve already been back to school once. But the opportunities promised for my profession just never panned out, and I need to do something that I like better anyway.

In other news, I just came back from a three-week trip to Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and back again. I took the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago because it’s been 10 years since I drove back from Montana, and I feel like you have to take an overland trip across America at least once every ten years. Well, I felt like that at first, but after two days’ worth of Amtrak toilets you sort of lose the romantical notions you had when you bought the ticket. Although I may have set the record for how many times someone has listened to Zen Arcade straight, at least in the lady category.

Things I did on my trip include: the Tin House Summer Workshop, where I enjoyed the wit and wisdom of Steve Almond, Pauls Toutonghi, and Karen Shepard, among others; the Seattle Mystery Bookshop; the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine; and the ever-interesting Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. I came back to Cleveland feeling much better. Or maybe I just feel better because I finally got an iPod and can just block out most of the world, like everyone else has been doing for the last ten years.

Well, let’s see. I still have 14 jobs. Jim and I went to Minneapolis in April, after a long time daydreaming about being friends with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer and Grant Hart — or at least being friends with people who have those same daydreams.  We went to see Joan Didion at the University of Minnesota but her talk was canceled due to illness.

Still, it was nice to be in Minneapolis because there was development along the train line, people talking about books in the street, people in the street, and a definite music culture. I also liked it that you could ask any random person on the street about which bus you should take and they did not recoil in horror and say, “the BUS?!?! But that is dangerous.”

I was accepted into the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, which I’ll be attending in July. After that I’m going up to Seattle to see a friend, and I’m thinking about coming back home via the Empire Builder. It’s been ten years now since I’ve gone overland across the country, and I feel like you need to do that at least once every ten years.

I’m planning the annual Author Alley at the Larchmere Festival, so if you’re a published author residing in Northeast Ohio and you want to come sell some books, check it out. I’m also still running my classics book club: June 23 at 7 pm we’re discussing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and July 28 at 7 pm we’re discussing My Antonia.

Our cat died. She was 15 years old, and she’d been with me for my entire adult life. I acquired her during my ill-fated year at Oberlin — there was a spot behind the conservatory where feral cats went to have their kittens. She actually traveled overland with me twice. She was never a sweet-tempered cat, but we loved her.

This weekend we went to Pittsburgh on the Megabus. I’m not going to get too attached to this route because there were less than 10 people riding each way. (The bus driver said the Columbus-Pittsburgh route is always full.) I liked Pittsburgh — it actually feels really far away, like it doesn’t quite belong to any definite region of the country. It feels like Shangri-La.

Otherwise, I’m still at the same-old, same-old, peering through the blinds and hoping to get by unscathed.