How Does the Rust Belt Matter?

A Sneak Peek

Best of the Rust Belt publishes in a few weeks! The book showcases the most memorable and timely essays from the 20-some anthologies Belt has published over the past decade.

To select the pieces, we worked to balance showing off the sheer writing prowess of those living in the region with the strange pressure to “represent” a place that is often misunderstood, while also becoming the focus of the nation’s attention every presidential election cycle. We focused on fashioning a book people could read either as an introduction to a place they do not know well or as a distillation of great writing from a place they know intimately.

We accomplished both seemingly at-odds tasks. I am super proud, and to the many contributors: so, so grateful. You should stop reading now and go place pre-order, or ask your library to get copy, or request it from your fave indie (because preorders to really matter ;) As I always say: it’s not reading the book that’s important, it’s ordering ten copies ;) I’ll wait. Then come back here for a sneak peek—- the gorgeous introduction, written by Anna Clark, which chokes me up each time I read, excerpted below:

It is a terrible thing to be in pain and ignored-as a place, as an individual. It is perhaps worse to finally be recognized, but only as a symbol-to be given a mask and told that it's your face.

I grew up in a small town on the Lake Michigan shore. After college in Ann Arbor, I spent a few years living in Boston. There came a point where I felt like it was time to move closer to my home-ground, and to a city that seemed like the exact opposite of Boston, which is how I came to live in Detroit.

"Why?" so many people asked me. Family, friends, fellow writers and creative types: the move seemed to confuse everybody. This was 2007. I was fresh off a graduate program in fiction writing and living in a decidedly literary city. Detroit, meanwhile, faced a foreclosure crisis, a mayor under investigation, a staggering poverty rate, layoffs, buyouts, another season of excruciating losses for the Lions-just one hit after another. As usual. Detroit's story of suffering spanned generations, so familiar that it could be mistaken for normal.

. . . to use the city incorrectly is to correct some of the city's undeniable imbalances.

I can still hear that question-"Why?"-clanging with a hard edge that startled me. It sounded like: "How could you?"

"I have some friends there," I remember fumbling in my answer, while, weirdly, blushing. "And I just-want to?"

In years to come, my reasons would deepen. But regardless, it was plain that for many folks, choosing this haunted old city equated to giving up on my dreams. "You already escaped to the East Coast," remarked a friend in a mournful tone, as if returning to the Middle West amounted to tunneling back into prison. It's one thing to write about our lives here after we've gained a healthy distance, à la Ernest Hemingway penning stories of the north woods in 1920s Paris, with a mitten-y map of Michigan pinned to his wall. But it's quite another thing, it seemed, to stay. If I were serious about writing, I'd be elsewhere.

To hell with that. It's such a tired take-and, still, one with maddening consequences, as Missouri writer Sarah Kendzior describes in her essay in this collection. The media executive she encountered in the wake of the 2016 presidential election had trouble believing people here have the skills to share their own stories, or that this vast swath of land has more to offer than country yarns. (Though also: who doesn't love a country yarn?)

What are you supposed to do with attitudes like this? When you are aware not only of the condescension, but also how dangerous it is to ignore the lived experiences of millions and millions of people?

Challenging such willful delusion about our region is exhausting because it concedes the question. ("Why?") I'm mindful of writing this in an election year from a swing state that foils any fool who tries to sum it up, though, in a time of high-stakes politics, many fools try.

In 2016, Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election came with the help of states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania voting red for the first time since the 1980s. Four years later, Joe Biden bested Trump in all three. This year, I have no idea what will happen. But I see old habits creep back into both the political campaigns and the media coverage. Trump attacks electric cars as a threat to our legacy industry; Biden marches with union workers and calls for the retirement of the term "Rust Belt." Pundits speculate about whether the national election will turn on federal investments in modern manufacturing and infrastructure in "key" states, or if it'll be outmatched by immigration fears. Or maybe reproductive rights. Or gas prices. Prognosticators throw up their hands: how can we know what these people are thinking? Meanwhile, states less swing-y than my own-Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Kentucky-are virtually erased from the public conversation.

Please don't give up. … Please try again. … Perhaps if I had been more courageous, you might have had an example to look up to.

Due credit: There seems to be an emerging awareness that interviews with stray voters in Ohio diners are an insufficient mechanism for capturing the range of lived experiences here. But still, the Rust Belt is too often framed as a problem to be solved. Swinging the spotlight over to the region for fifteen minutes every time a national election rolls around then leaving it in darkness doesn't just shortchange the people who live here; it stifles the wisdom and ingenuity that we have to offer those who live elsewhere. Making it harder to change this dynamic is the gutting of our local newsrooms, and the precariousness of jobs even at the titans of national journalism.
This is the stuff that literally keeps me up at night.

I know this: Centering more complex, more diverse stories-which is to say, truer stories-will get us to a better place. That goes for media coverage writ large as well as our individual habits of taking in news. It is more interesting, and more fun, even, to turn our attention to those who take the fullness of our voices as a given, and, accordingly, are building an infrastructure to amplify our most compelling stories.
In this, Belt Publishing is a pioneer. On the heels of a national recession, the press set up shop not far from Lake Erie and published anthologies about Cleveland, Detroit, and Cincinnati, each one brimming with stories and images of uncommon candor. This is how I came into the Belt family: editing the Detroit anthology. I still think of making that book as an act of listening. It takes me back to my early years in the city, and the miles and miles of watchful wandering. I reported freelance articles as an excuse to reach out to all kinds of people. It was a way to ask my new neighbors the ancient questions: "Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?" Here, I found a new kind of honesty in the city, and in myself. By bringing me closer to what's worth writing about, Detroit made a writer out of me.

Other writers have their own stories about how their particular places unlocked something in them. Belt makes room for them: the voices that are too often overlooked, too easily simplified, too casually diminished, precisely because they are rooted in the stirring old cities, the river towns, the curious suburbs, and the rural fringe of the Rust Belt. None of this comes out of a glib sort of regional boosterism, either. Rather, it's a scaffolding for storytelling that mines complexity and vulnerability, which are at the heart of any truth.

Anthologies are still Belt's signature. It is aptly democratic. The form suits the purpose of interrogating our lives as they are lived alongside others. The Greek root of the word "anthology" is, appropriately, "a collection of flowers." A bouquet, each bloom making its neighboring blooms more beautiful.

In this one, you'll find stories, collected from Belt's various books and anthologies, that touch on the ghosts of Printer's Row, public housing towers, rural flea markets, the Ohio novels of Toni Morrison-there are a lot of ghosts, actually. There are also stories of reckoning with violence, trauma, displacement, addiction, grief, complicity. Changing landscapes, and cityscapes. Explorations of anger. A disco poet.
Megan Stielstra distills the feeling of saying out loud for the first time, to a diner waitress named Flo in 1990s Chicago, that yes, you are a writer. There's a portrait of Detroit's storied gay bar, the Woodward, as only Aaron Foley can tell it. Phil Christman reckons with what it means to be Midwestern, that nebulous region that overlaps with the Rust Belt, but isn't quite the same. Brian Broome's bus ride through Pittsburgh rivals a ferry trip across the River Styx. There are histories of Wisconsin workers who fought for their rights, excavated by Ken Germanson. Intimate, interior portraits by renowned photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier. Childhood summers. Highways. Prayers. An Amish man's open letter to a kindred spirit coming up against the risk of rejection from the community for being who he really is-a risk the writer knows all too well.

There's regret. Beginnings. And far-reaching visions for our futures, plural.
To borrow a phrase from the writer and anthologist Alberto Manguel, Best of the Rust Belt gives us the gift of second sight, a chance to not only reread our favorites, or discover what we missed, but to see the flowers in a new arrangement, their shapes and colors changed.

This is the kind of book you want to recommend simply by quoting it. I indulged that impulse in this introduction, repeatedly, shamelessly out of context. But you should just read these stories yourself. Consider how they stand in conversation with one another. Notice where you find the electric shock of recognition: the feeling of seeing and being seen, sometimes when you least expect it. In all the prickly and precious ways, this book feels like home.

-Detroit, winter 2024