Cunningham: This program is part of
WQED's Pittsburgh History Series.
(Music)
Sebak: There are people writing books all around the Pittsburgh area.
Lori: I have friends that came from New York to visit one time,
and they're like, "We love it here. It's gritty."
Sebak: They capture stories and histories, facts and fantasies,
in poetry and prose.
And then I realized, like, the trick of poetry is --
How do you make each word count?
Sebak: So we thought we would pay tribute and go to meet
just a few poets and writers...
Some people say there's a kind of black comedy in my stories.
I agree with that. Yes.
Sebak: ...mostly folks who deal with fiction
who've spent some time in Western Pennsylvania.
Newman: You throw a beer bottle in Pittsburgh,
you'll hit a writer at this point.
Sebak: We're calling this program
"People Who've Written Books Around Here."
O'Nan: I wanted to write about Western PA in my first novel,
"Snow Angels." It's set in Butler, PA,
which I find an amazing and crazy place.
Sebak: And we apologize if we don't get
to your favorite wordsmith.
We're lucky there are so many to choose from.
It just feels like I'm writing about home
when I write about this area,
and so I like doing it.
Cunningham: This program in the NEBBY series
is made possible in part by The Buhl Foundation --
serving Southwestern Pennsylvania since 1927...
by Louis Anthony Jewelers --
proud supporter of Pittsburgh and its treasures...
by Huntington Bank -- serving communities since 1866...
by Levin Furniture -- furnishing Pittsburgh homes since 1920...
also by the Engineers Society of Western Pennsylvania...
by Henny Henninger...
by the Lincoln Pharmacy in Millvale...
by Mancini's Bread...
by Pamela's P&G Diners...
and by all 1,411 backers of our NEBBY Kickstarter...
Thanks to everybody!
Sebak: Let's start in Edgewood
where Stewart O'Nan writes at his house,
in his third-floor office full of his collections.
He was born here in Pittsburgh.
O'Nan: Grew up over on Linden Avenue,
across from the school.
One of my claim-to-fames is I used to deliver
the "Post-Gazette,"
and I delivered the "Post-Gazette" to the Dillards,
the McCulloughs, and the Philbricks,
Nathaniel Philbrick, there.
Yeah. So something in the water there in Point Breeze.
Sebak: Since then, he has studied and lived in many other cities.
O'Nan: Well, I'm one of those boomerangers.
I was away for about 30 years, left in '79,
last year the Pirates won the World Series,
and came back in 2009 when the Penguins won the Stanley Cup.
Sebak: He has written a lot of books,
nonfiction as well as fiction,
and he's still at it.
Usually I'll try to write here at the desk,
five days a week, 9:00 through 5:00.
I don't have another job.
You know, I don't have health insurance.
So I got to produce. I got to knock pages out.
Try to get one page a day, double spaced, 300 words,
could be good, could be terrible, just get it.
Get it down.
Once you get it down, then you can move it around.
It can be as bad as it's gonna be.
You're gonna write badly, like I said, every day.
And give yourself sort of the license to make it better
and better and better as it goes on.
Started to write in my early to mid-20s, about 23, 24 years old.
I mean, I'd never had any inclination to write before.
I mean, my father was an engineer,
his father was an engineer, I was an engineer.
I trained as an engineer, I was working as an engineer,
but every day I'd come back from work
and I'd write in my basement.
I'd write short stories, and I'm not exactly sure why.
I didn't have friends who were writers, or even big readers,
but I'd always been a big reader, and I grew up reading.
My mother took me to the bookmobile
when it parked on Wilkins
right by the curve near the field at Linden,
and from there I ended up going to the Main Branch
of the library down in Oakland.
Sebak: What has O'Nan been working on recently?
O'Nan: Well, I just finished a companion piece to
"Emily, Alone," which is set in Highland Park.
It's set in fact in my grandparents' house,
which is for sale right now.
And my father after church said he noticed
that there was an open house at the house he grew up in,
so he went and toured the house he grew up in.
Over on Grafton Street.
I'm very tempted to do it,
but, I mean, it's so solid in my mind now.
I've been writing about Emily and Henry now for 20 years.
So, this book is about Henry's life.
This is "Henry, Himself."
And it talks about his life from the very beginning.
The first line is,
"His mother named him Henry after her older brother,
a chaplain killed in the Great War,
as if he might take his place."
And so that sets up the expectations for Henry's life
as a man, as an American man in the 20th century.
But it's also about Pittsburgh and how Pittsburgh has changed.
Henry is born in 1923,
so we get to sort of look back at how Pittsburgh has changed,
and his father was an engineer
who helped wire a lot of the skyscrapers downtown,
including the Gulf Building.
And so there's all this lore about how the city was built,
and how it's changed.
Sebak: So you look forward to this new "Henry, Himself"
book with a Pittsburgh setting.
And you wonder, "What will Stewart O'Nan do next?"
O'Nan: One thing, I've never been sort of put into a pigeonhole
where I have to write a certain kind of book,
which -- I've been very, very lucky that way.
I'm allowed to do my goofy weirdo thing,
whatever it happens to be.
I'm just gonna do it myself,
and I think coming from Pittsburgh
and growing up at the time
I did helps with that, the DIY ethic, right?
George Romero says, "We can do it right here." Right?
You don't need New York to tell you that it's okay
or L.A. to tell you that it's okay.
You know, or the ghost of Melville or Camus
to tell you that it's okay.
Just do it.
You know, do it as best as you can.
It doesn't have to be perfect and, you know,
keyed in or toned up or calibrated to the nth degree.
John Wideman, great Pittsburgh writer, says a book is a gift.
Now no one tells the writer that they have to write it.
No one tells the reader that they have to read it.
And yet somehow we make that leap
and come together on that page and it means something.
It means something important to us.
And for fiction, that's kind of magical, right?
'Cause you don't know who your audience is.
You're just sort of putting it out there
and hoping that someone will find it.
And it will mean something to them and might move them.
And I, you know, having been moved many times as a reader,
especially when I was young, I mean that's --
that's it, right? That's what I want.
I want a book that moves me, moves me deeply.
Sebak: Our own search for deeply moving books
led us to the Falk Laboratory School
in Oakland, where we met Cameron Barnett.
He's a new Pittsburgh poet.
Barnett: I've been a Pittsburgher since I was six.
I always say that I'm California-born
but Pittsburgh-bred.
Sebak: He now teaches middle-school language arts
and social studies here.
And when I'm doing, like, writing of my own,
if I have a quiet moment in my room, I'll work there.
Sebak: When he's not at school, he lives in Garfield
just off Penn Avenue.
Barnett: I write often times here in my apartment.
I'll write in bed when a thought comes to me,
you know, last moment.
I often go down the street to the Commonplace
and, you know, grab a coffee and give myself a prompt and say,
"You have one hour to come up with something."
Give myself a bit of a challenge
and whatever I come up with in that hour,
you know, that's the poem or at least the beginning of a poem.
Sebak: In 2017, Barnett's first book of poems titled
"The Drowning Boy's Guide To Water"
was published by Pittsburgh's own
Autumn House Press.
The book was soon nominated for a prestigious
NAACP Image Award for Poetry.
"The Drowning Boy's Guide To Water"...
"Remember the strength of chlorine,
the indoor pool, swim class clinging to the kickboard
then jumping from the ledge
into the arms of the smiling white lady,
only mostly sure she would catch you.
Mom calling, 'Cameron!
Cameron!'
to get you to look, then said, 'Kick, kick!'
Remember, there's nothing a mother won't do
for one still shot of your head above the water.
It's important to always practice good form --
kick your legs."
The spirit of the book really comes from late high school
and early college when I was thinking about the experience
of growing up as a young black male in spaces
that I didn't always see a lot of faces like mine in.
And as I kept going, the theme of water
became more and more apparent.
My writing advisors Terrance Hayes
and Yona Harvey, Lynn Emanuel, they were pointing out like,
"Water's coming up all the time in your poems.
What's up with this?"
And I was like, "I didn't really realize that,
but now that you've pointed it out,
I'm going to run with it."
When I was in grad school, Yona Harvey sat me down,
and we had a conversation with a group of writers,
but I was sort of in a shy place with my writing to begin with,
and I kind of admitted
that I didn't really know how to write about race
because I didn't have a "typical black experience"
growing up, whatever that means.
And so I felt I didn't have the license
to really write about black issues or black things.
And she looked at me, and she told me, "Well, you are black.
All of your experiences and stories
are black experiences and stories,
like, they don't have fit any sort of mold or anything.
You can just do it."
And as simple as it sounds,
it was like this really great switch,
this light bulb that went off in me.
"Iron Angel"...
"Freedom Corner.
My knees kiss concrete.
Dirt is the first sign of forgetting.
The leaves that accompany it -- deciduous flair,
red crinkles and orange flakes,
a finely ground autumn snow
blown into cracks in the wall
beneath the iron body.
Every inch of the ground feels like braille.
I find my grandfather's name embossed in the granite,
Centre and Crawford.
This is the biggest circle in the city
that has been forgotten..."
You know, this is a family history
that I wasn't fully aware of
or really thinking about too much when I was younger.
But one thing I've told students before, too,
is that one of the reasons I like to write stories
and poems about myself
is that I am the master of that.
And there's a strength in being able to own your own story,
but no one else gets to own that for you.
You get to own that for you, and that's a special power.
Sebak: That special power of telling your own story led us
next to the borough of Trafford, PA,
to this house where two writers live --
Dave Newman, who grew up in Irwin,
and Lori Jakiela, who grew up in this house.
They both write poetry and prose.
They're married with two kids.
Lori teaches at Pitt Greensburg and Dave does medical research.
They've both published books that incorporate their lives
and jobs into the stories they tell.
They've been at it for a while.
Jakiela: As far back as I can remember.
I was an only child, and it was kind of one
of the things that I did.
Newman: I mean, I think wrote 25 books before I published a book.
So I was one of those guys that just didn't know
what I was doing, didn't...
just kind of kicked along, you know?
I don't think I saw a lot of Western Pennsylvania in books
when I was growing up,
I didn't see a lot of people who had a lot of jobs
or, you know, were sort of struggling to get by,
or, you know, that didn't see a lot of mills in books.
Like, I love the idea of books set in Western Pennsylvania,
and recognizing locations and you can have a book
where someone goes into Tessaro's and eats a burger
when they're down and out.
Or he goes to Dee's Bar or somewhere like that.
My first memoir is "Miss New York Has Everything."
And then my second one
was "The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious."
Newman: I have one called "Please Don't Shoot Anyone Tonight."
It was my first book.
Jakiela: My third one was "Belief is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe."
My fourth one is "Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker,"
and then I have a collection of poems
called "Spot the Terrorist!"
A collection of poems called "The Slaughterhouse Poems,"
a novel called "Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children,"
a collection of poems called "The Poem Factory,"
and a novel called "Two Small Birds."
That's all of them, I think. [ Laughs ]
I finished a novel that's not very good,
so I'm gonna go back and go back to an earlier novel
that was not very good and try to work on that.
I have a collection of poetry that's coming out next year --
"How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?"
I just finished a big book
called "East Pittsburgh Down Low"
that I just started sending out.
It's all set in Turtle Creek and Wilmerding and Trafford
and around here.
My last book I wanted to call "A Collection of Essays"
because that's what it is, but the publisher said,
"Nobody likes essays so call it a memoir again."
But yeah, people generally sort of lump
in when you're writing about your own life
and telling true stories about it as memoir, yeah.
They're meant to appear based on my life
even if they're not based on my life -- if that makes sense.
I mean, they're meant to be someone sitting next to you
and talking to you that you can get to know.
It's really important to me.
I mean, my dad was a millworker, and things it's important to me
to remember where I came from.
I love Pittsburgh.
I love Western Pennsylvania. I love all of it.
I love all the little towns around here.
Love the Electric Valley.
Love all the old Westinghouse towns.
If you get something wrong about this area,
like if you say something that's not true,
or is misrepresenting it, people will call you out really hard.
I like the unhip side of Pittsburgh.
I'm like not into the $5 piece of organic toast,
but I do like the dive bars and the burgers.
Most of the work is done here and sometimes coffee shops.
I can work in public spaces pretty well.
I like it.
The noise, you know.
Hi. Can I get you guys something to drink?
Right now I usually write at 4:00 in the morning.
I get up and I write before I go to work.
And I try to bang out at least an hour or so every day.
Jakiela: Usually at the table here for me or in bed.
And his work ethic is very good
so it helps me because I'm lazier.
Newman: And then on Saturday, Lori and I will sit down,
and we'll have a couple drinks
and we'll touch up what we wrote,
read it at the table and go over it together
and have a little editor-session back and forth.
You have poems? Mm-hmm.
You want to read one?
You far enough along?
Yeah, I am. All right.
Read me some.
"'So what's your earliest memory?'
my father-in-law Charlie asks the waitress,
the bartender, and me.
I love Charlie, a holy New Yorker
who spent his life away from New York.
Who sang Frank Sinatra while he washed pots and pans
and worked on houses and worked in factories and worked doubles
so his kids could have lives he did not.
Charlie is earnest and kind,
and his stories don't ever go where I think they should.
'What's your earliest memory?'
Charlie asks, hoping to tell his."
That sound like your dad? Mm-hmm.
That's good. It does. It sounds awesome.
You know, we read for each other, you know.
And there's...
and people are always asking, "Is there competition?"
I'm like, "Absolutely no. There's not."
And I don't know how to explain that to people,
but it's not like that.
"Outside the wedding tent, in the parking lot
by the gift shop at Bushy Run Battlefield
in their new-ish Ford Escape,
Brianna, who everyone calls 'Bree,' takes a deep breath
filled with frustration and says,
'You have got to be kidding me.'
She pauses and stares hard at her husband.
She says, 'You have got to be kidding me.
We stopped at the ATM, you took out $100,
we stopped at the ATM specifically
so you could take out $100.'"
Jakiela: I went to New York to be a writer,
and I didn't write at all really,
I mean notes, little scribbles, things like that,
but if I hadn't gotten together with my husband,
if I hadn't moved back home,
I wouldn't have written anything.
I had no books.
And, you know, I wrote everything since
I've been back here,
with his support.
Newman: The idea of doing work is appealing to me,
and the people that work, and I always liked the idea of writers
who worked a lot and did their work.
You know, that was just always appealing to me.
And then also, I mean, I think people just write to say,
you know, "I was here once," you know?
"And you're here, and isn't that awesome?"
Sebak: Of course, there have been awesome writers
who have lived here once, some just for a while.
Take Willa Cather, a great American writer
usually associated with Nebraska
and the Great Plains where she grew up,
but she moved here in the late 19th century,
and in June of 2017,
her Pittsburgh connections attracted scholars
and devoted readers from around the world
for the 16th Willa Cather International Seminar,
organized this time by two local academics,
Tim Bintrim and James Jaap, with help from Tracy Tucker
from the Willa Cather Foundation in Nebraska.
This day, folks are visiting sites on the North Side
that Cather would have known.
It's all part of the seminar.
Bintrim: It's always in a different place where she lived.
This is the first time it's been in Pittsburgh.
And we're taking a week, six to seven days,
to celebrate her time in the city,
her 10 years living in Pittsburgh
between 1896 and 1906.
We can expect to go on walking tours
and to visit places that were integral
to different works that she wrote.
Tucker: I think she always wanted something,
you know, newer and bigger and more exciting,
so this doesn't seem like a surprising place
to find Cather after she's done with college.
Jaap: From I think she was 22 till she was 32,
and then she continued to visit until about 1916,
so for another decade, she made Pittsburgh really
one of her -- one of her "bases," I would say.
Tucker: This was a big step -- to be away
from the rest of the family
and develop her own friends and her own networks of people.
Jaap: This house where we are was owned by George Gerwig,
a friend of hers.
Bintrim: And George was her friend at the University of Nebraska.
They were great friends.
He taught her theater reviewing.
Jaap: He recommended her for a position as an editor
and writer at a new magazine based in Pittsburgh
called The Home Monthly.
This was in 1896.
Tucker: This would have been one of the first places that she,
you know, she was meeting lots of actors
and she was writing reviews,
and I do think she liked Pittsburgh a lot,
of course, that doesn't mean she didn't go on
to New York afterwards or want to go on to New York.
But I do think this was an important step for her.
Jaap: So the first five years she was a journalist,
and then she shifted to teaching school.
So for the next five years, she taught at Central High
and then over here at Allegheny.
Bintrim: It's all documented, starting with "Chrysalis,"
the 1980 work which we all go back to.
And there's been a lot published recently.
Peter Oresick's collection is a good place to start.
It puts the six most important Pittsburgh stories
together for the first time in a handy format.
And it's just wonderful.
For about five years, her last five years here in Pittsburgh,
she stayed in the home of her friend Isabelle McClung
over in Squirrel Hill on Murray Hill Avenue.
Bintrim: We got permission from the owners, the current owners,
to go into the back garden
and to gaze up at the rightmost dormer window
which is where Willa Cather did
so much of the writing that we know,
including the great prairie novel, "O Pioneers!"
which was put together out of two stories that she wrote here
and then spliced together in that tiny upstairs sewing room
with a single window which is always what she favored.
There's something about the storytelling
and the beauty of her writing that appeals to people.
Just the beautiful language, first and foremost.
She tells a great story and she tells it beautifully.
And that's really all that matters to most readers.
Sebak: Many such readers today may also want to check out
the beautifully told stories of Osama Alomar
whom you may encounter on the North Side,
often on Sampsonia Way.
I walk a lot. Yes.
Sebak: He fled his homeland of Syria for political reasons,
and he's been selected as a writer-in-residence
for two years here in Pittsburgh
through the unusual City of Asylum program.
Alomar: I first came to the States on October 2008.
I lived in Chicago for eight years.
And I drove a cab there.
Sebak: Osama first came to Pittsburgh years ago to give a reading.
He stayed in this same house.
I remember that night I wrote three very short stories.
Sebak: He has written and published several books
of these "very short stories,"
including the 2017 collection called "The Teeth of the Comb."
The stories are almost like poems.
Alomar: "Never Been Touched."
"A book sitting on the shelf with torn covers and pages
filled with comments and notes in the margins
said to his colleague who stood beside him,
'I envy so much your freshness
and your eternal youth.'
But his colleague answered him dejectedly,
'I've never been touched!'"
I write about objects and animals because I feel
there is inspiration everywhere,
not only among humans.
There's inspiration in dogs, cats, chairs,
walls, any kind of objects.
Sebak: Osama says he usually writes in the afternoons,
here in the house.
Alomar: Writing every day.
I'm writing every day on my notebook.
But I don't go to my computer every day.
Now I'm working on a novel about the Syrian war,
about the Syrian disaster.
And it lasted until now for over seven years.
I cannot describe this disaster in very few words
or very few sentences.
Syria is hell now,
and I think it takes years and years.
Sebak: Osama still writes in Arabic,
but, obviously, his English is good.
Alomar: You know, language is a very big ocean,
so every day I discover new thing.
Sebak: And he seems to be productive in Pittsburgh.
Alomar: I'm still discovering the city.
It's not that big.
It's not like Chicago.
I'm good here.
Maybe that's why I'm writing every day.
Sebak: And it's just a short walk
to the place called Alphabet City
where City of Asylum now has a great bookstore.
-Hi. -Hi. How are you?
Good. How are you?
Alomar: Yeah, I always go there.
Check out the books, the events,
there's lots of beautiful events there,
jazz music, readings, all kinds of events.
Sebak: One night in February of 2018,
we went to that bookstore for an event
featuring the Pittsburgh writer Tom Sweterlitsch,
who brought along his wife and daughter.
Tonight is the book launch for my new novel
called "The Gone World."
They've invited me to give a reading and maybe a Q&A
and sign some copies of my book.
[ Applause ]
So --
So today "The Gone World" comes out.
Those of you who know me,
this book has been with me for a long time.
I started writing it back in 2014
shortly after my first novel was published.
And it's actually been finished for quite some time
but publishing sometimes just takes a very long time
to work its way through a publishing house,
so finally it feels good to have this out into the world.
I don't know what I call my genre.
It's sort of a mix of all sorts of things,
so this is my second book, and both have been similar
in that they've had a strong component
of like a thriller/mystery novel
but they're clearly science-fiction.
This new book, "The Gone World," is much more horror
also than my first one.
And this one is a time-travel novel
so it touches the future and the past.
"'Hello?' 'Special Agent Shannon Moss?'
She didn't recognize the man's voice,
though she recognized the drawl on the vowels.
He'd grown up around here,
West Virginia, or Pennsylvania --
rural.
'This is Moss,' she said.
'A family's been killed.'
A quaver in his voice.
'Washington County dispatch logged the 911
a little after midnight.
There's a missing girl.'
2:00 a.m., but the news was like an ice bath.
She was fully awake now.
'Who am I speaking with?'
'Special Agent Philip Nestor,' he said.
'FBI.'
She turned on her bedside lamp.
Cream-colored wallpaper patterned with vines
and cornflower-blue roses
covered her bedroom walls.
She traced the lines with her eyes, thinking.
'Why my involvement?' she asked."
My first book was incredibly Pittsburgh,
it was nothing but Pittsburgh essentially.
This one is the area.
There are scenes in Pittsburgh,
but there's a lot of scenes in Canonsburg, West Virginia,
so it's still what I would consider
local to Pittsburgh writing,
but yeah, not so much the city itself this time.
"Moss' memories of Courtney were the sweetest
essence of childhood summers --
endless days spent poolside, roller coasters at Kennywood,
splitting cigarettes down by Chartiers Creek.
Courtney had died their sophomore year,
murdered in a parking lot for the few dollars
she'd had in her purse."
So the time-travel mechanism in "The Gone World"
is that generally speaking you can go to the future,
but you're not going to the future,
you're going to a future,
one of an infinite possible versions of future.
I often say I didn't invent how to time travel,
but I had to do enough research to make it feel like I had.
Sebak: Tom says he's been writing every day
since his early teens in Ohio.
Sweterlitsch: But yeah, I would write horror short stories.
That was the first thing that I did with any regularity.
And I did that through high school until college
when I started writing poetry.
I came to Carnegie Mellon and majored in creative writing.
I had a couple of other majors, too, but writing
what I write now is sort of this --
like I view it as a little bit of a combination
between the kinds of interests I had when I was studying poetry
and, you know, the horror and science-fiction stuff
I liked as a kid.
So, I do not write at home.
I live in Greenfield.
It's a minuscule two-bedroom house.
And I don't have room to write there.
And I go to different places.
I go to shopping-mall food courts --
that's a favorite of mine --
Century III Mall, Ross Park Mall --
those are great places just to set up shop
and nobody bothers you or thinks it's weird
that you're just sitting there for a long time.
Once everything's done and it is in print and published,
I don't look at it ever again.
I pick out a couple passages for readings, and that's it.
I think I would go -- I think I would go mildly crazy
if I went back into a printed book
'cause I would just start finding all sorts
of things to change and re-write
so I just don't. [ Laughs ]
"...but arrivals were different from departures,
no exhilaration at seeing home after
so long an absence --
rather, seeing this future-earth was like staring into a mirror
and discovering someone else's face."
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Sebak: You know, we're lucky to have all these writers --
and more -- in our midst.
The stories and poems, the characters and predicaments,
the memoirs and novels that they create
all add to the beauty and mystery and goofiness
of living in and around Pittsburgh.
We're happy to see places we know mentioned
and preserved on printed pages.
And no question -- we always want to read more and more.
(Music)
Last question -- If someone says to you,
"As a Pittsburgher, what book should I know?"
O'Nan: You should know "Damballah"
by John Edgar Wideman.
It's a story collection about Homewood.
Gorgeous. Gorgeous.
He's working all different types of form.
He's working the yarn, the fable, the slice of life.
Beautiful language. Just gorgeous.
"Damballah."
John Edgar Wideman.
Yeah, that's the one that I would point you to.
You know, the real, real Pittsburgh of it.
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