Ohio has produced many great writers, but for the most part, with the exception of, say, Sherwood Anderson, they don’t write about Ohio in particular. As a writer myself, and that noun fits me uncomfortably, I rarely envy other writers—not their talent nor the quantity some seem to easily produce. There is one exception, and one whose abilities I have coveted for three decades now. James Wright. He had it, the thing I long for. He was a poet—like Dylan and Waits are songwriters—of an America I both understand and love. One that makes sense to me. The scarred and flawed America that does not pretend to be anything else. Wright is the Ohio I once fled and then returned to again and again when I needed reminding of what I believe. His obsessive naming of place reads like an over-thumbed travel guide of depressed towns where history fades to memory. Take, for example, “Miners”:

Somewhere in a vein of Bridgeport, Ohio;
Deep in a coal hill behind Hanna’s name;
Below the tipples, and dark as a drowsy woodchuck;
A man, alone,
Stumbles upon the outside locks of a grave, whispering
Oh let me in.

Wright revealed a southern Ohio those who grew up there, whose families stretch several generations back into the coal mines of Appalachia, know well. Boxes of old photographs reveal the sad-eyed slumped miners of my own family and the women who, like those of the poem, “mount long stairs / In the shafts of houses, / Fall asleep, and emerge suddenly into tottering palaces.”

Every poem, every song must have a place, though many would argue for universality. But the names are markers, real lives, true experiences. Connections to be made between what is felt personally and what the poet can achieve. My own movements through space have been erratic. Norfolk, Virginia wasn’t much but the smell and taste of salt water. Austin, Texas was worth some time, but the memories didn’t stick. Too brief, too incomplete. Florida, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, Kentucky, Connecticut—I have resided for a time in or upon them all—and I have traveled back and forth across the United States and around the world. But Wright’s Ohio—my Ohio—is a gravitational center around which all else rotates. Wright speaks of young men on the football field who “grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October, / And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies” (“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”). My own moments on the field were spent begrudgingly playing flag football during gym class, sneaking beers through the chain-linked gates, trudging through the snow, and talking to friends about getting out. But when you leave you always leave something behind, and sometimes that seems like a hell of a lot. James Wright has already told that story:

Lo now, the desolation man
Has tossed away like a gnawed bone
Will hunt him where the sea began,
Summon him out of tree and stone,
Damn him, before his dream be gone:—
—from “American Twilights, 1957″

The past is always there to taunt the present. I grew up in Southeastern Ohio and left quickly after high school, joining the Navy for the get-out-of-this-place-quickly factor. It took some time to get it . . . to get the distance needed to realize what I loved about where I was raised. After I got out of the Navy, I flirted with home like an unreliable boyfriend, moving back and moving away, always unsure of my emotional commitment to the place. My last, and permanent, departure—to Connecticut—followed my rebirth as an Appalachian, a new role as bluegrass guitarist, and the conferral of a PhD. But years have passed and miles have passed, and I have settled in in Cleveland for thirteen years now. Still an Ohioan after all.

On many days over the course of my life I have agreed with those who think of Ohio as a forgettable backwater. Youthful hunger to get out, to see something, to be something completely different can cast an immense shadow over the first familiar life you have always taken for granted. There is a great deal of aspirational enthusiasm in being young, but there is very little nuance. On my flight to basic training, my first time on an airplane, I felt certain I would never return to Ohio. And the person who stepped onto that airplane never did. From that point forward life became an exercise in comparisons, and for a very long time Ohio would bounce up and down on a list of ratings I kept in my mind of the places I had gone and the things I had done. But of course nuance means you can be both that thing and another, of that place and of some place else entirely. For me, even now, the two sides don’t always play nice.

Although only a scant 200 miles separate the home I live in now and the home I lived in as a child, there are in reality tens of thousands of miles between. Those two homes are connected in the most complex and tenuous of ways. In his memoir, A Childhood:The Biography, Harry Crews writes of the home he had long ago left, but that would not truly leave him:

I get it. Happy as I am in Cleveland, I still miss home and many of the people I knew there. It is easy to forget how entangled with home you really are—how evocative the experience of returning can be. Since the death of my mother and, a decade later, my father, my travels to Southeastern Ohio have been rare. But the experience of descending the state for home is still the same. From Cleveland on Lake Erie to Marietta on the Ohio River, you drive a long stretch of Interstate 77 that cuts downward through the eastern side of the state, threatening to lop off the Appalachian edge. Slowly the land changes from the glaciated flatness of Northern Ohio into the foothills of the Appalachians—at 380 million years, one of the world’s oldest ranges and once its tallest long before the Himalayas were battered into existence by the crashing of tectonic plates. At about Cambridge you begin to see the change. The land along the highway slopes more noticeably and more consistently. The highway begins to wind a bit. Occasional farms and fields nestle in valleys and tiny houses are barely visible along far-off ridges.

Then the one true sign of returning home appears—the sweet smell of southern Ohio and the reminiscence it invokes. The smell of toiled farmland and honeysuckle in the spring. The smell of dry leaves, freshly-mown football fields, and harvested earth in the crisp air of autumn. These are not fragrances confined to Southern Ohio, of course, but with the first faint smell of the Appalachian foothills the visceral response begins. The whole unfolding of memory sends sensations through me and, calmly, quietly, I become myself again. The me of five-years-old. Of eighteen. Of thirty. Of fifty-one. The me that is never really me unless it is wandering the hills of Southern Ohio along a gravel backroad with folk music on the radio. John Prine sings, “You may see me tonight with an illegal smile. It don’t cost very much, but it lasts a long while,” and I am happy to be back in the cradle of my youth where I first heard Johnny Cash sing “I Walk the Line” and where existential clarity arose from the ashes of chaos in the early years of my thirties. I grew up in Southeastern Ohio, but not until I left, returned, and enough years had passed for me to become drunk on the dark, sweet-scented soil of my birth.

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Harry Crews is not the first person to write about the tension of living in two worlds, of course, and I won’t be the last. And James Wright is not the first or last to look back sad-fondly on what remains behind in the dark crevices of an American past. To have a foot in two different places—geographic, economic, intellectual, existential—is the inevitable result of movement. Yet staying still doesn’t prevent the alienation that change brings—the change is just done to you rather than by you. Making a choice to change, to move, to become something else is an active process that can in the end be quite disorienting. There always remains the most delicate of filaments extending across the years and across the miles, a fragile connection between then and now.

Crews recalls that among those with whom he had spent most of his life—academics—none had much in common with the people with whom he had grown up. I cannot say the same. I have been fortunate to befriend a number of folks in my field whose upbringing looked a lot like my own. Whose parents worked in factories and fields. Whose dads came home covered in dirt and grease. Whose Sunday dinners were carb- and gravy-heavy. Who spent their youthful days wandering the hills and hollers, or picking tomatoes and bailing hay for summer money. Who can still smell the funnel cakes and livestock barns of county fairs. Who screamed themselves hoarse above the growling din of demolition derbies. Who jumped carelessly into the water-filled quarries from great heights. Who skinny-dipped in rivers and cricks. Who snuck cheap beers into football games and movie theaters and school dances and bonfire parties and fast food parking lots. Who got high in shag-carpeted basements while listening to Led Zeppelin IV. Who crowded into second- or third- or fourth-hand cars without mufflers. Who knew Skynyrd but not Derrida. Who lived daily what many academics merely theorize. But we academics of poor rural America find each other and exchange the secret handshake and the knowing wink of mischievous kids who have snuck into the clubhouse. And we know enough about literature to resist plucking the low-hanging fruit of Gatsby comparisons when contemplating our liminality. We abhor the trite.

When I left home a few months after high school, to join the Navy, I assumed every future transition would be seamless—that human metamorphosis, like that of the butterfly, occurred in stages and resulted in a wholly different and distinct creature at the end. So different that it bare no resemblance to the original at all. I did not realize that our metamorphoses happen in fits and starts, and that no total transformation can happen in any case. You may appear as one distinct being to those with whom you spend your later years—friends, colleagues, spouses—while wrestling interminably inside with all the other versions of you and the discord they can bring. In most of my life now I’m just an academic, with all the trappings and assumptions that are bestowed upon that role. But it’s a role that chafes against historical facts: I am also a hillbilly from the Appalachian foothills, the first in my family to attend college, the only one to move away, and now one of only two who remain. But unlike some who write so-called elegies, I’ve never been interested in the long con. I can tell you that there’s a lot of room for bullshit in both the hillbilly and the academic. It’s certainly true that neither has a monopoly on truth or reality. I can tell you the good and bad of both worlds.