Note: This essay was read for Lit Youngstown’s First Wednesday Readers Series on November 4, 2026. Thank you to the incredible Westside Bowl for hosting.

This is an essay about an essay that began as a song. Which is just another way of saying I got frustrated and scrapped my original plan for tonight. The essay and song were about my oldest sister, who died in 2009. In both I got stuck.

I taught college writing for twenty-five years, and one way I encouraged students to get unstuck was to do some self-reflecting about the stuck—some “meta-analysis’ in academic parlance. I never encouraged them to read their reflection to a semi-captive audience at a First Wednesday reading, however, but maybe I should have.

Knowing I’d be here tonight, and thinking I should read something new for you, I put together an essay I had been trying to bring to life for many years. It started as a song sixteen or seventeen years ago, shortly after my sister, Anita, died. It was tentatively called “For Anita” (John Prine having already taken all the great song titles), and I didn’t make much progress on it. Anita was my oldest sister. And it turns out it’s very difficult to write about her. The song itself got little farther than the first few lines in which the character of my sister is introduced:

Born in 1961 in Albuquerque, New Mexico

God don’t make imperfect things

Crying out into the world, momma’s little baby girl

God don’t make imperfect things

Lackluster songwriter skills aside, I didn’t have the emotional range (and by range here I probably also mean distance) to complete the lyrics at the time. My sister’s life was hard and it was complicated, and even now I don’t know how to bring an audience-ready essay about it to the stage. Oh, but I tried. I wrote and whittled and said too much and too little. I excused myself for the audacity of trying to tell someone else’s story long after her passing. I questioned my own agenda:

In the years since 1979, and in those since she died in 2009, my sister as person-I-knew has become frozen in place despite my feeling that I am missing so much of her story, and despite my attempts, such as this very essay, to remember, retrieve, rewrite, revise, and reify a version of her that is both true and complete. But for what purpose? Our parents and our sister, Cheryl, are gone, and our remaining sister, who so often seemed to dislike her three siblings, is lost to familial atrophy.

And elsewhere I attempted to explain why I have even wanted to tell my sister’s story for nearly two decades:

A story, not even a complete one, and nothing more. Time moves on, but some version of the truth remains, even if warped and distorted. The past takes root and grows. The stories remain, but they change and change again. They are not our own stories, but we need to tell them anyway. We are compelled. Compulsive. The need to write something like the truth and the ache of the faded memory are one and the same.

I couldn’t even bring myself to say “I,” and so I put you, me, we, everyone on the hook for telling her story. “How fair is that, dude, we didn’t even know your sister, or you for that matter.” “Fair point,” I say to the imagined audience that heckles me in my head.

As the subject of my sister’s hard life unfolded on the page—a runaway at thirteen, married with a child at nineteen, thirty years more of abuse and addiction—I worried that I was sinking into the maudlin and, like the graveyard whistler I am, I was met over and over with the urge to crack a joke or quote a song lyric. Just an hour ago I deleted a whole oblique reference to Jackson Browne. At one point a few weeks ago, I even decided to scrap the essay entirely and write instead about Jimothy and Dolly. Even then I couldn’t make myself avoid the difficult and disheartening place most of us have found ourselves in these long post-COVID years. These two heroes were cast as temporary respite. But Jimothy lives on, Dolly never really dies, and life continues apace. Public readings come closer and closer into view whether or not you have that essay beaten into submission.

So I did what writers do when they can’t get out of the way of their own writing. I curled up in a ball and cried hysterically. Then I drank a stiff glass of Lagavulin 16, and I asked my editors—in other words, my friends—to take a look at the essay and offer their excellent feedback. I trust my editors—er, friends—with such things after all, and I even let them pet my dog whenever they want.

“There’s a lot of stuff going on here,” they said, “This could be a book.”

“I don’t want to write a memoir,” I said. “They all seem a little self-indulgent in my opinion,” I added.

A little elegy we’ve all heard of may have ruined the genre for good. Plus, I don’t even know the difference between an autobiography and a memoir, except that perhaps the former is a chronological list of facts of a life and the latter is intended to be an Oprah book club pick.

As a writer, in the interest of honesty, you take the good, you take the bad… and there you have… an essay that fails to launch.

My editors agree. The disjointed nature of my essay was met with a fair question. “Whose story are you trying to tell,” they asked. “My sister’s,” I emphatically insisted. Then again, maybe not. Maybe I’m just trying to tell the story of Southeast Ohio, which is entirely brutal and beautiful, and lives deep down in my bones. Maybe I’m only ever telling that story. Or, more accurately, the story of now living in belly of rust belt Northeast Ohio and always longing for home. Elsewhere I have described the journey from here to there:

If you could fly from my stoop as the proverbial crow, you would do so for about 175 miles from Cleveland to reach my hometown of Logan. You would sail southward beyond the Cuyahoga River, across the flattened hills of Northeast Ohio, down, down, down and away from the glistening bowl of Lake Erie, beyond the line that marks the ancient glacier’s retreat, to the rolling Hocking Hills, where Black Hand Sandstone—the compacted deltaic sands of an ancient sea 300 million years long gone—forms some of the most spectacular rock formations you will ever see. You will have flown past the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and found yourself nestled in the forested hills and valleys of the Wayne National Forest.

Both Cleveland and Logan are characters in nearly everything I write. And that makes sense. The first writer I truly wanted to emulate was James Wright, born and raised-up in Martins Ferry just down the way. Wright is, perhaps, the preeminent poet of rust belt Ohio, and was the first writer I truly felt akin to, though that came somewhat later in my reading journey in a freshman poetry class in college. Although I didn’t become a poet (or at least one willing to share his poems), when I reflect honestly about why I write the way I do, and about what I do, I have to admit it’s because Wright taught me to. And of all that I learned from him, two things were most influential:

1) Southeastern Ohio is a deeply rich vein to mine as a writer. And so is Northeastern Ohio. In fact, I consider the two close siblings.

2) Place is a character as important as any other character in a poem, a story, or an essay—and maybe more important.

We all likely know “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” but now that October has passed, as well as the season of high school bodies galloping terribly against each other, I’ll instead refer to “From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower.” It’s brief enough to read in full.

Cribs loaded with roughage huddle together

Before the north clouds.

The wind tiptoes between poplars.

The silver maple leaves squint

Toward the ground.

An old farmer, his scarlet face

Apologetic with whiskey, swings back a barn door

And calls a hundred black-and-white Holsteins

From the clover field.

Maybe you’ve been in this place. Perhaps on your travels through Ohio. But maybe also in your dreams. Or in those deep places inside you where the memories you aren’t sure really happened reside. Isn’t that the job of the writer: to make the real uncanny and the uncanny real?

My friend, Jay, who incidentally borrowed my copy of Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems for way too long, and then returned it once I panicked and thought I’d lost it, says to me while we’re sitting in the driveway by his Solo Stove, “You’re really good at writing about place, about geography. At describing what you see in the world. You pay more attention to the world around you than most people.” I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. So I say, “When I was growing up in Logan, I was usually alone with my thoughts. I studied the world around me more than the people in it. What else can you do? In town, walking around at night, I’d gaze at the light-filled windows, wondering about the people who lived there, making up stories to fill the deep lonely feeling of it all. The world is one vast, lonely landscape full of beauty and possibility. I’m just better at telling the story of the landscape than of the people who live there.” Then we had another sip of scotch.

The essay I began writing for tonight, which didn’t have a title yet and was called “For Youngstown,” (imaginative) was not entirely without any direction and beauty:

I grew up in a house beside Scott Creek. Until I was three and my parents added two additional bedrooms, we were a family of six in a two-bedroom, 1000 square foot box pressed up so close against a wooded hillside that it seemed to have sprouted there. Our yard melted away into the creek, and beyond that, fields that went through myriad agricultural iterations over the years before finally becoming a dormant ground for whatever seed took hold. Across the creek, our short driveway turned into a gravel township road that stretched a fifth of a mile through the fields to 93 South, a meandering two-lane highway that eventually finds its way to the Ohio River at Ironton.

Along the edges of the yard and road, blackberry and elderberry vines to be turned into jams and pies. The hills covered in oak, hickory, elm, maple, beech, white pine and a bed of decaying leaves and needles, damp, musky, full of microscopic life. In the summer, my father and I cut down trees and carried them down the hill to be split, stacked, and dried for firewood. In all other times I disappeared into the woods alone and imagined myself somewhere else entirely. I did not yet understand how joy and sorrow could coexist. Could have a common source. Maybe I still don’t. But the soft, low autumn light glinted through the trees, the earthy scent of fallen leaves filled the air, and I was forever wedded to this place no matter what else it kept hidden.

But I’m not sure any of this ever really happened. Oh, that place existed, but my memories of my life there? Those are considerably less trustworthy. And even less so when trying to write about my sister. To write an essay like the one I had prepared for tonight relies heavily on the machinery of memory. I tried to tell the story of my sister inasmuch as I can remember it. Then it became entangled with the story of me, inasmuch as I can remember that one either.

Memory is a will-o’-the-wisp. But I remembered to come here tonight, and to fret about it a perfectly reasonable amount. My story of my sister’s story is important to me—the solidifying of my memory of her before it disappears—and for other reasons best teased out in therapy.

Writing is nothing if not an act of faith. Faith that there is something that needs to be said, and that others are interested in reading or hearing it. Despite not knowing what kind of response might come from a bowling alley full of strangers. A meta-analysis of failure hardly prompts a mic drop. The essay about my sister’s life and death will come though, in time and with difficulty. I could see it outside the window of my car as I drove here from Cleveland earlier today, the falling leaves signaling that there’s a long winter coming on and cold days of staying in and writing. As I crossed over the Meander Creek Reservoir, a great blue heron glided past overhead and I rolled on into Youngstown feeling pretty good for the first time in a long time. Tonight would be fine. And Anita’s essay will come in due time.

My sister’s story is a tragic one, and, yes, not mine to tell. And maybe that’s why it’s right that it should come so slowly and so hard. Easy is for things that don’t matter. Sixteen or seventeen years ago I stopped writing that song about her with one final line. It occurs to me now that it’s where I should have started in the first place: “And there are times when I see her now, golden hair across her brow.”