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University of Akron Press - Jen Hirt

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98 pages

English

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Hear Me Ohio is a collection of essays about leaving Ohio while always looking back at it from places as far and different as Idaho, to the familiar forest of an arboretum in Kentucky, to the Pennsylvania riverbanks of the Susquehanna River. Hirt writes about loss and discovery, but also horseradish and hold-ups, unicorns and spiders, chestnuts and dobsonflies, dogs and kayaks. Readers will find nature writing, meditations, literary journalism, and memoir-a range of approaches for covering a range of miles and years since a childhood spent growing up in Hirt's Greenhouse in Strongsville, Ohio, which was the subject of her first book.

Sujets

Sciences et techniques

Midwestern United States

Informations

Publié par	University of Akron Press
Date de parution	02 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781629221908
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1320€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Hear Me
Ohio
SERIES ON OHIO HISTORY AND CULTURE
Series on Ohio History and Culture
Kevin Kern, Editor
Joyce Dyer, Gum-Dipped: A Daug hter Remembers Rubber Town
Melanie Payne, Champions, Cheaters, and Childhood Dreams: Memories of the Soap Box Derby
John Flower, Downstairs, Upstairs: The Changed Spirit and Face of College Life in America
Wayne Embry and Mary Schmitt Boyer, The Inside Game: Race, Power, and Politics in the NBA
Robin Yocum, Dead Before Deadline: … And Other Tales from the Police Beat
A. Martin Byers, The Ohio Hopewell Episode: Paradigm Lost and Paradigm Gained
Edward C. Arn, edited by Jerome Mushkat, Arn’s War: Memoirs of a World War II Infantryman, 1940–1946
Brian Bruce, Thomas Boyd: Lost Author of the “Lost Generation”
Kathleen Endres, Akron’s “Better Half”: Women’s Clubs and the Humanization of a City, 1825–1925
Russ Musarra and Chuck Ayers, Walks Around Akron: Rediscovering a City in Transition
Heinz Poll, edited by Barbara Schubert, A Time to Dance: The Life of Heinz Poll
Mark D. Bowles, Chains of Opportunity: The University of Akron and the Emergence of the Polymer Age, 1909–2007
Russ Vernon, West Point Market Cookbook
Stan Purdum, Pedaling to Lunch: Bike Rides and Bites in Northeastern Ohio
Joyce Dyer, Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood
Robert J. Roman, Ohio State Football: The Forgotten Dawn
Timothy H. H. Thoresen, River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio’s Mad River Valley, 1795–1885
Brian G. Redmond, Bret J. Ruby, and Jarrod Burks, eds., Encountering Hopewell in the Twenty-first Century, Ohio and Beyond. Volume 1: Monuments and Ceremony
Brian G. Redmond, Bret J. Ruby, and Jarrod Burks, eds., Encountering Hopewell in the Twenty-first Century, Ohio and Beyond. Volume 2: Settlements, Foodways, and Interaction
Jen Hirt, Hear Me Ohio
Titles published since 2003.
For a complete listing of titles published in the series, go to www.uakron.edu/uapress .
Hear Me
Ohio
Jen Hirt
All new material copyright © 2020 by the University of Akron Press
All rights reserved • First Edition 2020 • Manufactured in the United States of America.
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher,
The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
ISBN: 978-1-629221-78-6 (paper)
ISBN: 978-1-629221-89-2 (ePDF)
ISBN: 978-1-629221-90-8 (ePub)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Hirt, Jen, 1975- author.
Title: Hear me Ohio / Jen Hirt.
Description: Akron : The University of Akron Press, 2020. | Series: Ohio history and culture | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019046231 (print) | LCCN 2019046232 (ebook) | ISBN 9781629221786 (paperback) | ISBN 9781629221892 (pdf) | ISBN 9781629221908 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Hirt, Jen, 1975- | Strongsville (Ohio)—Biography. | Ohio—Biography.
Classification: LCC F499.S87 H565 2020 (print) | LCC F499.S87 (ebook) | DDC 977.1/31043092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046231
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046232
∞The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Cover image: Morning Web Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/Ve1oxYig3yo.Cover design by Amy Freels.
Hear Me Ohio was designed and typeset in Mrs. Eaves with Cooper Hewitt display type by Amy Freels and printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Illustrations by Nadia Alnashar.
Lyrics written by Damien Jurado, published by Brown Coat Music (BMI) and Covertly Canadian Publishing (BMI). Used by permission Produced in conjunction with the University of Akron Affordable Learning Initiative. More information is available at www.uakron.edu/affordablelearning/
Contents
Introduction
Not Less Than 1,000 Bottles for Horseradish
Collide with Me
Monster Magnificent
Hour Thirteen
Arrived to Find
Glow in the Dark
String Theories
The Understory of the One-Eyed Deer
Idaho Fell
Follow Me
Students of the Route
Certain Chimeras
The Pit Bull Porch
Whisper Satyr
Lores of Last Unicorns
Sources
Acknowledgments
I can at best report only from my own wilderness .
—Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey
We moved to the city so far from my family
I haven’t been back there since .
It’s been a long time, a real long time .
Out from my window, please hear me Ohio
Your daughter wants to come home .
—Damien Jurado, “Ohio”
Introduction
I grew up in Valley City, Ohio, and my family owned Hirt’s Greenhouse in Strongsville for nearly a century before moving the business to land in Granger Township, between Medina and Akron. The tumultuous years that preceded that move are in my first book, Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees . To write that book, I enrolled in graduate programs far flung from Ohio—first in Iowa, then northern Idaho, a territory about as different from the Midwest as one can get. Why not stay close to home to write about home? It’s a good question. I could have stayed. But at the time, a professor suggested I go someplace new, someplace I might never have the chance to live in again. Like so many writers, I set my compass toward the sunset. Living in Ames, Iowa, for three years, in a farmed-out flatness, gave me ample time to contemplate all the horizons. Living in Moscow, Idaho, for five years, where there was one major road running north-south along the edge of the largest unbroken wilderness in the Lower 48, gave me time in the valleys and on the vistas. I saw Ohio differently from those regions, and that view has been important. I would not have written what I’ve written about Ohio if I had not left Ohio. It seems like a paradox.
An opportunity to teach writing at Penn State Harrisburg meant I could settle back east, as the phrase goes, and I’ve been living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, since 2006. The essays in this collection cover events and observations from my years in states other than Ohio, but every one of them has a foundation in my first twenty or so years spent, for the most part, in Medina County, Cuyahoga County, and Portage County. How so? I grew up in the country and in the greenhouses, never a day without plants and critters. I spent much of my time alone, or, more accurately, hanging out with animals instead of people—my horses, my cats, the dog. As a result of that Ohio childhood, I’m drawn to nature writing, to observing the natural world and using it as a lens for insight and meaning. While I may have polished these skills outside of Ohio, I developed a fascination for nature in Ohio. Cheesy as it is to invoke a tourism slogan, Ohio honestly is the heart of it all when it comes to these essays.
The title of this collection, Hear Me Ohio , comes from the song “Ohio” by Damien Jurado, from his 1999 recording Rehearsals for Departure . It became more of a hit in 2014, when he remixed the folksy guitar with a snappy house music beat and just a little dubstep pacing. I like the folk version better, and it coincides with my first adult year spent living outside of Ohio. The song is about a guy in a big city who spots a woman outside his window, waving down a taxi. She needs to get back to Ohio to visit her mother. The guy, amazed at how far away Ohio must be, yells out his window, “Please hear me Ohio, your daughter wants to come home.” It might be the only song where someone directly addresses a state and asks for compassion from that state, on behalf of a daughter getting back to her mother.
My mother, Karen Hirt, died in Ohio on February 3, 2014, of a heart attack after years of declining health. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the mid-1990s—the complexities of that diagnosis and its impact on my family run like a frayed nerve through my first book, Under Glass . In Hear Me Ohio , there are two more essays about my relationship with her, “Certain Chimeras” and “The Pit Bull Porch,” which is about the day she died.
But this is not a book about multiple sclerosis. It’s not a book about greenhouses, those structures my name is forever attached to. Only one essay is about Hirt’s Greenhouse, the opening piece “Not Less Than 1,000 Bottles for Horseradish.” Nor is it a memoir where I recount a play-by-play of my life since the 2010 publication of Under Glass (which was a memoir). Instead, Hear Me Ohio is a collection of essays, an attempt, like all essays, to understand what’s happening around me and to give that understanding an artistic frame. I guess it’s also an attempt to call out the window from my house in midtown Harrisburg, to ask Ohio to hear me again. So hear me out, Ohio. I’m not really yelling from a window, just speaking from a page. I’ve seen a few things, from huge Kentucky spiders to huge Idaho spiders to a one-eyed deer, from mid-Atlantic monster insects to neglected pit bulls. I’ve come to terms with premonitions and inheritance. I’ve gone kayaking, at night, alone, to get a photo of the moon.
It’s Ohio I have to thank. Hear me, Ohio, and thank you, Ohio.
Not Less Than 1,000 Bottles for Horseradish
My great-grandfather starts the morning of December 25, 1913, with a gun to his head.
He wakes to a noise downstairs in his home on East 40th Street in Cleveland, Ohio. His wife wakes too, but there is no rousing their young children, among them my two-year-old grandfather. Sam Hirt investigates. He is a small Austrian, a less-than-observant Jew with very round eyes and a country of frown under a mustache so wide he looks to be all mouth, like an old baby bird with its beak shut. His forehead glows a half moon under a hairline receding at a wrecked angle. Because he and Anna were well-off, they have at the staircase a button for a downstairs light, a convenience that most homes will not have for another half decade. The light reveals a masked man who levels at him a revolver.
I won’t know any of this until one hundred years later.