Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio »

Ohio native Lisa Watts is an editor and writer who raised her family in a small Ohio town for ten years.

“Agood place to be from.” That’s how some people might characterize the Buckeye State. The writings in Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, are testimony to the truth of that statement. By prominent writers such as P. J. O’Rourke, Susan Orlean, and Alix Kates Shulman, these contributions are alternately nostalgic, irreverent, and sincere, and offer us a personal sense of place. Their childhoods are as varied as their work. Some were raised in urban Cleveland, Akron, and Cincinnati, others in the small Ohio towns that typify the Midwest, and still others in the countryside. Yet what they have to tell us about their roots resonates with a shared heritage, a sense of what is universal and enduring about growing up in the heartland.

Foreword: Goofy Ohio Stories and Other Sweet Things   R. L. Stine     xi
Introduction: Looking for Roots   Lisa Watts     xv
City Sensibilities
Fathers in the Snow, and Other Selected Poems     3
Sweet Lorain     13
Grace Notes     21
Pool Buddy     31
Why It's Good to Come from Nowhere     37
The Known to Which I Return     47
Small-Town Nice
Preacher's Kid     57
Out of Ohio     69
Two Towns, Arguing     85
This Is the Place     93
Heroes and Tree Huts     105
Decoction     113
In Fields and Woods
In Such a Homecoming     127
We Are Mapmakers     143
The Mere Breath of Sheep     149
Geese and Crows     161
Answers     169
After the Flood     177
Salamanders and Sycamores: A Natural History     189
Afterword: Toward a Literature of the Midwest   Mark Winegardner     197