Wednesday, August 24, 2016 Larkin Square Authors Series Timelines: 1b: Past Events (Unseen Archive), 2: Larkin Square Author Series
Book Discussion
Featuring:
Paul Hertneky
Rust Belt Boy
Where:
Larkin Square
745 Seneca Street
Buffalo, NY
Date: September 21, 2016
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Paul Hertneky is one of millions of baby boomers who fled the industrial north upon fulfilling his parents’ dreams of a college education. He returns to his roots in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in a collection of stories specific to one legendary riverfront plateau and one boy’s journey, but emblematic of immigrant life and blue-collar aspirations during the heyday of American industry and its crash, foreshadowing one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history.
Over twenty-five years, Paul Hertneky has written stories, essays, and scripts for the Los Angeles ProheadshotB&WTimes, Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, NBC News, The Comedy Channel, Gourmet, Eating Well, Traveler’s Tales, The Exquisite Corpse, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Adbusters, and many more. His work centers on culture, food, industry, the environment, and travel, winning him a Solas Award, and two James Beard Award nominations. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he serves on the faculty of Chatham University.
Rust Belt Boy, Hertneky’s warm and affectionate collection of stories/memoir/essays about growing up in Ambridge, a steel-making suburb of Pittsburgh at the time of its greatest levels of employment and job security after World War II, and just as US steel-making and industrial might began its steep decline, will resonate strongly in other Rust Belt cities like Buffalo, as he brings alive the industrial grime, the strong sense of family, community, and hope, and the wonderful scent and taste of the various forms and flavors of pierogi. Bonds of family and food help hold together communities in distress. A book for the millions who left the Rust Belt in the 70s and 80s, and for those who stayed, and for those who are returning, or coming for the first time.
Hertneky will talk about his book and the history it chronicles in a free event, part of the Larkin Square Author Series. Copies of the books will be available for purchase–those wishing for an autograph are expected to purchase the book from Talking Leaves as an act of support and respect for the author and the store sponsoring his visit.
A bit of advance praise for the book:
“I loved it. I haven’t read a book in many years that made me feel so wistful, and grateful, as RUST BELT BOY. Given my own family history—my grandfather was a Pennsylvania coal miner who barely spoke English, my grandmother ran a Prohibition era saloon on the banks of the Susquehanna River—I felt Hertneky was writing a love letter to my own boyhood, and at the same time a Dear John letter, telling me goodbye to all that. If you’re one of the six million baby boomers who walked away from a dying hometown, read this book and remember another America.”
—Bob Shacochis, National Book Award winner and author of Pulitzer finalist, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul.
“The inside truth of a life, or a culture–of anything–cannot be tricked together. It has to grow from what’s been bred in the bone and tested in the day’s real living. Paul Hertneky’s RUST BELT BOY has the savor of that living. It is a rueful, bittersweet expression of loss and a brave reenactment of memory.”
— Sven Birkerts, author of THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES and THE OTHER WALK.
“RUST BELT BOY brings to life, in loving, lyric detail, an essential but overlooked portrait of America’s blue collar heart. Paul Hertneky is a splendid writer, by turns hilarious, tough, and tender. He’s always honest, often revelatory, and never disappointing; his book deserves to become a classic.”
— Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus, National Book Award finalist