If Only Cleveland Were Detroit

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About a year ago, I started a book club with a Cleveland focus. We took a long break for about in the middle there, and some of our choices were not about CLE or written by CLE writers, but the ones that were include:

—Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt
—Believing in Cleveland by Mark Souther
—Surrogate Suburbs by Todd Michney
—Good Kids, Bad City by Kyle Swenson
—Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

If there were such a thing as a recent history of Cleveland, we would have read it by now. But no such luck. I gave at talk at Case’s Writers House last week, and we got to talking about this problem: why is there no good recently written history of the city? One person mentioned the most recent history she could find published in the 1980s, and which she “would not call good.” The Encylopedia of Cleveland is an extraordinary resource, as is Cleveland Historical, and I learned more about Cleveland from reading A Ghetto Takes Shape than any other single volume, but I would buy all of you a round if I could curl up with a nice 150-400 page, well-written, smartly angled history of this town. Even better if I could publish it.

A year or so ago I decided Belt would do a series of short histories of various Rust Belt cities, because Cleveland is not alone in this gap. Pittsburgh, too, lacks an accessible, recent history. So does Buffalo. I spread the word, and some smart folks went off to look into proposing writing a history of their city for us, but were never heard from again [sad emoji]. Now, we are looking into doing this as a series of graphic histories, and making some slow headway. Stay tuned.

One city that does not lack for recently-written histories, and would keep a book club busy for a decade just by reading books about written it in the past decade is Detroit. Here’s a pretty good recent list. There are more. Many. Why? Maybe because Detroit has always had a richer, deeper history than Cleveland (don’t @ me), and because it was the poster child for the Great Recession, so it became a national story, and contracts were signed. Many of these books are really good; a few—the “I bought a house for ten dollars; here is my story” variety—are, well, not. But do not step foot into Detroit without reading Thomas Sugre’s Origin of the Urban Crisis or (full disclosure) Aaron Foley’s How To Live in Detroit Without Being A Jackass. There are so many books about Detroit there are must-reads and listicle rankings. Detroit wins a Pulitzer for publishing books about itself.

At that Case discussion, we discussed why there were so few Cleveland histories. I mentioned the following possible reasons: scarcity of Research 1 institutions with strong history departments that would encourage such a project; lack of interest on the part of New York (aka ‘most all’) publishers, given their provincialism; lack of qualified writers to take on the task given economic decline/lack of day jobs for the sort of folks who would be qualified to write such a book (an issue I come across constantly in my day job); a paucity of square footage at the key archives (not sure if this is the case; it would be interesting to do a comparative analysis of the amount of information at various cities’ historical societies and libraries). But none of these seem definitive or even plausible explanations.

We concluded this discussion by collectively shrugging our shoulders.

(The next question that was asked of me is which Cleveland authors is Belt working with, to which I could also not answer right away; we have about 25 books under contract right now, about urban renewal, Rust Belt cuisine, local news, midwestern identity, municipal politics, incarceration, toxic stress and community trauma, midwestern architecture, the Great Migration, the black midwest, and more—and yet not one is being written by a writer who lives in Cleveland. Nor have any we have published thus far, save two anthologies, both of which I edited. It took me awhile to go through the mental rolodex to answer. “None.” Why?” “Almost no Cleveland writers send me proposals.”)

Last week I was in New York, and I ended up at a bar chatting with an editor who works at Knopf. Turns out he edited Nico Walker’s Cherry, the biggest book about Cleveland written by a Clevelander since —-Crooked River Burning maybe? Maybe longer (wait until the movie). Anyway, it’s a book I would forgive any white guy under 26 for liking, even if Walker does kinda (not kinda) hate women, and is certainly interesting despite its Bukowski-ness, and has a stunning description of Cleveland Heights at the beginning. I had a great time chatting with this editor (when does one run into other book editors in Cleveland? Get to talk about publishing nuts and bolts with strangers? Exciting!) and when I stumbled out of the bar at 2 am I realized he had more experience editing Cleveland books than I do. That makes me angry-no-sad. I bet he’d buy a narrative history of Cleveland. I hope someone sends me the proposal first.