By Christine Rice

You probably know about Belt Magazine’s online mission to publish top-notch independent journalism about the Rust Belt. If you’re really sharp, you might have picked up author Aaron Foley’s How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass or even preordered Edward McClelland’s How To Talk Midwestern. But you might not know that Belt also publishes essay and personal narrative anthologies by writers who have lived or are living in the Rust Belt cities of Akron, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Flint, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Youngstown.

Since I’m from Flint, I was particularly interested in Belt’s latest offering, Happy Anyway, A Flint Anthology, edited by freelance writer and award-winning features writer for The Flint Journal Scott Atkinson. As Atkinson writes in his introduction, the essays in Happy Anyway show that, “Flint happiness is a fought-for happiness, an earned happiness. It’s a happiness that carries an asterisk, a never-ending footnote of stories that demand you understand and respect the history of where everything good in the city came from.”

I caught up with Scott to discuss the anthology and how Flint influences his own creative process.

There’s this fantastic piece you wrote for Belt Magazine about Mission of Hope’s Pastor Bobby and the Flint Water Crisis. In it, you write:

He’s so happy. In his business, if it can be called a business, you need to be. It’s a particular kind of happiness, a Flint happiness, not meaning so much that you’re happy, but that you’re happy anyway. You’re happy even when you see a couple of guys you just handed water to selling that same water a few blocks away. You’re happy that your shelter has only been broken into twice in eight years (“That’s wonderful!”), and that second time, just a few days ago, when all the thieves took was your reinforced metal door meant to keep them out? You love them with all your heart.

Christine Rice: So, yeah. As with any place on earth, there’s this push/pull of wonderful and not so wonderful. As a writer, what does this dynamic do for you? How has it influenced your writing? What influence does it have on other writers you know?

Scott Atkinson: It has influenced me tremendously. Almost everything I’ve written for the past several years–even fiction–has to do with Flint. There’s something incredibly interesting about a community trying to get back on its feet, because that manifests in so many ways. People are holding onto the past or trying to forget it. They’re starting new businesses or struggling to find work. That makes it rich with stories, and as a storyteller I think there’s a big responsibility that comes with that. You can’t romanticize it. You shouldn’t even want to romanticize it, but it happens, and I think that’s where a lot of frustration comes from when locals complain about the national media. It is what it is, and like any worthy subject (and I think Flint is an immensely worthy subject) you have to put in the time to figure all that out. I hope I’m pulling that off as a writer and an editor. I know I still have a lot to learn.

CR: Flint is burdened with so much misguided and/or downright wrong media-image baggage. In Jan Worth-Nelson’s essay titled “Beam, Arch, Pillar, Porch: A Love Story,” she writes:

One night recently I heard Rachel Maddow say on TV, parsing our latest misery, “Is Flint, Michigan, still habitable?” and for a moment, I felt like everything was falling apart. My nerves faltered and I wondered how I – how any of us – have managed to be here all this time.

That last line is funny but it’s also really sad. The cumulative effect of media misinformation is infuriating. And then…during the ongoing water crisis…the media’s carelessness seemed to be replaced by an odd but strangely sweet overprotectiveness. As a resident of Flint, as a person watching this surreal narrative play out, and then to read peoples’ stories…it must have been somewhat gratifying to give Flint a voice in its own narrative. Was it?

SA: It is, but it’s still frustrating. I’ve realized that I’m quite territorial about Flint. I got the most recent issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review (from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor – I teach at U of M’s Flint campus) in the mail a few weeks ago, and they focused on the water crisis. I hadn’t even read a word and I found myself just mad. I was pleased to see that one essay was from a Flint native and I breathed a bit easier. Again, it’s easy to get caught up in it all and romanticize it, to want to turn it into some dystopian novel or something. Again, Flint is a nuanced place, and if you want to get it right, you have to put in the time. The daily news cycle doesn’t really allow for that.

But here’s where it gets more frustrating…you need that kind of national attention for things to happen. Initially I had no intention of writing about the water crisis. As a freelancer I didn’t want to feel like I was capitalizing on a tragedy, and there were just so many media people in town I didn’t think I had anything to add until Belt called me and asked for a story. That’s when I found Pastor Bobby. I was talking about this with Melissa Mays, a citizen who’s been leading a lot of grass-roots efforts to help people get clean water and information, and she said to keep writing. Her fear was that if we lose the attention, the pressure on the government will lessen and progress will come to a halt. So while Maddow’s comments are frustrating, I think we also need to be grateful Flint is getting the attention it’s deserved for a long time.

CR: There’s a heartbreaking and poignant piece by a young writer Layla Meillier titled “Do You Realize.” In it, she writes:

Six feet, I discover his gun is real.
Five feet, I have no goodbyes to say.
Three feet, here I go, dying in the middle of the day.
Two feet, silence in my head.
I meet the barrel. It was pointing at the meeting of my collarbones the entire time.
“Are you scared?’ he says. I mug him as best I can in my numb state.
“No.” My voice is strangely firm.
He steps out of my way, puts away his gun.
“Are you a student?” He motions toward my books.
“Yes.” My voice is no longer firm.
“What are you studying?”
“English.”
He gives me a “huh,” a smile, and then runs to catch the bus. I watch him as he bouncily climbs the steps and then turns around to shout from the doorway, “Wait, how old are you?”
“Twenty,” I yell back to him and watch as his bus leaves.
I was sixteen at the time.

The next paragraph:

That was a little over two years ago and I am still not sure how many times I can get so lucky.

By the end of that piece I was in tears. These personal narratives – at the same time – confirm and reject what we think we know about Flint. They support and then erase common notions. The personal narrative forces us to peel back the cold, hard headline and make us look deeper. These essays, very clearly, help define what it means to live in Flint.

Can you talk about your experience editing this collection? And I’m curious about your memory of reading Layla Meillier’s piece for the first time.

SA: Layla will be president someday. Or win a Pulitzer.

As a high school student she was already attending UM-Flint. She’s never been my student, but I knew her a bit, and I was talking with as we walked away from campus one day. She said, “Flint’s an easy place to grow up,” by which she meant that Flint was a place where you had no choice but to become an adult quickly, and I asked her to write something. She turned in those two essays, and I couldn’t turn either of them down. I remember reading the first one and showing it to my wife.

Hers was one of many voices–that of a younger person–I wanted in the collection. I wanted a broad cross-section of the city. I made sure to reach out to some African-American writers I knew because I really didn’t want an anthology about Flint to be written solely by white people. There were some stories in the community I knew about, like Eric Woodyard’s, that I specifically asked for, knowing they spoke to larger themes about the city. Other stories just came in. I was so glad, for example, to receive Katie Curnow’s story about her family’s questionable ties to the 1936-37 sit-down strike that gave rise to organized labor in the factories. I knew I wanted something on the strike, but I didn’t want some boring history piece. Her story was just perfect. In the end I feel like I got the cross-section of the city I was after, in part because of the pieces I didn’t expect.

CR: What surprised you the most as you read through the Flint anthology submissions? Content? Patterns?

SA: I’m not sure if it was a surprise, but if it was, it shouldn’t have been. There are a lot of stories about homes. What it means to leave them, to stay in them, or return to them.

CR: What was the best part of the editorial process? What did you learn?

SA: The best part is seeing a piece reach its full potential. I’m sort of a structure freak, and many of these pieces came in with such great material but we had to do some work on finding the narrative in all the details. I’m proud that in that process I didn’t encroach on any of the writer’s voices – I think anyone would agree that there are very distinctive voices in the book. What I’m most proud of though, are the writers. They took my edits enthusiastically and through it all told me how proud they were to be a part of this. Being able to offer them this outlet was a wonderful experience.

Release party: June 27, 2016, 7:00 p.m., Soggy Bottom Bar, 613 Martin Luther King Avenue, Flint, MI, 48502

You can buy Happy Anyway, A Flint Anthology HERE.

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Scott Atkinson has written about Flint for Belt Magazine, The New York Times, and other publications. He teaches writing and journalism at the University of Michigan-Flint. More at scottatkinson.info.

Hypertext Magazine and Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion.

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