The Thick of Thin: Memoirs of a Working-Class Writer

by Larry Smith

Overview

In The Thick of Thin, Larry Smith writes of a life full of personal challenges, a life full of consistent engagement with the larger world, and a life full of commitment to making it a better place as a husband, father, writer, editor. Smith has worn a lot of hats, and he s worn them well. His story here has the emotional resonance of all of his writing. Much of his life s work has been focused on making the point that working-class lives like his in communities like his are important to our culture and history, and he makes that point more strongly than ever in telling of his own in this memoir.

—Jim Daniels, author of Street Caligraphy

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780933087750
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	04/10/2017
Series:	Harmony Memoir Series
Edition description:	SPECIAL
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Larry Smith is a native Midwesterner, born and raised in a working-class family in the industrial Ohio River Valley. In 1965 he graduated from Muskingum College in Ohio and at 22 married a hometown girl, Ann Zaben. He worked in the steel mills that summer before moving to Euclid, Ohio where he taught high school and Ann began working as a nurse. He earned degrees at Kent State University (M.A. and Ph.D), and was there when the riots and shootings of students occurred. In 1970-1971 he and Ann and their daughter Laura moved to Huron, Ohio, where he began teaching at Firelands College of Bowling Green State University. Son Brian (1970) and daughter Suzanne (1975) were born in Huron. In 1980 he was a Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Sicily. He is the author of eight books of poetry, a book of memoirs, six books of fiction, two literary biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen, and two books of translations from the Chinese with co-translator Mei Hui Huang. His photo history of his hometown Mingo Junction appeared recently in the Images of America Series. Two of his film scripts on authors James Wright and Kenneth Patchen have been made into films with Tom Koba and shown on PBS.



As a professor of English and humanities at Firelands College (1970-2010) he has taught writing and literature and served as director of the Firelands Writing Center, a cooperative of writers. As director of the literary publisher, Bottom Dog Press, Inc., he has edited over 65 books and carried into publication some 200 titles of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In addition, Smith has been a reviewer for American Book Review, Parabola, Small Press Review, Choice, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohioana Quarterly, Heartlands, and the New York Journal of Books. He is a requested presenter at various writers conferences in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. His poetry has been featured on American Public Media s Writer s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His recent publications include the novel The Free Farm (2013), Each Moment All: Meditations as Poems (2012) and Lake Winds: Poems (2014). He enjoys playing guitar and doing meditation at the Converging Paths Meditation Center in Sandusky, Ohio.

Read an Excerpt

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

At 73, I find myself on a spiritual retreat through the New Mexico desert communities of the native Pueblo people. The bus and walking tour with 40 fellow pilgrims is led by Richard Groves, director of my wife s Sacred Art of Living and Dying group. My hair, what s left of it, is gray, and my arm is still sore from shoulder surgery two months ago. My good wife Ann, with her own surgery for back pain, is seated beside me, and we half joke-half pray over the ancient healing site of Chimayo visited a day ago. We have sweated and hobbled along these ancient paths following Richard s lead, hearing his talks on history and tales of spiritual presence. I am a half-believer in the mysticism which these fellow travelers seem to embrace, but I know the power of belief and have witnessed it in the sacred work of Ann and others. Their being close with those struggling to embrace dying as a part of living is inspiring.

As I lean my head back against the bus seat, I look out at a desert landscape under bright sun. The rock formations and gorges are as different from our Ohio flatlands as one can imagine. Here was once an ocean bottom; back home we have the scarred flatland of ancient glaciers ending south in rocky hill lands. In the cool drift of the bus, I close my eyes and sense myself as a place, my life and its places written upon and through me. My youth in a working-class steel mill town in the Ohio Valley, my college life in the rolling hills of Southern Ohio, married life along the lake land suburb of Cleveland, then on to the rolling hills of Kent, Ohio, where we began to raise our daughter and witnessed the violent shootings of our students. In our mid-twenties, we trading our Ohio River for the shore lands of Lake Erie in Huron, Ohio. Here Ann practiced and taught nursing, and I, after 40 years of teaching college English courses, would retire with the gold plated clock. During a sabbatical year, our young family of five journeyed to the ruggedly beautiful area of Sicily where we survived together and I learned far more than I taught at the university there.

Table of Contents

Part One : Converging Paths

Author s Preface: The Circle Unbroken 11

Chapter One: Born & Raised 17

Chapter Two: Family Moves & Early Schooling 29

Chapter Three: High School Years 51

Chapter Four: College Life 66

Chapter Five: Starting Out Married Life & Work 95

Chapter Six: Life along the Lake 107

Chapter Seven: Other Journeys & Family Matters 113

Chapter Eight: The Family Expands/ Retirement 137



Photos 148-162



Part Two: River of Stones, My Writing Life

Chapter Nine: Early Writings of Home &

Imaginative Release 163

Chapter Ten: Author Appreciations &

Birth of Bottom Dog Press 173

Chapter Eleven: Native Zen & Voices 181

Chapter Twelve: First Fictions 186

Chapter Thirteen: Life in Translation & Channeling 191

Chapter Fourteen: Memoirs & Mature Poems 196

Chapter Fifteen: Author Film Appreciations 206

Chapter Sixteen: Later Fictions, Voices & Sagas 209

Chapter Eightteen: Salutations in Lake Winds 223

Author s Afterword 233

Interviews

Increasingly I began to sense my life as made up of intersecting planes. Existing in time and in place, but also in social and spiritual contexts, they manifest in realms of inner awareness. Within me was my working-class youth, my nuclear and extended family, my work and growth experience with others, my awareness of spiritual pathways and great movements in art and writing all of it and more inside of me. These planes of being formed my own storied world, the one that I was and am writing here. Despite this diversity, or maybe because of it, I was a larger whole. I am what I am, cry Moses and Christ and Popeye. At 70 I joined the Catholic Church and feel at home enough to volunteer as a reader at Mass and as a part of the charitable St. Vincent de Paul Society. At the heart of my writing has always been the need to explore my own converging paths, to sense their passages and see their interconnection: in essence, to share this sense of life with and for others in my deeds and in my writing which we turn to now.

Editorial Reviews

First Review of The Thick of Thin: Memoirs

" A native of the industrial Ohio River valley, Smith grew up in a mill town where classmates were children of steel workers mostly of immigrant and black families. Smith s father shared the goal of many in the valley to send their children to college and escape the mills to more fully serve the community. Thus, was birthed the new working-class of which Smith proudly writes.

...The author has turned out a well-written memoir that resonates with those who reached adulthood in the 1960s and 70s and became the working class. This book warms the reader like a quilt of memory scraps, recorded in words rather than stitches."

From the Publisher