I had the opportunity this past week to go to Chicago for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, although I can’t claim I went entirely on the up-and-up. About a month ago, I found out about the panel Midwest Gothic: Dark Fiction of the Heartland. I’ve been describing my work as Midwestern Gothic since 2004, so I had to attend. Unfortunately, on the same day, tickets sold out, and since I had mostly hoped to attend that one panel, I didn’t feel too awful about crashing the party.
Other aspects of AWP, however, were open to the public, most significantly their annual book-fair. This is a huge event with hundreds of tables featuring publishers, presses, printers, writers, academic programs, and so forth. I ran into a lot of the writers I’ve met over the years, and was reminded that writing need not be as isolating a career as we often perceive it to be.
But in addition to Midwestern Gothicism and reconnecting with friends, the trip had a higher purpose. After all, I’ve spent the last fourteen years living in America’s largest cities, but now I’m back in a medium-sized industrial town in mid-Michigan, and I’m still trying to accommodate myself to its artistic ecosystem. This wasn’t a move that happened under pressure; I welcomed and embraced the change. And yet I feel that Flint has to soberly assess its cultural status if it is to fully realize its remarkable creative potential. It needs to see advantages clearly, recognize the cost of utilizing them, and activate.
Well, that sounded pretty touchy-feely, didn’t it? Okay, fine. Here, then, are three more substantial reflections I’ve had in Chicago this week, which I will seek to apply, personally and professionally, in Flint. I’m sharing them here to give Flint artists some food for thought in their own careers:
FIRST: Without wading deep into the thorny issue of egoism (I personally think that artists without a healthy pride in their own work ought to consider other professions), one advantage that we often attach to populous cities, endowed cities, and organizations with artistic clout is the centrality of connection. That is, our relationships make the whole stronger than the sum of its parts. But this goes beyond the simple process of trading names and endorsement; it is an aggressively positive dynamic established between active artists, because it involves a mutual assumption of worth and value.
So I put it to myself like this: In Flint, one needs to cheerfully defy the spirit of inertia, despair, apathy, pessimism. In Flint, each artist needs to be a one-person joy factory, regardless of the work she is creating.
SECOND: As I’ve often argued, all over the country, there is a lot of talent in Flint. This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the city; when the auto-industry dried up, the institutions and foundations who had benefited from industry’s wealth had carefully managed their funds and we now have a multi-generational legacy of education in the arts. This is propagated through funders like the Ruth Mott Foundation, organizations like the Cultural Center, and higher education at Mott, U of M, Kettering, and so forth. Additionally, as the city has deteriorated, it has drawn on its heritage to produce a wealth of guerrilla or underground art of startling legitimacy, seen in the musical legacy of recent years, in many of the downtown galleries and theater troupes, and so forth. And yet… there is a temptation to let professional standards slip when one feels he is creating art only for himself. There is a temptation to do create something adequate instead of something exemplary, difficult, well conceived, and crafted, and impeccably executed. Adequacy does not a vital arts scene make. Djuna Barnes rarely thanked her benefactors because she felt she deserved the support she received. If we decide to be more polite than she was, we should nevertheless recognize that we are contributing something vital to our community. But by extension, such recognition implies that we are right to expect a lot of ourselves.
So I put it to myself like this: In Flint, don’t “settle.” Demand more of yourself, and in exchange, demand and take more in terms of recognition.
THIRD: Finally, the debate about “little Flint,” the dying industrial town that is hemorrhaging people and money. I can be explicit about this one: Flint is a big city, or more precisely, the cultural qualities that are essential and vital to big cities are all present in Flint. We fall into a trap when we confuse tangibles (like statistics) for intangibles like sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and so forth. They impact each other, yes, but the latter are not quantifiable. They are, rather, a mindset that responds to local opportunity, and as citizens, we cease to believe in such opportunities in the midst of a city’s collapse. That a cultural collapse echoes the economic collapse is, however, a narrative sold (by design or accident) by the national media, by the suburbs, by despairing or bitter expats… in short, by those who don’t know firsthand what is happening here right now.
Here are a few useful analogies:
Flint has 102,000 people, but its Metro area has become increasingly diverse as a result of Flint’s exodus, and this larger population has remained stable at about well over 400,000 people. Points of comparison: At the height of the Classical period, the city of Athens had a population of 250,000, but only about 30,000 Attican men had civil and political rights. In its might, ancient Rome was bigger — it may have achieved a population of over a million — but by the Early Middle Ages this population of about 30,000, or roughly the size of Burton. Even during these low-points Rome was still the center of the Catholic Church, and was the coveted prize of numerous empires over the centuries. And within Michigan today, the Greater Flint area is still larger than Ann Arbor and the Tri-Cities, and is on-par with Lansing. I am not saying this to put our neighbors down; I am just saying that population is a poor measure of cultural and artistic productivity.
Now let’s take a look at Flint’s cultural capital and amenities. In addition to the institutional support and guerrilla clout that I described above, we have their spatial equivalents: excellent facilities and an abundance of unused space. We have a population that is not only diverse, but which has become diverse through a trial by fire through such dark moments as the demolition of the St. John Street Neighborhood and such bright spots as the passing of the first ban on discriminatory housing compacts in a large U.S. city. And on the subject of history, Flint’s is outsized, playing in the big-leagues with giants like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and yes, even Chicago, by one essential equation: the things that have happened here, remembered today, and even happening here right now, have had profound implications for people living across the nation and the entire world. Now only was Flint powerfully relevant to the larger world, but that relevancy has expanded and grown.
So I put it to myself like this: There is no reason why Flintites cannot embrace a cosmopolitan outlook. Flintites can and must embrace a cosmopolitan outlook.
Now Is this all idle boosterism? Deluded imagination?
Maybe someone other than me should post the verdict.
But these observations, made now, when I am living in Flint but having visited in Chicago, after having known Chicago, having known New York, having known successful writers and publishers in the urban engines of our American identity — I believe that these observations reflect a more, not less, objective perspective at our city. Embracing its strengths, and their call to greater passion and rigor in our own work, can only make our creative production more potent, more relevant, better, and livelier.
By extension, I think we need to stop worrying about when or if the damn city’s going to finally die, and invest all our energies in the brilliant things we can achieve with the time it has left.