A part of Belt's City Anthology Series. A lively grab bag of essays, fiction and poetry that reads at times like a who's who of contemporary Chicago writers/residents.-- The Chicago Tribune Chicago is a city built on meat, railroads, and steel, on opportunity and exploitation. But its identity has long involved so much more than manufacturing. Today, the city continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization. The problems that plague the region don't disappear once you pass the Indiana border, though. In fact, they're often amplified. And Chicago is a complicated city because of that, defined by movement that's the anchor of the Midwest, but bound to its neighbors by a shared ecosystem and economy. Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak directly to the concerns the city shares with the region at large, and the elements that set it apart. With contributions from writers like Aleksandar Hemon, Kathleen Rooney, and Zoe Zolbrod, and here you'll find stories about: - Buying Bread on Devon Street - The Cantinas of Pilsen - Bike commutes through the North Side - Adventures on the El. Writing with affection, frustration, anger, and joy, the writers in this collection capture all the harmony and dissonance that define one cacophonous place. A wide-ranging insider's look at one of the world's most iconic cities. One of the best books to come across my desk that I can frankly remember. Rick Kogan, WGN Radio Writers like Stuart Dybek, Studs Terkel, Sandra Cisneros, Nelson Algren and Gwendolyn Brooks start to make up the city's canon. They are required reading for every Chicagoan. But Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology, the neighborhood cookbook taking the pulse of post-industrial Chicago right now seems like required reading as well. Emma Terhaar, Third Coast Review A lively grab bag of essays, fiction and poetry that reads at times like who's who of contemporary Chicago writers/residents. Chris Borrelli, Chicago Tribune Within this collection of poems and prose lies a collection of voices and lives and pasts and presents. As told by those who run through Chicago's veins and beat with its heart, the lens of the industrial Rust Belt pops this book's blue collar, oozing working-class adoration and experience. -- Chicago summer book recommendation, American Writers Museum Martha Bayne is a Chicago writer and a senior editor with Belt Publishing. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Baffler , Chicago Reader , Latterly , The Rumpus , and Belt Magazine . Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology By Martha Bayne Belt Publishing Copyright © 2017 Belt Publishing All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-9977743-7-5 Contents CITY OF MOVEMENT, THE BUILT CITY, THE DIVIDED CITY, Elaine Hegwood Bowen, 1964, SPORTS BREAK, THE CONFLICTED CITY, THE LIVING CITY, CITY OF MIGRANTS, CONTRIBUTORS, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, CHAPTER 1 Chicagoland SONYA HUBER Chicago is a dark jewel on the lake, an implacable garnet, a bristle of quartz towering next to a turquoise expanse. These stones are set in a bezel of grey highway. A rough backdrop highlights their sparkle as further rings of grey asphalt reach outward, framing a semi-industrial backdrop called Chicagoland. To an outsider, the word "Chicagoland" might evoke a theme park where you can ride the Capone-a-con or the Checker-Club Blues Experience, where you'd line up to buy eight dollar hot dogs on a poppyseed roll with relish and a pickle and then hug a plush-costumed figure dressed like Jane Addams. If Chicagoland were a theme park, I would pay to visit, and then I would feel empty, wanting the ineffable that would be absent. I grew up in New Lenox, Illinois — twenty-four miles from the nearest edge of the city limits. To explain and locate New Lenox, I say, "It's far southwest of the city, right next to Joliet. You know: Blues Brothers, the prison," and people all around the world nod and say, "I've driven through there on I-80." Am I a suburban kid claiming affiliation with a city I only drove into for grade-school museum trips and supervised parental expeditions to buy Christmas chocolate at the old evergreen-colored Marshall Field's? Yes. Kind of. I am also someone who took high-school drives to see bands at the Cabaret Metro on Clark Street, who drove up to play indoor soccer and drove home on the cold highways alone, listening to Paul Butterfield on the radio and absorbing the blues, taking for granted that the night in every city would be soaked in such wailing and ache. My friends and I drove downtown aimlessly, not having money to actually do anything and not knowing what to do, then driving home. I am someone who later took the train in to work, then still later moved into the city, crossing a divide and falling in love with the neighborhoods knit together by the L. I am not from Chicago, but I am from Chicagoland. At