This year’s conference theme and location offer timely opportunities for creative engagement with the post-industrial city and (re)generations of the so-called “Rust Belt.” This session will enable participants to read/present and discuss original creative short-form work crafting and exploring narratives, concepts, identities, images, locations, perspectives, and/or experiences of the Rust Belt, a term coined in the 1980s to describe the decline of industries (particularly large-scale blue-collar production and manufacturing) and resultant economic decline and decay. Constructions of histories, memories, and transformations of “Steel City” Pittsburgh and vicinity are especially welcome, but those of post-industrial locations elsewhere in the United States or worldwide are also of interest. (Re)generations can be located within the represented cities themselves and/or in the imaginative acts of the writer/maker.

Work to be presented can take the form of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction (memoir, travel-writing, etc.), photojournalism/visual storytelling, composite audiovisual and moving image projects (film/video/multimedia), or other hybrids. Potential topics for consideration may include any of the following (and more): underrepresented and intersectional Rust Belt identities; the figure of the worker and corporalized labor; unions; transgenerational immigration histories; racism and xenophobia; “boomtown” production stories; specific industries such as steel production, coal mining and automobile manufacturing (as well as other industries such as cement production, meat and dairy processing and packing, textile and garment manufacturing, etc.); communities and displacements (related to mill and factory closures, job losses, gentrification, etc.); regional folklore; dreams and disappointments; new technologies and utopian/dystopian futures; myths and realities of resurgence.

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21804

This session will be in-person only.