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    Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology
    Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology
    Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology
    Ebook172 pages2 hours

    Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology

    By Joe Kraus

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    About this ebook

    In Currents in the Electric City, an installment of Belt’s City Anthologies series,  the story of Scranton gets told by the people who know it best.

    Scranton, PA,  is more than just the setting for The Office. It's a living city, one with a rich industrial and labor history, that also has a small-town feel. Who is considered “from Scranton” is fiercely guarded even as the city sees immigration from around the world. Neighborhood talk can reveal your family secrets before you even know them yourself, as Barbara J. Taylor writes. Pieces in this anthology talk about desires to leave, ties that bind, and decisions to stay, as well as impressions from newcomers to the Northeastern Pennsylvania hub. As coeditor Joe Kraus notes in his foreword, Scranton was once a prominent stop on the vaudeville circuit—vaudeville translating literally into “the voice of the city.” The chorus of voices that fill the poems and essays in this anthology tell a complicated story of the Electric city that many have heard of, but few know.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 16, 2024
    ISBN9781953368782
    Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology

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      Book preview

      Currents in the Electric City - Brian Fanelli

      Cover of Currents in the Electric City

      Foreword

      JOE KRAUS

      I first heard about the Belt City Series when friends of mine contributed to the Chicago anthology, Rust Belt Chicago, in 2017. And I thought, Why not Scranton? Couldn’t we bring together the voices of different Scranton writers to produce a book that would celebrate what Scranton is, was, and will be?

      I wanted to be a part of any such project, but I confess my bona fides were thin. I work in Scranton—I’m a professor at da U—but I don’t live here. I drive in every workday, and I explore the city on many a lunch hour, but it’s not mine in the way it is for most of the contributors here.

      The piece I’ve contributed, Palimpsest of Scranton, or Scranton in the American Popular Imagination, grows out of my sense of partial outsider-ness. It’s my exploration of how others have seen Scranton from the outside, and it draws on my now two-decades-old collection of favorite quotes about our Electric City.

      But as I explored how to make this collection come together—having received encouragement from Belt publisher Anne Trubek—I realized I couldn’t do it without a real Scrantonian.

      I met Brian Fanelli the way you’re supposed to meet people in Scranton—first by reputation, then through his family, and finally in person. The reputation part came when I read—and admired—his poetry collection Waiting for the Dead to Speak. The family part came when his niece, Jessica, did an independent study with me. And in person, well, I asked if he’d consider being a part of the project, and he said yes. It’s Scranton, and there’s a basic sense of trust that undergirds that kind of question.

      This book doesn’t happen without Brian, without his sensibility or his love of the city and its people.

      Fortunately, Brian and I share an admiration for authenticity, for writers speaking in their own voices, for writers pushing the rules of writing ever so slightly.

      We share a belief as well in what the Belt City Anthology series represents: that the voice of the city is a chorus, not a solo. Decades ago, Scranton was famous as a stop on the vaudeville circuit, and you can still hear the refrain, If you can play Scranton, you can play anywhere, as a lingering sign of that history.

      That word, vaudeville—at least as I understand it—is a corruption of the French phrase, voix du ville, literally the voice of the city. Vaudeville functioned by bringing a series of performances across a single stage, giving one performer after another the chance to sing a song, tell a joke, dance, recount a story, perform a magic trick, or present an oddity.

      Our stage in this book is smaller than the great theaters of that era, but the thinking is the same. We present here a variety of poems, essays, and dramatic monologues by and about the people of Scranton. Our contributors come with different experiences as writers and with different experiences of the city, but they all share a sense that, as they speak for themselves, they speak as well for the city as a whole.

      Raise the curtain, then, and please join us in reading what our fellow Scrantonians have to offer as they represent, critique, and celebrate the city we share.

      Introduction

      BRIAN FANELLI

      I grew up in a tiny yellow house in north Scranton, where my parents somehow raised five children. Yes, I shared a bedroom, and so we didn’t melt during muggy Pennsylvania summers, my brother and I ran a window AC held together by duct tape. Sometimes, it worked. Other times, it roared to life and then sputtered out. If we gave it a good whack, it would often chug along and eventually keep us cool. With the AC cranked, I lay in bed, beneath a Return of the Jedi poster, wondering what existed beyond my insular north Scranton neighborhood.

      During my senior year of high school, I was sure of one thing: I wanted to ditch Northeastern Pennsylvania. Hello, Philly area. I stayed there for a few years following college graduation and worked full-time at a daily newspaper. Everyone, yes everyone, in the newsroom assumed people from Scranton were like Dwight from The Office, no matter how many times I told them that wasn’t the case. Why did I feel the burning need to defend the place I wanted to leave? Why did I care what wealthy Philadelphia suburbanites thought? Perhaps I relished the role of feeling like an underdog in that place and sticking up for my scrappy hometown. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, Scranton left its mark on me like coal dust. Even though I said I’d never return, I eventually moved back home and have long since secured a decent full-time job and a place within the local arts and literary community. When coeditor Joe Kraus asked me to help with this project, I immediately said yes, in hopes that maybe, just maybe, it would give a new perspective to the Electric City.

      As the writing in this anthology illustrates, Scranton is a multifaceted place with a long and complicated history. Many of the pieces celebrate the city’s past and specific childhood memories, including Tom Blomain’s The Five Seasons of Scranton, Dawn Leas’s The House on Frink Street, and Jack McGuigan’s How I Learned to Run.

      While some of the work acknowledges the difficulty of living in Scranton, such as Amye Archer’s Escape Plan and Jade Williams’s Outage in the Electric City, others highlight the positives. I specifically relate to Jess Meoni’s Dedicated to the Venues That Raised Me. I know those music clubs, places like Café del Sol, Test Pattern, and Café Metropolis (OK, that was in Wilkes-Barre, but still). I pogoed and slam danced on those sticky floors and had two-hour-long conversations with high school friends about getting out of town. Though I can’t relate to what it’s like to be a woman in the punk scene, I know exactly what she means by the importance of those venues and how they can forge a worldview and turn a sixteen-year-old with spiky hair into an activist. Unfortunately, those clubs are all gone, but by writing that essay, Meoni honors them and what those five-dollar shows meant to kids living in a place with not much else to do. This anthology also contains unique perspectives on familiar Scranton landmarks and businesses. Mandy Pennington’s What Washed Windows Can Do gives a personal take on the Steamtown Mall and its many changes. Stephanie Longo uses her journalistic skills to showcase the story behind Parodi Cigar Group and thus, a broader immigrant narrative, while Scott Thomas’s poem On Seeing Louie in a Toadstool explores family history and the promise that the lights of Lackawanna Station meant in 1938.

      It took me a long time to figure out my relationship to Scranton and the fact I’m a native. Sometimes, I still have the itch to escape and often hop in my car to return to Philly, but I’ve made peace with the city, and I’m eager to see its next phase. As you’ll see from this anthology, many of the writers have a genuine affection for Scranton, economic challenges and all. I count myself among those that want to see the Electric City succeed, which is part of the reason I signed on with this anthology.

      What I hope this anthology proves is that Scranton is more than a faux documentary TV series about a paper company, a John Mitchell labor rights statue at Courthouse Square, or an election stop every midterm and presidential cycle. Yes, we gave birth to a president, but we’re more than a political slogan or punchline. Joe and I are grateful to Belt Publishing for allowing us to add Scranton to their city anthology series. Despite its challenges, the city is evolving, trying its hardest to be more than coal mine tours and President Biden’s hometown. In the spirit of the writers that once called this place home, including Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jason Miller and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet W. S. Merwin, we present to you an anthology about Scranton. I promise that there’s only one or two pieces that mention The Office.

      Bringing the World to Scranton

      SONDRA MYERS

      First and foremost, Scranton is a city. It’s not a town, and most important, it’s not a suburb.

      I spent the first ten years in Old Forge—which is a workingman’s town. A number of coal miners and people recovering from their days in the mines lived there.

      My mother was from Philadelphia—she met my dad when he was at law school at Penn. When my mother’s siblings came to visit—she was the youngest of nine—they assured her that the door back home would be open for her whenever she was ready to move back into civilization.

      My father’s law practice was in Scranton, and when I was ten, we moved here.

      My own work through the years took me to Harrisburg, with frequent assignments in Philadelphia. From there, it was off to Washington, where I took a job with the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

      I value diversity, and here, I found it in the Hill Section.

      History: In my school, James Madison, there were Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, and—unique to our town—African Americans. I can’t resist saying that Ulysses Robinson, a Black kid who lived with his grandmother in the Lower Hill, was the best student in our class from day one. He went on to be valedictorian in high school and was accepted at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. He chose Yale.

      Here is another passion of mine: the quality of arts education. There should not be a lower standard for people who live in smaller communities. One of the reasons that I loved the Metropolitan Opera films is that people everywhere could have that excellent experience. I thought that the Met Opera president should be given a Nobel Prize for that.

      Coming back here from Washington was something of a struggle, but when I saw some of Scranton’s assets—both its people and its institutions—I knew, as Joe Biden knew of our country, that it was a place of possibilities.

      Not from Here

      MARIA JOHNSON

      How can you possibly not have heard of him? my eldest daughter’s boyfriend asked her in our kitchen one afternoon, about six months into their relationship. The him in question, Bob Sura, was a local guy who went on to play ten seasons in the NBA and is a really big deal in these parts.

      Babe, you gotta remember I’m not actually from here?

      OK, fair point.

      Made perfect sense to them. Thing is, by any normal standards she is from here: born at Community Medical Center up by the park, lived here all her life. But her parents aren’t from here, and in Scranton, if your parents, and your grandparents, and your aunts and uncles and cousins aren’t from here, you will never be really From Here.

      When my husband and I moved here for my job at the University (called da U, if you are from here) my new colleagues warned us that this is what it would be like: If you’re not From Here, they told me, you’ll always be an outsider. People are nice enough, they said, but

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