Writin' On Empty Book

The writers who contributed to this book are more diverse in their backgrounds and experiences with Ohio than alike. Novelist Andrea Louie writes about how her parents, who immigrated from Asia, became sheep farmers in Wayne County as a "small act of defiance against routine and inertia". They learned how to castrate sheep and immunize lambs from books ordered from the United States Agricultural Extension Service. Writer Mark Winegarder, who hails from Bryan, starts his essay with the sentence, "I grew up in a two-story brick house that never had an onion in it". He explains that his memories of the meals served in his house led him to conclude that he and his siblings "grew up in a place as flavorless as the food we ate there and the times during which we ate it."

Because the writers are a good twenty to thirty years older than me, I wasn't always able to identify with the Ohio that they remembered. But there were similarities to my Ohio. For example, in her introduction, Watts quotes New Yorker writer Ian Frazier (whose recollections are also included in this book), who suggests that Ohio is a place from which people leave. "When I was growing up there, Ohio seemed centrifugal. Some mystical force the place possessed flung people from it, often far", Frazier writes. It is interesting to note that most of the writers included in this volume no longer live in their home state. This is something I could identify with - as many of the people I know from Ohio have also moved away.

But all of the writers in this collection also note that the state that generations of Ohioans have thought of as "BORING" (as children's author R.L. Stine, who writes the foreword, put it) has instilled something in them that cannot be readily removed. Book critic Dan Cryer identifies that something here: "Niceness was bred into me the way scions of the rich pick up a sense of entitlement about admission to the Ivy League. I was nurtured on it from birth." Or maybe it is the fact that it is dull, as O'Rourke proposes. "Toledoans don't have to look long at the exciting events of history to realize how little those excitements contributed to human felicity. The humdrum is the source of decent pleasure", writes O'Rourke.

I don't often read books about Ohio; mostly, I just think about how much I want to leave. But this book was a humorous and thoughtful examination of the state and the values that unite most Ohioans. When I do leave, I will know that I owe Ohio for my levelheadedness and lack of pretension, as well as a sense that it's "good to come from nowhere".