Writer’s Friday: Who Is Cincinnati?

Sep 17, 2010 by classicgrrl

Trying something new on CincyVoices on Fridays – Writer’s Friday is the experiment and the idea is to feature Cincinnati writers and their writitng, regardless of the genre. 

Want to have something posted here? Do you live and write in Cincinnati?  Send it to [email protected] …

Every other Thursday, the Writing Salon at Ink Tank meets and last night we discussed place in storytelling.  These paragraphs were written last night by our various members.  This was our charge:

You have the power to make Cincinnati who it is.  You might begin by considering the ways in which Cincinnati has made you who you are.  Begin with a specific location.  Describe it.  What details make that place who it is?  Write a paragraph in which your sense of who Cincinnati is, is evoked.

Westwood – Marie Stelle O’Nan

My first apartment was with my friend Melissa off Queen City. I worked second shift and spent parts of my morning walking up and down the hills around my apartment complex. If I walked north on Queen City, I’d see houses from the 40′s and 50′s– brick two and three bedroom houses that made me think of soldiers coming home. Sometimes there’d be a plastic deer or cement goose in the tidy yards. Once an old woman in a thin cotton house coat ran out her front door and pulled me in because she was scared by a buzzing from the kitchen. It was the timer on her oven.

If I went south on Queen City, I walked past thickets of honey suckle until I hit side walk and then further south it was like a city. There was a church for Italian Catholics and a UDF and steep old buildings that housed or used to house businesses. There’d be a couple of men looking for money. One sold browning carnations out of a bucket of dirty water and another man wore a will work for food sign. I smoked then so I’d give him a cigarette and pretend the gesture made me a city girl rather than a suburb girl.

I always got lost in Western Hills. I think the streets were built along rivers and streams rather than on a grid. Two streets would run parallel and then intersect and then run parallel again. Looking back I think smoking with an unemployed man in an army jacket and turning off that lady’s stove made me feel less lost. My great grandparents lived in Western Hills before their children spread out with the expanding edge of the city. From Price Hill to College Hill to Madeira. I thought of so many grandfathers that I knew lived in Western Hills–German Catholics who stuffed their children’s stockings on St. Nick’s day. Walking along those old twisty streets made me feel connected to my grandparents and made me feel like an adult.

Untitled – Antonia Glosby

Every place of this city has a part in my maturing in this city.  From the time I was about nine years old until I was fourteen, we lived on Irving Street, at the bottom of Forest Avenue, near one of the Cincinnati Zoo’s entrances.  In the evenings, before dark, we always heard this animal, whose sound I could never identify.  When we were at the zoo, I never could put an animal to the scream.  It certainly sounded like a scream, half human, half animal in distress.  I only recently learned it was the call of a peacock.  Such a beautiful animal making such a horrible sound.

Cincinnati Dialogue Sketch – MaryKate Moran

“Where’s Mt. Adams? That’s around here, right? I saw it was near downtown on a map.”
“Kind of?”
“Can we walk there?”
“Not unless your high heels convert into hiking boots.”
“Do you have a train?”
“Yeah. It runs at two in the morning and goes to D.C.”
“Huh?”
“Nevermind. Let’s get a cab.”
“Okay. Only if you want to. Would you go there? Normally?”
“God no. But you should see it.”

Adaptation – Classicgrrl

“We really should support the new Kroger” I explained arguing again with Sam-we constantly bicker over where to buy and eat food. “They stock all Hispanic items, let’s just go to Delhi.  There is Amol’s on the corner,” Sam countered.

“Cute.  Somehow, I don’t think Amol’s stocks my brand of hair mousse. Wish there was some kind of indie specialty food store over here.”  Sam didn’t miss a beat, “This is the West side sweetie, Catholics don’t do specialty.  Save that hoity toity crap for Oakley.”

We had just bought our Victorian in East Price Hill and I was attempting to embrace my new ‘hood.  The romance of a working class, diverse population filling tree-lined streets with stickball playing, smiling children was one thing; the reality of the mom brigade of screaming toddlers, strip malls, and chain store choices were something else.  We had purchased just outside of the Trifecta; the swath of area between St. Mary’s, St. Williams, and St. Teresa.  The crime was lower in the Trifecta.  We were just down the street from Holy Family where Sam had gone to church and, for a short time, school.  Two atheists stuck in a Catholic, god-oriented neighborhood makes for some comic moments.

I was also struggling to adapt politically. Even our mixed race gay neighbor couple had a ‘Yes on 9′ sign prominently posted in their front yard.  I had learned quickly to keep my politics to myself after wearing my Obama shirt into the very Kroger we were contemplating. “Dumbass–Idiot–Stupid” was what I heard on my very first visit to the newly rehabbed store on Warsaw.  All said with snarls and disgust.  I consoled myself with our view and the fact we were only 6 minutes from Downtown.

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