Writer and Professor Jane McCafferty Talks About From Milltown to Malltown

 Jane McCafferty, Associate Professor of English at CMU and author of Thank You for the Music and One Heart, discusses her new book, From Milltown to Malltown (Marick Press, 2010). The book, which is a collaboration with poet Jim Daniels and photographer Charlee Brodsky, features Brodsky’s photography of Homestead, PA alongside poetry from Daniels and McCafferty.
 
How did this book project come about?
Charlee Brodsky has been taking photos of Homestead for years and she asked both Jim and I if we’d be interested in responding to the photographs as writers. We both said yes, and she gave us a choice; I’d pick some [photos] and he’d pick some and we just started writing. It was so different for me. It’s almost like when you’re a poet and someone says, “you have to write in sonnet form”—it was such a boundary, such a constraint, and yet you have so much freedom to interpret the photo however you want. I really liked the combination of the freedom and the boundary.
I walked around Homestead a lot with Charlee. In fact, last spring break, I just hung out in Homestead the whole time just to soak up the place. Charlee and I had worked before on projects. I worked on something with her on mental illness; I did something with her called “Seasons” that were just these beautiful stark pictures of seasons and then another one called “Faces” where she took really up-close portraits, and I got to be the writer interpreting these faces, turning them into characters and connecting them. There were exhibits and visitors could go around and read each piece of  writing that corresponded to the photos. I think it’s really fun for writers who are often working alone and just with their own imagination to be invited into a conversation with another artist, with another art form.  We both really liked doing it.
 
You spoke a bit about your collaboration with Charlee; was there any collaboration between you and Professor Daniels on the poems?
Nope. He wrote what he wrote and I wrote what I wrote. Charlee is great about being really open—she totally lets go of the photographs. She completely trusts us. I’ve never given her something and had her say, “That’s not what I meant. That’s not it at all.” She puts the image out there and realizes that any number of people could interpret it in any number of ways. I think if you were so far out there, she might have a problem. There’s one [poem] that’s really kind of crazy—there’s a manikin—and a door on the manikin’s leg. Remember that one?
Yeah.
Inside the door, there’s an Italian lady. That’s pretty surreal, you know? I thought maybe Charlee would say, “Can you do something else?” But she didn’t. She said, “Great.”
 
Can you talk about why you think this book is important for a Pittsburgh audience, and why it might also be important for someone with no knowledge of the region?
What happened in Homestead is really interesting. I think it’s an example of what’s happening all over the country where you have old towns that are getting super-sized out of business; chains move in and swallow up a place. We have this great, massive loss of character going on in the country and that’s what the book is about without hopefully being a classic critique on that. I do personally hate that loss, but as a writer, I was just trying to lay down what I thought rather than making judgment on the Waterfront. Because the Waterfront is what it is. There’s no turning back, so I feel like it’s more like “How to we live with the Waterfront?” And how do we appreciate what’s good about it? But also remember the history that’s been trampled on. We’re so a-historical as a country and so undereducated about our own history; this particular place seemed a great example of something that was still in our face with the smokestacks still there. Charlee’s daughter once asked, “What are they?”
 
Yeah, I’m not from the Pittsburgh region and had no idea what they were. I thought it was just a shopping mall. I asked someone about the smokestacks too and they said they didn’t know, but thought it had something to do with Steel.
Yes, which is sort of classically American. We don’t always understand what came before us. If you’re a Pittsburgher and grew up here, you certainly understand that it was a Steel town. But all of these people who move here, I think they have a very vague idea that Pittsburgh made steel and that there use to be all of these steel mills, but it’s all a very distant memory. Most people don’t know that that the Waterfront is this incredible collision of the past and the present. I think this is happening all over the country.
 
Get your copy of From Milltown to Malltownat the CMU bookstore or visit http://www.marickpress.com/index.php?/milltown-jim-daniels to order a copy online.