Talking Leaves teams up with UB for Rust Belt book talk

While Buffalo locals might wish that the state of their current economy was a product of fiction, its art and cultural society still thrives.

Next week, Main Street bookstore Talking Leaves will combine appreciation for literature with the opportunity to discuss its thematic relation to Buffalo's fall into Rust Belt obscurity.

Nancy Welch, author of "The Road From Prosperity," a collection of short stories about struggling families who lived in Ohio in the 1970s, will be doing a reading from her book as well as signing copies at the Talking Leaves store in the University Heights.

While to Welch the event will just be a reading, she is not here for that reason alone. The event, which is free to everyone, was organized by Kari Winter, a UB associate professor of American studies, and according to bookstore owner Jonathan Welch, this is the first time Talking Leaves is working with UB's American Studies Department to put on an event.

Winter, who worked alongside Welch at the University of Vermont, where Welch is an associate professor of English, thought that the author's insight would provide an interesting element to her class.

"I'll be in Buffalo to meet with classes at SUNY Buffalo taught by Professor Kari Winter," Welch said. "The classes, one graduate, and one undergraduate, are currently reading 'The Road From Prosperity.' "

Welch based her stories on a post-1970s landscape in which families faced joblessness and struggled to maintain their middle-class status. They are the tales of husbands and wives, daughters and sons, who miss their chance at the American dream due to layoffs and shutdowns.

"The stories in my collection mostly chronicle the struggles and aspirations of families in the Ohio rustbelt who were left behind as jobs moved elsewhere," Welch said.

The title is not just a metaphor but also a setting in the book.

"One town where several stories are set is called Prosperity, and while the town used to be plenty prosperous with jobs for all, the shutting down of steel mills and the move of more and more companies to picking up and laying off workers with every up-tick and downturn in the economy means that many people in town are now struggling," said Welch.

Professor Kari Winter hopes to tie the themes of Welch's novel into the material being discussed in her American studies class by comparing it to Buffalo.

"Buffalo is one of many decaying economic cities," Winter said. "The characters in the stories are young people in high school, college, and people having jobs for the first time. They have to deal with issues such as despair of families and suicide. The stories remind me of students I have talked to who come from Western New York."

While the book relates to Buffalo and have its ties to local economy, most of the stories were influenced by Welch's own experiences in the 1990s.

"I wrote these stories over the last decade as I tried to think about the gap between the rhetoric of the late 1990s," Welch said. "All the papers proclaimed an economic boom, bursting stock market, prosperity all around."

When the expected economic boom didn't happen, and her own family was personally affected, Welch was inspired to write her novel.

"I had actually experienced and witnessed in my own family a whole lot of struggle," Welch said. "So what was wrong? Where was this so-called prosperity all the papers and politicians were talking about in the 1990s but that I couldn't see in the Midwest towns where I was living and where I was from?"

The author hopes that her written work will inspire the same sort of questioning, and next week she will read one of her most touching stories which most directly relates to Buffalo.

Talking Leaves hosts events with authors a few times a month, and varying from book signings, to readings, to discussions at both Talking Leaves locations. The signings typically attract smaller crowds, from 10 to 25 people, but Welch said that numbers can vary from as few as two to three people to as many as 75. Talking Leaves is hoping for a good turnout for the upcoming event.

"I can't say for sure but I'm guessing that the 'left behind' feeling I had in Ohio was shared by people in Buffalo who also try to get by day to day when there's no guarantee of steady work, steady love, and all the rest." said Welch.

The talk at Talking Leaves' 3158 Main St. location is on Feb. 15 at 7 p.m.