A regular column in a local publication must rank among the more challenging assignments for a writer. The essays have to be timely and relevant to townspeople, conscious of the present even when not focused on a current event. At the same time, writers of vision and talent want to say something that won’t instantly age like yesterday’s newspaper. Prose style needs to be accessible to a wide readership, while not neglecting more bookish readers, who appreciate literary and cultural references. The writer, naturally, must be a local resident, someone who knows about the place’s past and its politics, economy, and arts scene, and who is acquainted with people and places across town. In other words, a local columnist has to be a lot of things to a lot of people, as well as an interesting personality with an original voice. That’s a tall order.

 

Since 2007, Jan Worth-Nelson has filled that order in Flint, Michigan, where she has written for, and edited, the East Village Magazine. Over time, the discipline of writing a monthly column resulted in a portrait of a struggling city in the Rust Belt, as well as an accumulative memoir. Worth-Nelson, who had lived in Flint for 26 years, established her central theme in her first column. “What does it mean to live in a place for a very long time?” she asks. “What does it mean, particularly, to live in a place for a very long time that is, say, bleak, and at its best, notorious? What does it mean, in other words, to live for a very long time in Flint?” The question is directed at herself as much as to the reader. For Worth-Nelson, living in a city like Flint means taking interest in its people, of course, but also its streets, stores, parks, neighborhoods, architecture, civic organizations, schools, churches, bars, and landscape. It means paying attention to the town’s troubles and failings as much as to its virtues.

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Collected in this book, Worth-Nelson’s columns range widely in subject. Many portray interesting local people, including a man who is kayaking every river in the Saginaw watershed; a woman with a degree in horticulture who promotes urban gardening; Flint expatriate Gordon Young, author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City; the Flint City Derby Girls; and the six-foot tall Miss Madeline calling out the numbers at Drag Queen Bingo night. Other essays are intensely personal, linking individual experiences to public and philosophical concerns. A narrative about her husband falling on a sidewalk sets up one essay’s thesis, summed up in its title, “Life is unendingly fragile.” The essay makes a quick turn to that truth: “Trouble always lurks, just outside peripheral vision. Everything can change in an instant. . . . [T]he possibility of danger stalks us—at every uneven sidewalk, at every pothole, at the corner store, at stop signs and stoplights, in our driveways and garages where video cameras and the neighborhood watch keep sighting shadowy home invaders.” That prescient passage was published in 2012, two years before the Flint Water Crisis turned everything in the city upside down. (Worth-Nelson includes a handful of essays on the crisis that should be counted among the important sources on that public travesty.)

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The public voice in these columns addresses such issues as race, social class, economic changes, and crime. The personal voice speaks of life experiences from childhood to retirement, family, friends, work, art, and marriage. A third voice, one that bespeaks Worth-Nelson’s work as a published poet, dwells on minutiae at home, around town, and beyond. Sometimes she focuses very closely, as in essays about the attic of her old house in Flint, the back yard, the basement, even the junk drawer. Worth-Nelson turns the same poetic eye to details in the urban landscape, describing particular trees, for example, and Chevy in the Hole, a brownfield by the Flint River on the former site of a General Motors factory. Even this poisoned hobo jungle has “a certain austere beauty,” of which one may become aware by learning about its history and potential. That realization and the way the author relates it call to mind nature writers like Aldo Leopold and Terry Tempest Williams, who like Worth-Nelson eschew the simplistic perspective of tourism for a more nuanced land aesthetic. 

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Evocations of Rust Belt cities like Flint require a poetics of space suited to the material circumstances of the locale. Worth-Nelson develops ideas about loss, nostalgia, decline, resilience, identity, and hope through images impressed on her by repeated experience. She confesses to feeling “sorry for abandoned buildings, as if they have a heart.” Even a crumbling Brutalist office tower merits sympathy. “Genesee Towers is butt-ugly and always has been,” Worth-Nelson wrote a few months before its demolition. “Poor ill-fated monstrosity—it might have feelings too, people. How do you think it likes being in architectural hospice, knowing its fate isn’t a morphine syringe but a wrecking ball? Or worse, the ignominy of implosion, collapsing in on itself.” Passages like these present Flint through synecdoche, personification, and other figures of speech that convey empathy, the kind that only comes from long residence in and involvement with a community. 

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Like other recent writing about Flint, including Gordon Young’s Teardown, Kelsey Ronan’s novel Chevy in the Hole, and Sarah Carson’s poetry collection How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan, Worth-Nelson’s collection is as much prologue as elegy. While she expresses grief over losses both public and personal, she looks to the future, encouraging individual and collective effort. “This is what we do, then,” Worth-Nelson concludes, “dearly beloved of Flint. We make what beauty we can, and sometimes that heals our hurts and troubled history.” 

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“When you love a place,” the poet James Wright once wrote, “really and almost hopelessly love it, I think you love it even for its signs of disaster, just as you come to realize how you love the particular irregularities and even the scars on some person’s face.” That’s My Moon Over Court Street is infused with a love of place and people that touches on scars and suggests ways to begin healing a city’s hurts.