With November’s election nearly upon us, The Extraordinary Times caught up with David Giffels. Giffels is the acclaimed author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America (2020), which Publishers Weekly calls “a trenchant mix of memoir, reportage, and political analysis.” His other books include the memoirs Furnishing Eternity and All the Way Home, both winners of the Ohioana Book Award, and The Hard Way on Purpose, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice.” His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Parade, The Iowa Review, Esquire, Grantland, and many other publications. He is a professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts creative writing program. We spoke via Zoom: * How have you been getting along since the pandemic started? Personal life has had some silver linings: for example, spending time with my family. I'd normally spend a lot of time just leaving the house and so forth. And there have been unexpected benefits just being together. Most of the time, professionally, it's been a challenge like it is for most of us. My wife and I are both teachers. So we've been adapting to teaching online. Releasing a book in the pandemic has been a challenge and book touring is a whole different experience than any of my previous books. So it's been a mixed bag. * You've been called "the Bard of Akron." How did this moniker come about? How do you feel about it? The New York Times Book Review reviewed my previous book Furnishing Eternity [2018] and referred to me as “the Bard of Akron”. It makes me cringe a little bit, you know, to be tagged that way. That's not to say that I'm not proud of the work I've done writing about my hometown and about the rust belt which has been my topic through most of my books and essays and my work as a journalist. So I wear it with pride, but with an ironic smile on my face. * What inspired you to write Barnstorming Ohio? I knew from long experience as a lifelong resident as of Ohio and as somebody who's been writing about Ohio in different ways that we have this unusually reliable record of choosing the American President. Ohio has accurately voted for the winner in every presidential election except two going back to the 19th century. No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. But more than that, I knew that we have this sort of bellwether spirit and bellwether nature. Ohio embraces a kind of Americanism that is elusive, but that I was sure was out there. And so I spent the year from March 2019 to March 2020 traveling extensively. I drove over 4000 miles around Ohio and talk to more than 100 people to try to put my finger on that elusive Americanism that I would find here. * How did Ohio become the bellwether state? First, there's the quantifiable breakdown of the states into five distinct regions, referred to by political scientists and journalists as “the Five Ohios.” Those regions are the industrial urban northeast, where I live, including Akron, Cleveland, and Youngstown. Then there's the more more conservative southwest centered around Cincinnati (the beginning of the South or the end of the South, depending on which way you're looking at it); the much more rural farm dominated northwest, kind of the beginning of the true American Midwest; then the Appalachian southeast; and finally the center of the state dominated by Columbus, which is a more white-collar urban center. It's the only growing city in Ohio, surrounded by wealthy suburbs and of course also dominated by the culture of the Ohio State University, the third largest campus in the country. Each of those regions votes in distinctly different patterns and that's what makes us unusual. Many states have diversity, but they don't have patterns that can be broken out into five pieces. And each of those five pieces somehow reflects a wider version of the American electorate. So you can't say we're a purple state, even though we're very diverse. What you could say is, we're a red-blue, red-blue, red-blue state and those centers hold. So analysts can make a lot of that. * Barnstorming Ohio for your book, did you encounter any moments of surprising insight?
Something that emerged and just kept finding new permutations was the notion of people as individuals—but I think also Ohio as its nature—feeling overlooked and unlistened to, and frustrated. I think that has its own version when we're nearing a big political season because people want to be heard on issues, they want to be heard on their needs and on their dreams. They want to be heard in big ways, but also in very small ways. We’re in a social media age where people do feel more anonymous and where we don't interact publicly the way we once did. Individual voices are threatened and so I heard over and over and very different versions all across Ohio, both communities and individual people expressing some version of that anxiety and also relief that they were being given an opportunity to speak for themselves. * Will you be voting in-person or by absentee ballot this year? Ohio was an early adapter—and certainly my county, Summit County—to the absentee ballot. I've been voting absentee for a long time and I'm used to it. My household is a well-oiled machine in a time when a lot of people are feeling some uncertainty or even anxiety about voting absentee. But I deliver my ballot by hand just to make sure that it gets there.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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