Patrick Kerin
I believe blogs and other online publishing options can help support a meaningful and vital literary culture. While most blog entries are short, I hold to a contrarian view that this need not always be the case, and that some readers are willing to read lengthier material in the blog format. I hope you enjoy Buckeye Muse.
About the Author
I am a writer, poet, and teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio. My writing career began in high school with reporting sports news for a small community paper and later working as a sports stringer for the Cincinnati Enquirer. I majored in English in college, graduating from the University of Kentucky with an English degree and a core concentration in film studies. While at the University of Kentucky I took creative writing classes taught by Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall, and Percival Everett.
After college I worked as both a full time and freelance journalist in Cincinnati, writing a wide range of news and feature stories and covering topics as diverse as Cincinnati municipal government, fair housing, local business, education, social justice initiatives, historic sites and structures, and local history. It was a great education to wander the city, meeting many different people and seeing places and observing events that make for the vibrant life of a community. One of my all time favorite stories to write was an in-depth profile of Al “Wallpaper” Wolff, the last of Eliot Ness’s Untouchables. Another was a series of articles on a local woman who had visions of the Virgin Mary and created a storm of excitement among some in Cincinnati’s Catholic community.
After a number of years in journalism I returned to school, earned a secondary school teaching license and taught middle school English, later earning a master’s in secondary education and also a certificate in post-secondary adult literacy, both from the University of Cincinnati. I currently work as an adjunct instructor and field service professor for the University of Cincinnati’s College of Education.
This varied background in writing and teaching has given me experience with many different disciplines related to language: literary criticism and literary history; creative writing; journalism and creative nonfiction; reading pedagogy, literacy, and adult developmental reading and writing. My focus as a writer now is on creating poetry and also writing posts here on my blog.
About the Blog
Buckeye Muse is a blog focused on Ohio and Ohio Valley writers and and writing, past and present, and Ohio Valley literary culture. Writers featured range from canonical figures to lesser known authors, and the blog will also feature songwriters, journalists and historians. Nonfiction writing, including works of history, essays, journalism, memoirs and primary source material relating to Ohio history are also featured here. In addition, entries will include features on sites of literary and historical significance in Ohio and the Ohio Valley.
Entries on specific authors will range from biographical data to examinations of specific aspects of life and career to examinations of influence and place in Midwestern and American culture. Entries on works may be short appreciations or meditations on the work or more full-scale literary criticism.
Another feature of the blog is an occasional section called "Beyond the Books," in which significant events in Ohio Valley history or famous or infamous individuals are profiled. These will highlight larger national trends and changes in American culture that are part of the context in which American authors with Ohio Valley connections worked.
The authors featured have some kind of connection to the region, being either born and reared in the Ohio Valley, or having spent some time in this midland section of the United States. Works specifically relating to the Ohio Valley and its culture are also featured.
In addition, information about readings, book festivals and other literature-related events will be posted whenever possible. One of the goals of this blog is to promote literary culture in the region and to make people aware of the area's rich culture and cultural history.
All of my blog material is copyright-protected.
Help Support Buckeye Muse
If you enjoy my content, please consider supporting Buckeye Muse. Thank you, for all the support so far. Your donations help keep the site alive and provide the coffee that fuels the writing!
Wonderful blog, Patrick. I hope you can keep this going for many years. Sorry that I haven’t met you but hope I can sometime soon. Thanks again,
Bob Kennedy
Great blog, great stories! Keep them coming, Patrick.
Randy McNutt
Thanks, Randy! Really great to hear from you. I was wondering if you had gotten a chance to check this out. Look forward to featuring you and Cheryl and the books you both have written. Speak with you soon, and thanks again!
A correction: I never taught at the Bread Loaf School of English; I was a Scholar in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writer’s conference. Please amend the entry which lists that. Thanks Richard Hague
Thanks for the information. I shall amend for my sins! 🙂
Thanks for following The Immortal Jukebox. I hope you will enjoy the wide variety of music featured and perhaps make some discoveries. I usually post once a week and your comments are welcomed. Regards and good luck with all your projects. Thom
Thanks, Tom. I was already following but the posts were coming into my google email, so I clicked to see it come up in the wordpress feed. I have really enjoyed all your posts—I guess I am getting some education about the mechanics of wordpress today.
Thanks for this blog! I am an American journalist and author. I was born in Steubenville in 1954. I am interested in learning more about my great grandfather, John Manley Caldwell, of Wellsvillle. Do know anyone who knows much about Wellsville in the early to mid 20th century?
Thanks! I’m glad you like this.I have not been to Wellsville myself, but I looked up the town on Wikipedia, and I saw a work of local history referenced at the bottom of that entry that had a phone number attached. Perhaps you can order a copy of this book. I would recommend contacting the city offices for leads on local history sources there–the head of the local historical society, if there is one, or residents who might be resources. The local library might have a local history or genealogy section–I have found that it is not unusual for small communities to have one of these in the local library. Census records can also hold valuable information. I hope these things can help you with your search, and hope you can actually get to the town itself and get “out on the ground” and see what you can find. Good luck with your search, and thanks again for your comment and blog visit!
I stumbled across your blog on Sherwood Anderson´s time in Elyria, Ohio today. It was so beautifully written and absorbing that I spent most of my afternoon reading it. Window cleaning can wait. Anderson was one of my first beloved writers. Winesburg remains one of books I re-read through the years. I was astounded when I learned that an Elyria apartment I lived in during the mid-80s was just two doors down from Anderson´s house! I used to walk down the street often in the evening and felt its sense of history, never far away in Elyria. As you wrote, it is a place where the past is near. I first saw the town´s beautiful square near dusk during a February snowfall in the late 70s. I felt as if time had slipped, like a temporal chutes and ladders game, and I was in the past. This was when the old Courthouse was still the county seat and the buildings surrounding the square were still close to their original state. Thank you for your article. Because of it, I´m going to take another walk in the square and down 7th street. It´s only 20 miles away from me now and many years. I look forward to reading your other work on this site and telling my friends about you.
What a beautiful note! Thank you for everything you wrote here. It’s wonderful to hear your memories of Elyria and all of your connections to the town. I would love to see it in all the seasons. I can certainly imagine how evocative the square would be during a winter snowfall. I hope you have a fun return trip to Elyria—I had to pause my series on Elyria this year in large part due to some outside demands, but it will resume later this fall. You really made my heart glow with your delightful response–it means a lot to me. Hope you enjoy the other content on my blog and thanks for getting the word out!
I echo the thoughts of Teresa James in regard to “beautifully written and absorbing.” Thank you for the time and thought you put into the Anderson features. I’m from Elyria and grew up on E. 4th St. I knew Anderson had lived in town but didn’t know the exact address. So, that was important to know, but I also appreciated your psychological insights into his possible motivations for many of his actions as they pertained to living and working in Elyria. I shared the house photo and a few of your thoughts regarding his writing in the attic and such on this Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/groups/loraincountyhistoricalphotos, and it garnered a lot of attention. Thanks again!
Thank you so much! I tremendously enjoyed my visit to Elyria and look forward to returning. I’m at work on the third post in the series, which concerns his social life in Elyria, then will examine his famous fugue walk to Cleveland, and I will conclude it with two shorter features on what he wrote while in Elyria and what his two return visits to town were like. Thank you also for sharing this information on Facebook–I had noticed a big uptick in interest in this material and was curious to find out what had happened. Many thanks once again, and I will start following your page, which I find fascinating and appreciate. It’s great to see folks preserving history and community memory.
With kind regards and much gratitude,
Patrick Kerin
ps, I included links to your site buckeymuse.com also.
I recently was given the book, “Home Again With Me”, by James Whitcomb Riley. The illustrator was Howard Chandler Christy, and the book visually is beautiful. I was doing some research on Riley, attempting to find out more about this particular book/poem, which was written in 1908, quite awhile after his more popular poems had been written. I have been unable to find out anything specifically about this book—who the inspiration for it was, as I know he didn’t marry or have children, what the critics thought about it, etc. The Wikipedia article on him had a lot of other specifics on his life and inspirations, but nothing about this one. I happened upon a piece you had written about your visit to his family home, and I really enjoyed your writing style, and the information that you shared. I wondered if you had ever come across information about “Home Again With Me” or had any ideas about a more specific source I might be able to learn more from? I am always interested in the stories behind the poems, paintings, books, etc. Thanks for sharing, if you happen to have any more info.
Hello! Thank you for your comments and compliments! I appreciate your interest in Riley and thank you for visiting my blog to read about him. By this point he was in the last years of his career and, as you noted, a lot of his best known work had appeared years before. There was always a lot of repackaging of Riley’s verse into different formats for special editions, especially gift editions, and by this point Riley was a kind of American living treasure. I am not sure if the poem was written in 1908 or was a republishing featuring the Christy illustrations.
Riley always had deep affection for his hometown and native region and for his family. There is an irony to his career–the man who celebrated the small town Midwest and its bucolic ways spent many years on the go, always checking railroad timetables and in communication with publicists and booking agents and the like. He also had problems with alcohol. Riley had determined to be a success and he made this happen–but it certainly came at a cost. Another sad aspect of his family life, aside from the loss of his mother when he was a young man, was that the relationship between Riley and his father was strained and was never resolved before his father died.
I have not been able to find any information about this poem in a couple of sources that I have examined. I am not sure off the top of my head how many poems Riley published in his lifetime. It may be close to a thousand or more–his Collected Poems is a mighty doorstopper of a book. It could be that there is some discussion of this poem somewhere in early Riley literary criticism, but he is not the kind of writer who invites deep scrutiny in our age. However, there is an excellent biography of Riley that appeared in 1999—James Whitcomb Riley: A Life by Elizabeth J. Van Allen. It is a good biography, and it has helped to bring some attention to Riley. I could not find any mention of this poem in it, but if you are interested in Riley I certainly recommend it.
Sorry I couldn’t be of more help in regard to this poem. Thanks once again for contacting me and for sharing your interest in Riley and his work. I have also been struck by the visual appeal of many of Riley’s books. He took a special interest in how they were printed and edited and the artwork chosen to illustrate them.
Patrick Kerin