The old neighborhood was the place that Joe Mackall left. It was a place where everyone's parents worked at the factory at the dead end of the street, where the Catholic church operated like a religious city hall, and where he grew up vowing to get out as soon as he could and to shed his blue-collar beginnings and failed, flawed religion.
Joe Mackall is a professor of English at Ashland University, as well as a cofounder and editor of the nonfiction journal River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and on NPR¿s ¿Morning Edition,¿ and he is the author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish.
