Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is one of my favorite cities on the planet. (disclaimer: my planet consists of the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Ireland, which are the only countries I’ve been to) Still, I went to college in Pittsburgh and I like it a whole lot. Last month, the Carnegie Mellon Creative Writing Department flew me up to their fair city to be the Distinguished Alumni Reader in the Adamson Visiting Writers Series. It was early February and very, very cold – as in about 5 degrees when I landed. The cold, clear air made for some great window seat photography.
Obviously, I was drawn to shots of the downtown gathering around those three rivers, but then, as the plane flew out to land at the airport, I was struck by the patterns of subdivisions in the snow. The contrasting landscapes made me think of two things. First, The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler – a book I read as a text in a class I took at Carnegie Mellon. Second, my own essay (of course!) Rowing through the Ruins, which is about taking that class – Reading the Built Landscape – and rowing down the Allegheny River every morning. Think about the different experiences one might have in either of these cityscapes, what each one might do to the soul.
Erin E. Tocknell 