Ashtabula

At MobyLives, Paul Oliver has written a nice piece on Ashtabula, Ohio and its local Occupy movement.

While Wall St. is certainly the fortress of everything the movement is fighting against, a city like Ashtabula is everything that the movement is or should be fighting for. The 99% is a wide-ranging demographic, but at its bottom is the forgotten mill and port towns. Places like Ashtabula, Ohio or York, Pennsylvania.

Though I've never been there, Ashtabula will always have a place in my heart, as it was the setting of my first published story, "Ectoplasm". (The inspiration for the story was the same Dylan lyric that Oliver mentions.) Clearly, the same economic conditions that drove my story continue today, and have even worsened. I'm not sure that my protagonist would have still had his teaching job in 2011.