Contemporary Authors

• Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood Bauhan (Peterborough, NH), 2016

• http://www.paulhertneky.com/ - Paul Hertneky

  Over twenty-five years, Paul Hertneky has written stories, essays, and scripts for the Boston Globe, Athens News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ​New Hampshire Union Leader, NBC News, The Comedy Channel, Gourmet, Eating Well, Traveler’s Tales, The Exquisite Corpse, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Adbusters and many more. His work centers on culture, food, industry, the environment, and travel, winning him a Solas Award, and two James Beard Award nominations. In 2016, He was named one of "5 over 50" notable authors by Poets & Writers Magazine. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he serves on the faculty of Chatham University.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hertneky

  Paul Hertneky
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Paul Hertneky is an American journalist and author best known for his 2016 book Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood, about the Baby boomers he grew up with in the rust belt mill town of Ambridge, Pennsylvania, where he was once a steel worker.

  He is a member of the faculty of Chatham University.[1]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Childhood and education
  2 Career
  3 Rust Belt Boy
  4 References
  5 External links
  Childhood and education[edit]
  Hertneky was born in Pittsburgh[2] and reared in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in a family of Czech/Slovak/Hungarian heritage.[1][3] His father worked for the American Bridge Company, the company from which Ambridge takes its name.

  Hertneky graduated from Ambridge Area High School in 1973, the University of Pittsburgh and Bennington College.[1]

  Hertneky and his wife, Robbie, settled in Hancock, New Hampshire, where they lived for almost 20 years.[2]

  Career[edit]
  Hertneky worked for a steel mill during college, then took a job at a trucking company, before moving to Massachusetts to become a journalist.[1][4]

  Hertneky has worked as a freelance writer and editor.[2]

  Rust Belt Boy[edit]
  The Pittsburgh Post Gazette describes the essays that comprise Rust Belt Boy as a series of 26 vignettes, that, taken as a whole, "form an homage to a lost way of life" through "incantatory writing."[5]

  National Book Award finalist, Sy Montgomery calls it "An essential but overlooked portrait of America's blue collar heart" that "deserves to become a classic."

  The Keene Sentinel called Rust Belt Boy "an unexpected journey of discovery, a journey of often bittersweet delights."

• http://www.bauhanpublishing.com/rust-belt-boy/ - Bauhan Publishing

  Over twenty-five years, Paul Hertneky has written stories, essays, and scripts for the Los Angeles ProheadshotB&WTimes, Boston Globe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, NBC News, The Comedy Channel, Gourmet, Eating Well, Traveler’s Tales, The Exquisite Corpse, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Adbusters, and many more. His work centers on culture, food, industry, the environment, and travel, winning him a Solas Award, and two James Beard Award nominations. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he serves on the faculty of Chatham University.

• Keystone Crosstones - http://crossroads.newsworks.org/index.php/local/keystone-crossroads/94107-a-rust-belt-boy-reflects-on-changing-hometown

  MAY 31, 2016
  A 'Rust Belt Boy' reflects on changing hometown
  play
  A 'Rust Belt Boy' reflects on changing hometown
  0:00/4:33
  mute
  In his new book, Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood,” Paul Hertneky writes a nostalgic tale of growing up in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.(Image courtesy of Esther Honig)
  In his new book, Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood,” Paul Hertneky writes a nostalgic tale of growing up in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.(Image courtesy of Esther Honig)
  Eleanor Klibanoff, WPSU
  BY ELEANOR KLIBANOFF, WPSU

  ABOUT FOLLOW CONTACT

  Facebook
  Twitter
  Mail
  More
  Everything you need to know about Ambridge, Pennsylvania is in the name. Once home to the American Bridge Company, Ambridge sits about 15 miles north of Pittsburgh, across the Ohio river from Aliquippa. To an outsider, it looks like any former steel town. But for Paul Hertneky, it's something else entirely.

  "Sons and daughters lucky enough to feel attached to a distinct hometown know it works its way under our skin and into our being," writes Hertneky in his new book, "Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood."

  It's a memoir about growing up in a steel town as the U.S. lost its grip on the industry. The story is about Ambridge and Hertneky, but it will sound familiar to anyone who grew up during the industrial boom in Pennsylvania, and beyond. And for those who came of age or arrived after the bust, it provides context for those 'good old days' everyone's always talking about.

  Ambridge today

  As part of his book tour, Hertneky came back to Ambridge and he gave me a tour of the book's setting. Many of the spots mentioned in the book are no longer there: the once-vibrant downtown is quiet, the mills are abandoned and all signs of the American Bridge Company are erased.

  "There was a massive building here until about six months ago," said Hertneky, pointing to a large lot covered in rubble. "It was the office building for the American Bridge Corporation, and my father worked in there as a draftsman."

  We walked around the vacant lot, Hertneky looking for a brick to take home as a final memory of the place that defined this town for decades.

  "On this site is where draftsmen drew the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Empire State Building, the San Francisco Bay Bridge," he said. "All these iconic buildings, the Sears Tower in Chicago, they were drawn in this town, in this building."

  As a writer, Hertneky felt drawn to these Ambridge stories, but he resisted writing them. He didn't want to write about the town when it was at its lowest. He wanted to wait until there were signs of a comeback.

  rust belt boy 02

  Author Paul Hertneky looks through the rubble left on the former lot of the American Bridge Corporation in of Ambridge, Pennsylvania. (Image courtesy of Esther Honig)

  A vision for the future

  That came in 2006 with the arrival of an Australian businessman interested in investing in abandoned industrial sites. Hertneky, living in New Hampshire at the time, came to town and wrangled a lunch meeting.

  "He asked for steamed milk and honey," Hertneky recalls. "I thought, wow, milk and honey. That's what all of these people came here looking for. I looked into the German enclaves and saw, these are people who came here in the 1800s, looking to fulfill their vision. George Washington appeared in the 1700s, he had a vision. J.P. Morgan came and bought all the rest of this in 1904, he had a vision. Now, maybe we have a fourth visionary."

  While the Australian set out to make a new Ambridge, Hertneky set out to remember the old. And his book has been more succesful than the work of the supposed fourth visionary, which slowed to a crawl after the market collapse in 2008.

  Telling the story of the past proved easier than trying to rebuild the future. Each chapter of Rust Belt Boy weaves Hertneky's personal experiences into the larger history of the town. A bar fight with a steel mill worker turns into a story about the union protests of the 1930s. Corruption and politics collide when the author spends a summer working as a Senate page. And a mouthwatering chapter about pierogies is actually a reflection on the immigrants that built Ambridge from the ground up.

  As Hertneky lived it, Ambridge was defined by those immigrants who arrived before him and the expats who left as he did. Many of his peers didn't want to leave, but the closing of the steel mills forced them to look for work elsewhere.

  "You could see classmates just disappearing and going away," said Hertneky. "Going to California, going to Texas, going to Florida, going to the Carolinas. There was work, it was warmer, all those sorts of things."

  Hertneky was, from a young age, eager to get out and see the world. He went to the University of Pittsburgh and, after a stint in the steel mills, found his way to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He describes Cambridge as one letter — and a world away — from Ambridge.

  Those who left, those who stayed

  He hasn't lived in Ambridge since and doesn't foresee living there in the future. His optimism about the future of the town is largely from the perspective of an outside observer. Everything that has happened since steel — the slow brownfield revitalization, the arrival of an Episcopal seminary, the small but growing antiques market — happened without him.

  That's something Hertneky acknowledges, writing, "For three hundred years, western Pennsylvania, like the entire industrial heartland, was shaped by newcomers. To some extent that's still true. But like never before, its vitality comes from those who have stayed...Rescuing the Rust Belt, they are my heroes."

Rust Belt Boy
Publishers Weekly.
263.18 (May 2, 2016): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Rust Belt Boy
Paul Hertneky. Bauhan, $21.95 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-87233-222-5
Essayist Hertneky focuses his first book on his childhood in the steel town of Ambridge, Pa., "with its ethnic enclaves and round-the-clock
factories." He combines his memories with sections on the history of the town to produce a memoir that is both a coming-of-age story and a
social history of the growth, death, and rebirth of a rust belt community. He talks lovingly about the strong role Catholicism played in his family
during the 1960s, where he "felt embraced at the heart of this world where children were seen as divine gifts." He also provides a fascinating look
at how the town itself was founded in the spirit of communal millennialism embodied by the Harmony Society, a group with origins in Germany
that existed in Pennsylvania from 1805 to 1905. He is honest, insightful, and empathetic about the rough life of many of the people who worked
in nearby Aliquippa's steel works, which "gobbled up mile and mile of shoreline." Most successfully, Hertneky depicts his own trajectory from
the town to college and beyond in parallel with the history of Ambridge's "grand schemes and redemptive dreams." (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rust Belt Boy." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452884037&it=r&asid=05176a1a62135aa6dcd0e744d7c70c49. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452884037

• The Los Angeles Review
  http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-rust-belt-boy-stories-of-an-american-childhood-by-paul-hertneky/
  Word count: 787

  BOOK REVIEW: RUST BELT BOY: STORIES OF AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD BY PAUL HERTNEKY

  04f5df5a2bc8aeb9d3b0cc3c40fb2d8c
  Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood
  Paul Hertneky
  Bauhan Publishing, May 2016
  ISBN-13: 978-0872332225
  $21.95; 224 pp.
  Reviewed by Renée K. Nicholson

  “Like tempered steel, the locals have been made sharper and stronger through extreme stress.” Paul Hertneky, in his memoir, Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood begins at the end, locating us in current-day Ambridge, Pennsylvania, a town on the western outskirts of Pittsburgh. He brings us to this place to take us back in time, showing us how this small industrial town grew from a tiny outpost. Living in the rust belt, in “a border town between the Northeast and Midwest,” Hertneky’s parents, children of immigrants, met, married, and built their life in shadows of industry and manufacturing. Ambridge, we find out, was named after the American Bridge Company, and its residents identify as “Bridgers.”

  Peppered with reportage-like segments and historical accounts mixed with personal narrative, Hertneky places himself both within Ambridge and outside it, using place as the thread that holds his narrative together. In Hertneky’s writing, not only does a sense of place matter, a sense of this particular place matters to the story that unfolds there. “The sidewalks of Ambridge in the 1960s were jammed with pedestrians running their weekly errands. And, on most evenings, Merchant Street, lined with shops, bars, and restaurants, gleaming with shiny cars and neon signs, drew families that walked arm-in-arm as they might in Naples or Athens.” The Ambridge of Hertneky’s youth teems with civic life, church life, family, and possibility not yet tamped down by the shadow of the large manufacturing plants. Ambridge is also characterized by the many immigrant groups that make up its hardworking population, from all over Eastern Europe as well as Italy and Germany. Neighborhoods come to take on the character of these homelands, becoming little enclaves. The town itself reveres certain things collectively, church, family and football chief among them, bringing cohesion to the many ethnicities.

  The book’s structure strikes a balance between essay collection and memoir. Beginning and ending with the frame of current-day Ambridge, and in between moving back in time to the young adult Hertneky working shifts at one of the manufacturing plants, the book then moves even deeper back into history, both of the town and of his family. From this vantage point, Hertneky presents a more linear trajectory of childhood, college, first jobs and loves, towards present day. Each essay functions both as a stand-alone unit and part of a larger narrative that lends itself to a linear reading. At times Rust Belt Boy covers and retraces familiar ground, and although there is repetition, it’s easier to follow his emotional threads by reading it as memoir or narrative arc from start to finish.

  Parts of the book that stand out as particularly evocative writing include Hertneky’s writing about the smells and tastes of Ambridge’s traditional foods. In describing the delight of eating pierogi cooked by volunteers at his Catholic elementary school, Hertneky writes, “With my fork I cut the firm potato pillow in half, exposing the fine filling” while also ordering extra kraut from the grandmother’s wielding spoons.

  Though many of his Baby Boomer childhood memories read idyllic, there are two things that tug on Hertneky’s narration. The first is the impending and then actual collapse of industry in Ambridge. The second is Hertneky’s own wanderlust. While he feels the ties to home and family acutely, much of what Hertneky writes about circles around the need to leave Ambridge. Even the pull to stay near his high school love is not enough to fasten Hertneky to his hometown, or even the Pittsburgh region. By the end, we witness his escape: “I packed everything I owned into the Civic and hit the road,” Hertneky writes of his younger self.

  Even as Hertneky physically leaves Ambridge, he feels its imprint on him—from the shoes he wears that he finds out of step with the fashion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he first travels, to the accent he takes from the town in which he grew up. The latter never leaves him. Hertneky paints a vivid picture in the early chapters that come to fruition late in the book as the revelation that he will always be “a son’s attachment.” We see his view of Ambridge from a local’s perspective, with the clarity that only distance can clarify.

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazett
  http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2016/05/22/Rust-Belt-Boy-A-fond-memoir-of-Ambridge-the-way-it-was/stories/201605220052
  Word count: 677

  BOOK REVIEW
  'Rust Belt Boy': A fond memoir of Ambridge, the way it was
  May 22, 2016 12:00 AM
  Rust Belt Boy Paul Hertneky.jpg
  Rust Belt Boy jacket (2).jpg
  Rust Belt Boy Paul Hertneky.jpg Paul Hertneky.
  Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
  Paul Hertneky.
  By Stuart Sheppard
  The best stories of place make the exotic sound familiar, or the familiar sound exotic. Paul Hertneky has managed to achieve both in his debut collection, “Rust Belt Boy.” Like Hemingway reliving the Paris of his youth in “A Moveable Feast,” Mr. Hertneky revisits the place of his birth, Ambridge, and traces the arc of this town’s life and death, alongside memories of his own childhood and evolution into manhood.

  "RUST BELT BOY"
  By Paul Hertneky
  Bauhan ($21.95).
  This is not an easy journey, as nothing is harder to be than a fair witness to your own history. But Mr. Hertneky is up to the challenge, recounting the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of an American city that, in its particularity, became emblematic of such a great swath of this country known as the Rust Belt.

  The 26 pieces that comprise the book are really vignettes, not stories. Taken as a whole, they form an homage to a lost way of life. The best of these, like “Horns in the Hollow,” offer incantatory writing: “Maybe it’s just the wind whistling through my woodshed, but some mornings I swear I hear the air horns from the trains and factories in the Ohio Valley, echoing through the hollows and the decades that have passed.”

  However, instead of merely waxing lyrical, Mr. Hertneky goes on to describe the ugly daily routine of working in the Armco Steel mill, and how after his shift he is sitting in a bar, dealing with a drunken co-worker, hankering to fight him. This is a world in which the bucolic is always threatened by the toxic, whether the land, or the minds of its inhabitants.

  Mr. Hertneky recounts how the community evolved from a utopian society in the mid-19th century called Economy, to rise and fall with the industrial fortunes of the steel industry. Although informative, some of these sections read like history lessons. He is at his strongest describing the ritualistic details of his Catholic upbringing, the strange customs of his family, and how all of these were fostered by the community of immigrants that gave Ambridge its unique ethos and ability to survive.

  The best writers of place are like good tour bus drivers, who decide which things to stop and show the reader in detail, and which to show in passing. There are times in “Rust Belt Boy” when you wish the author would take a more intimate look at something. For example, the episode concerning his Uncle Charlie — who drinks bottles of seawater hidden in his closet, which eventually kill him — is glossed over too quickly.

  In other instances, we are given too many pedantic details about trips to visit girlfriends, and editorializing about “self-serving politicians, company yes-men and union bosses,” which becomes annoying tautology.

  But Mr. Hertneky’s obsession with food, especially pierogi (called pirohi by his Slovak family), is gloriously told with the kind of transcendent writing usually associated with sexual awakenings: “During Mass, the promise and seduction became unbearable. I stared at the ornamental sacristy and my eyes glossed over, seeing Jesus feeding hordes of followers by multiplying pirohi instead of loaves and fishes.”

  He also captures his neighbors’ personalities with profound succinctness, such as “The Polish Mrs. Lacarno ... perched on a stool at night, smoking Larks and listening to talk radio.”

  Eliminating superfluous details, and concentrating on the things that made Ambridge such an exotically familiar city, would have created a more perfect book. But this honest journey of self-exploration is able to stoke the coals of those defining childhood memories which lay dormant in all of us.

• Pittsburgh City Paper
  http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/an-ambridge-kid-looks-back-in-rust-belt-boy/Content?oid=1916235
  Word count: 465

  BOOK REVIEWS + FEATURES
  April 27, 2016 BOOKS » BOOK REVIEWS + FEATURES

  EMAIL
  PRINT
  FAVORITE
  SHARE
  An Ambridge kid looks back in Rust Belt Boy
  Paul Hertneky’s memoir excavates his hometown’s past
  By Kim Lyons
  Paul Hertneky’s new book Rust Belt Boy (Bauhan Publishing, $21.95) is a nostalgic account of growing up in Ambridge even as the narrator senses its coming decline.

  Before even opening the book, the reader is struck with what one hopes is an intentional metaphor: The grinning face of Hertneky as a child graces the front cover, while the back of his head is on the reverse. This evokes the two-faced Roman god Janus, ever gazing into the future while simultaneously looking to the past.

  That theme is key to Rust Belt Boy. Hertneky delves into the historical significance of events he had no inkling about as a kid, sometimes going on tangents that lead a little far afield, but making us appreciate why he’s heading there.

  click to enlarge
  artside_17.jpg
  Hertneky uses one of the hardest-hit cities in Western Pennsylvania to tell the familiar story of the baby boomers, who left cities in droves as manufacturing jobs declined only to return with a better appreciation for their hometowns.

  Hertneky offers wistful, almost reverent descriptions of the people and places of his Beaver County hometown, from the smell and noise of the hot mill at Armco Steel to the mysteries of the Laughlin Memorial Library.

  And the chapter on pierogies — or as he refers to them, pirohi — is as vivid an example of food porn as you’ll find. At the same time, the adult narrator acknowledges the cultural significance of the buttery treat the child protagonist is devouring:

  “I cut the firm potato pillow in half, exposing the fine filling placed there by ancient hands, refined through generations of argument, fulfilled by sunlight, pitchforks and cauldrons of boiling water … the first bite made me close my eyes.”

  This hindsight appreciation of history and the importance of preserving ethnic identity is woven throughout. The writer, now a lecturer at Chatham University, tells of his failed attempts at football, law school, even as a steel worker. None of his defeats are for lack of trying, but are informed by a kind of ennui that represents the mood of what was soon to become the Rust Belt. Getting the work done was never the problem.

  By the end of Rust Belt Boy, as Hertneky turns his gaze toward the future of Ambridge and the region, we have a greater appreciation of their industrial past, a place Hertneky left but never really left behind.