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William Black’s writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and Hotel Amerika. He teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and is cofounder of the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he lives.
I was eleven the summer the fire broke out. In the spring of 1967 my mother, my father, and I had moved to Umberland, Pennsylvania. An old miners’ neighborhood sprawled across the southern half of town, and its residents burned their garbage in a used-up strip mine, a pit of shale and sandstone scraped clean by bulldozers.
March 2013All that fall and into the winter, bulldozers and cranes cleared away the wooded top of Ransom Mountain, knocking down trees and shoveling dirt and rock into dump trucks, leaving behind a flat, barren expanse. Come spring, we were told, the mountain’s top and back would be a landfill that three counties would pay to use, creating jobs in town for the first time since the mines had shut down. But no one I knew thought very much about that.
February 2012Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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