"WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOEM?"

By Pat Jarrett

I find that a lot of photographers see Ohio as an endless sea of dead malls and salt-crusted cars on fire in front of rusted-out steel plants. It's more than that. The Ohio I know is tough and unforgiving. I never got a trophy for participation. I was never told that I was any more special than anyone else. The Ohio I know chews you up early so that when the shit hits the fan it's not as bad as it could have been — and as I grow older I'm thankful for that scar tissue.

The Ohio I know is full of the best friends anyone could ask for. Ohio friends are friends for life. Sure, we have our disagreements and maybe we fought on the playground in the fourth grade, but after thirty years I know I can count on my Ohio friends. They are bedrock. They are the friends who will make sure you aren't making a terrible decision. They will laugh at you right before they reach down to pick you up and dust you off and buy you a beer. They will fight anyone who means to hurt you.

I started this project when my maternal grandmother died. I continued to document through her husband's (my grandfather's) death, his funeral and the selling of his home in Stow that he bought when he came back from WWII. I photographed the loss of other family members, the return of my sister to Akron from Portland, Oregon, the birth of my nephew and the struggles of my family and friends.

Northeast Ohio doesn't have the luxury of a geographical crown jewel. No ocean or mountain range, no grand desert or majestic vistas really to speak of. Ohio's color palette is a shade above grey most of the year, and then there's construction and humidity. Because of this I feel like the people there really have to lock arms, look each other in the eye squarely and go on.

This body of work was inspired by my leaving northeast Ohio and the question I have been asked since I left, "When are you coming home?"

A TAVERN IN THE SHIRE

By L.S. Quinn

In the movies, hobbits have it pretty good. Peter Jackson's Bilbo Baggins lives in a flagstone-floored, beeswax-polished cottage in the Cotswolds, and it just happens to be underground. You can smell the lemon oil and pipe tobacco just looking at the screen. The Shire is filled with birdsong and sunlight, cows lowing on their way home from the pasture, hairy-footed hobbits folk-dancing in the grass.

But in my junior and senior years at the University of Akron, I worked in a real hobbit hole: Mr. Bilbo's, at 207 South Main Street. Just down the hill from campus and the now-defunct Inventors Hall of Fame, it was a low, half-timbered building, dark all day long and filthy. The walls were filled with paintings copied from the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit, coated in cigarette tar and half an inch of dust. We were extremely proud of those paintings, because they were Art.

The patrons were also dark and filthy. Cam was a stocky, bearded, leather-vested Mayflower Manor resident, who came in every day at exactly 4:37 to play "Low Rider" on the jukebox and get quietly drunk on $1.25 Buds. Every single day. I still flinch when the drummer starts hitting that cowbell.

Libby lived in a Communist homeless shelter and came in on Tuesdays to have the $2.75 grilled cheese sandwich and chicken velvet soup lunch special. She was always a bit twitchy. It turned out to be scabies. Tiny mites digging aimless patterns under her skin, leaving her endlessly scratching.

On Thursdays, a loud and loutish bunch of historic re-enactors would come in from their illicit practice on the UA soccer field to drink water, not tip, and creep on the female staff. They fit right in, in a hobbit-themed bar, with their fake swords and shields, their medieval-level filthiness. The women with cloaks made from Salvation Army fur, moth-chewed and shredding at the seams; the men in secondhand scrubs decorated with made-up coats of arms. One would pull out a pair of needle-nose pliers and start knitting homemade chain mail; another would order a single plate of wings for eighteen people to share. They smelled of cigarettes, old sweat, and unwashed laundry. They loved the past, but they loved Guinness, pot, and violence a lot more.

But Mark was a unique kind of dirty. We actually wouldn't let Mark past the doormat. He would come in, knee-deep in mud, carrying a shovel and a five-gallon bucket, and mutter, "Gmmmbrz," which meant, "A bottle of Guinness, in a paper bag, please." He had streaks of reddish mud up and down his shirt and caked over his forearms, and he smelled like stagnant water. We never knew where he came from or what cave he took that bottle to when he left.

Most of this clientele did not tip lavishly. Working a weekday afternoon, I might make eight dollars. Or three. Or negative forty (wage theft — credit card tips are easy for managers to make off with). Mostly I sat around drawing endlessly repeating patterns on my order pad. Occasionally a random patron would tip me something truly heartwarming, like a coaster with an obscene drawing, or a homemade suede flogger. The one guy I gave my number to at Mr. Bilbo's told me he liked golden showers on our first and only date.

But one day Mark sort of ducked his head and half-smiled as I handed him his paper bag of Guinness, and pulled another brown paper lunch bag out of his backpack. "Ibrotchusmthin." The bag was heavy — very heavy — and, like Mark, very dirty. I took it, somewhat gingerly, and unrolled the top to find the gleam of still-wet, freshly washed porcelain.

"I'm an archaeologist," Mark said. "Archaeologist" was the first fully formed word I'd ever heard him say. "I dig in the canal bed, under the Civic Theatre. We used to be the toy capital of the world."

"Did we?" I said, distracted, poking through the bag. I shook the clinking porcelain pieces out onto my cork tray: clean, white, delicately articulated porcelain doll parts. Feet, hands, and a couple of tiny broken heads; a few terra-cotta pitchers; half a blue-and-white painted willowware doll plate; some clay marbles. There were dozens of disembodied feet, an inch or so long, with tiny toes and curved ankles. Most were damaged, missing a bit of heel...