Robert McKean

Robert McKean lives outside of Boston now, but he grew up in Western Pennsylvania in a company town with nine miles of steelworks along the Ohio River and its own company store. At night the Bessemers burned the sky, gas jets flamed, and black “sugar’’ speckled the porches so thickly that they had to be swept every morning. Paydays the supermarket overflowed with shoppers speaking a dozen languages, and if you needed shoes, that’s when you got them: payday shoes.

McKean, winner of Methodist University’s Longleaf Press Novel Contest and recipient of a Massachusetts Arts Council grant, has set The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts (and the rest of his work) in and around a hardscrabble town like the one he grew up in. He calls it Ganaego. Beneath the ethnic, racial, and generational stew of lives and passions herein lies the story of Ganaego itself, its rise and fall as a protagonist in America’s late-Twentieth Century existential drama, the making of the Rust Belt.

McKean’s shorter works have been featured in publications including The Kenyon Review, Armchair/Shotgun, The Chicago Review, Crack the Spine, The 34th Parallel and many others. For story links, a guide to Ganaego, and more, visit www.robmckean.com.

(Photo credit above M. Benabib.)