Interview with Jon Wlasiuk

Belt talks to Jon Wlasiuk, author of An Alternative History of Cleveland

What made you decide to write this book?

My first book, Refining Nature, explored the origins of the petroleum industry in Cleveland. It was a grim story to tell and become immersed in for so long and by the end of that journey I had plenty of nightmares filled with fire and oil. So, for mental health reasons alone, I wanted to tell a story that contained an element of healing in the narrative. 

When researching my first book, I discovered that Americans had been extending the shoreline of the Great Lakes for nearly two centuries in order to build parks and factories. With the second book, I originally intended to write about how the Cleveland shoreline has been creeping lakeward for two centuries, becoming a canvas for different generations to dream upon. Once I began writing the story of how toxic dredge spoils from the Cuyahoga became the land we built airports and nature preserves upon, I connected it all the way back to the first people who inhabited this land and built burial mounds. History is all about connections. The Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, which was built from river mud too poisonous to dump in the lake, is now providing habitat to nearly 300 species of birds, including dozens of endangered species. This city has come to represent everything wrong with the Rust Belt, but we have made a literal wasteland bloom and that is a story worth telling.

What’s something you think people will be surprised by in the book?

Ohio is full of archeological sites filled with fantastical beasts. The remains of mammoths and mastodons have been recovered from seventy of Ohio's eighty-eight counties. Some elephants have been dug up from golf courses, and one was excavated from the corner of West 9th and Superior in downtown Cleveland. Northeast Ohio was also home to a ground sloth that weighed nearly two thousand pounds and stood nine feet tall. These giants coevolved with plants in the region that are still here, such as Osage oranges and honey locust trees. I think many people will be surprised that people hunted and ate these animals and that our current landscape was shaped by these ghosts from the past.

You often reference the failures and biases of the disciplines that have studied human history and culture. Can you talk more about how that played into your research?

One of the frustrating experiences we all go through in life is when we discover something we learned in school was flat out wrong or represented outdated ways of thinking. We can meet that challenge in different ways; we can dig in our heels and reject new knowledge, or we can be curious and willing to accept that our education is never complete, always in process. When I was a kid, textbooks were still telling the story of history as politics and the achievements of great men (and a few token women). When I got into grad school, it opened up new worlds. It was exciting to study stories told from the perspective of people not represented in those old textbooks, and I chased my curiosity all the way to how the land, water, animals, and plants could be agents of change in history. No matter how hard you try, though, you can never know everything about any topic, and I place a lot of warnings within this book about the limits of our present knowledge. I believe history can provide answers to people curious about the past, but it becomes damaging if it pretends to be the authoritative last word. That is one of the reasons why the title of this book begins with An rather than The.

The book starts twenty thousand years before present. Why take such a long look? How do you decide what’s worth telling in such a long history of a place?

The historian Elliott West once told me how his wife would get frustrated when she wanted to know the answer to a question about history and instead got a very long story. "If I ask you about traffic lights you don't need to explain the Magna Carta!" she protested. This is the heart of the problem with academic history: we struggle getting to the point. Sometimes good storytelling and accurate storytelling don't always go hand in hand. 

As a writer and professional historian, I've attempted to do both for all my work, and I think the better, more accurate story of Cleveland begins far before Moses Cleaveland stepped foot on the shores of Lake Erie. There are many histories of Cleveland (and Ohio for that matter), but the majority begin when white settlers arrive. That signals to the reader that nothing important or relevant occurred beforehand, and nothing could be further from the truth. Cleveland is the largest community in northeast Ohio and has been for a little over 200 years, but the human settlements that predate it struggled with the same problems that we face today. How do we keep our communities healthy? How do we bring resources in and deal with waste? How do we build a culture that reflects our understanding of the land we inhabit? 

Societies that predate the founding of Cleveland successfully navigated some of these problems and we have an opportunity to learn from them. Others collapsed and should serve as cautionary tales for us as well. Historians don't get to run experiments in a laboratory setting, but we can come close by studying how different cultures who inhabited the same landscape solved similar problems in different ways over time. Throughout the book, I always drag the reader back to the present, even in the middle of a story that takes place ten thousand years ago. 

Who do you think the audience is for this book? 

Belt was always my first choice to publish this book because they have cultivated an audience hungry for hyperlocal stories. This book will certainly appeal to anyone who has lived in the region. Even though it is a history, this book confronts radical possibilities for our future by highlighting work being done in the community right now. Of course, history buffs will enjoy learning about the incredible achievements and colossal failures from the past, but many of the Clevelanders I know are invested and engaged in the city's future and this book speaks directly to them too. History is reduced to trivia if it doesn't connect to our present problems and every chapter contains a lesson that can help us build a better future.

Are there any lessons to be learned from this history? 

So many! The most important lesson is about how to build a culture that reflects the land it is from. So much of our present culture seems obsessed with obliterating what makes a place unique. Cleveland has always projected an identity distinct from, say, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Chicago. To me, we are at our best when we lean into the interplay between the food that grows here and cultural traditions that adopt it in their own way. For instance, sunflowers were domesticated by indigenous people right here in Ohio and are now the national flower of Ukraine, where my family is from. In turn, southern and eastern European immigrants brought culinary traditions that have defined Cleveland cuisine. Our city is a testament to what multiethnic communities can accomplish when thrown together. Building walls (real or imagined) between each other would destroy one of the most exceptional traits of this city.

Talk about the illustrations—why did you want them?

As more content goes digital, readers have high standards for the physical media they purchase. Unfortunately, media companies have been cutting corners and moving away from artists, sometimes replacing them with abominations created by AI models. I wanted this book to look handmade, almost dreamlike in order to reflect the limits of our ability to perceive the past clearly or imagine a future. I met Libby Geboy at the start of the pandemic when I took a detour from academia to work at a community-supported fishery based in Sitka, Alaska. Libby and I first worked together producing monthly magazines, and her unique artwork accompanied my articles, which told stories of small-boat fishing communities. History is a pretty solitary profession, so collaborating with an artist to tell a story was thrilling and made me appreciate new ways of conveying information. This book was more personal than my last and I knew the stark, concrete reality of photographs or maps wouldn't fit the vibe I was cultivating. Libby was happy for the challenge, and I gave her full creative control over the illustrations. Some of the most influential books in my life, like Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, were made better by illustrations. Art Spiegelman's Maus and Harvey Pekar's American Beauty have demonstrated that graphic storytelling can reach an adult audience and have a cultural impact. That is the direction I'd like to take my next project.  

What do people get wrong about Cleveland?

The popular narrative about Cleveland when I was growing up is that we are a comically mismanaged dump. Part of that story is rooted in reality, but it also isn't unique to Cleveland. This book doesn't shy away from those stories, but it also focuses on the neglected elements of this city's past. Indigenous people shaped this land and found a way to live here sustainably for over ten thousand years. Unfortunately, our stories often relegate them to the past. Native communities continue to be part of this city's history, and their fight for dignity and recognition deserves a place in our shared history and future.

Another popular narrative is that Cleveland's glory days are long gone. As it turns out, the good ol' days could be pretty awful for people who weren't born with the last name Rockefeller, Severance, or Mather. The years since Cleveland was declared the "Mistake by the Lake" have been marked by tremendous strides in environmental stewardship and community building. Serious problems persist, such as habitat destruction, racism, and political corruption, but this city has pioneered some innovative solutions that are often eclipsed by old narratives. This book offers an alternative to those stale narratives about Cleveland.