Currents in the Electric City

In Currents in the Electric City, an installment in Belt’s City Anthologies series, the story of Scranton gets told by the people who know it best.

Scranton, PA, is more than just the setting for The Office. It's the hub of Northeastern Pennsylvania with a rich industrial and labor history. It’s also a small town in many ways: Are you really from Scranton if your family doesn’t go back several generations (as Maria Johnson asks)? Neighborhood talk can reveal your family secrets before you even know them yourself, as Barbara J. Taylor writes. The essays and poems in this collection show the city as it is today, a Rust Belt city that often serves as a punchline for being stuck in the past but one that is very much alive, with stories to tell. Learn about a Gujarati family’s experience, the small but hearty LGBTQ community, the beauty of the Lackawanna River Valley, and the foreign plants along the roadside that mirror the people who emigrated to the region alongside memories from the past: playing on culm banks, the multigenerational family who thrived in a now-dilapidated home, and even voices from the people buried in Dunmore Cemetery. Through it all runs the juxtaposed desire to leave and pull to stay, or return. Though many have heard of Scranton—through television, as President Joe Biden’s birthplace, or as a so-called relic of the past—nobody knows it like the people who call it home.