The old neighborhood was the place that Joe Mackall left. It was a place where everyone's parents worked at the factory at the dead end of the street, where the Catholic church operated like a religious city hall, and where he grew up vowing to get out as soon as he could and to shed his blue-collar beginnings and failed, flawed religion.
When the mysterious death of a childhood friend draws him back to the last street before Cleveland, however, he discovers that there is more to "old haunts" than mere words-and more to severing one's roots than just getting away.
The Last Street Before Cleveland chronicles Mackall's descent into his past: the story of how, looking for answers about his lost friend, he stumbles onto larger questions about himself. With clear-eyed candor, Mackall describes the resurfacing of dormant demons, the opening of the old chasms of depression and addiction, and the discovery, at rock bottom, of a flickering faith that casts a surprising light over everything that has come before. Mackall's is, finally, a story about life-lived and lost, given and earned.
Joe Mackall is a professor of English at Ashland University, as well as a cofounder and editor of the nonfiction journal River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and on NPR's Morning Edition, and he is the author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish.