YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – It’s 1978, and the Mahoning Valley is treading on precarious grounds as the region reels from the shutdown of Youngstown Sheet & Tube’s Campbell works months earlier.
Yet for young people in their 20s, the nightlife was still ablaze, as downtown Youngstown clubs such as the Agora packed in crowds to see the latest local and national rock acts. For this generation – those coming of age during the city’s industrial twilight – their future could well depend on whether to leave for other opportunities or tough it out at a time when all seemed lost.
Such is the backdrop for author Allison Pitinii Davis’ new novella, “Business,” which takes place between 1978 and 1979, the eve of economic upheaval. The fictional story centers around two young women, Alexa Mavros and Lia Mazur, whose lives intersect through their respective family businesses and personal relationships.
“It’s a story about how their lives become intertwined in an unlikely way,” said Davis, a visiting professor of creative writing at The Ohio State University who was born and raised in Boardman. Mavros, the first-person narrator of the story, works in an automobile factory and helps at her family’s laundry business. Mazur works at a trucking motel that her family owns. The two small businesses intersect, since the motel is one of the laundry’s major accounts.
“The book follows them, and a lot of their interaction is through Youngstown’s nightlife during the late 1970s,” Davis said. “A lot of the story takes place in what was once the Agora,” she added. Other landmarks of the era – Strouss’ Department Store, for example – are also featured in scenes.
However, a dispute leads to a breakdown in their relationship, an event foreshadowed in the novella’s opening pages when the two women meet for the first time at Mazur’s motel: “The ice put away, she spit out the pencil, she stuck out her hand, and announced the name that would, by December, ruin my family’s business.”
Mavros, feeling a sense of guilt from complicating matters that led to the dispute, spends part of the story trying to repair the damage and is faced with making some difficult choices.
“Business” is one of three stories contained in “Agency 3: Novellas,” published this month by Baobab Press.
Davis credits her formative high school years and her English teachers at Boardman High School as instrumental in developing her writing skills. She also recalls her visits to Youngstown State University for its annual English Festival as an important influence in pursuing her career.
“It was super exciting,” Davis said. “I really couldn’t have done it without the efforts of people in Youngstown who promote literary culture and reading.”
She went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in English and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, a master’s degree in the subject at Ohio State and a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She was also the recipient of the Wallace Stenger fellowship at Stanford University.
Yet her most profound influence is the Mahoning Valley. Born in 1986, Davis, who today lives in Wheeling, W.Va., is too young to remember the collapse of the steel industry. She did, however, have plenty of material from her parents and other sources connected with the period.
Her father’s family operated the Davis Motel on Market Street in North Lima, while her mother’s family owned a laundry business. Her parents met at the Youngstown Agora – formerly the landmark State Theater – during a performance of the 1970s local legendary rock band Left End. Here, the inspirations for her first collection of poetry – “Line Study of a Motel Clerk” – and her latest work of fiction were born.
“I grew up in two families that have run multigenerational family businesses, and I was just so interested in the inner workings of them and how they’re run,” she said.
Moreover, Davis is interested in examining working-class culture in gritty urban areas such as Youngstown. “You don’t often associate working class culture with creative culture,” she said. “Youngstown was truly a hot spot for that, and it was always such a big inspiration to me.”
For Davis, reconstructing this period in Youngstown history is a way to investigate the world in which she was born, she added. Many of those nightspots are now gone; the Agora, by then called the Star Club, closed during the 1980s, and the building was demolished more than a decade ago, leaving just the establishment’s distinctive terra cotta façade intact. The region’s steel industry had collapsed by the mid-1980s, taking with it jobs, opportunities and population. Her challenge was to reinvigorate this culture through her writing.
“I’m really finding ways to preserve it through literature,” Davis said.
Sherry Lee Linkon, a professor of English at Georgetown University who once served as the co-director of Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University, said Davis’ work represents a fresh perspective that is embraced by her generation’s writers, academics and artists on this period of deindustrialization.
“There’s a whole generation of writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians, too, who are creating work about these places,” she said. “What Allison and her generation have done with that history is create stories where they both honor the memory of that past and try to help us imagine how things could be.”
Davis plans to read portions of the novella at Lit Youngstown’s annual Fall Literary Festival this year, held over two days, Oct. 17-18.
“Allison was already an incredible writer when I met her 10 years ago,” said Karen Schubert, director of Lit Youngstown, the nonprofit organization that hosts the festival. Davis has in the past contributed to workshops and events for Lit Youngstown, and Schubert said it’s always exciting to have her present her work.
“She’s such a joy,” Schubert said. “There are quite a few writers who grew up in Youngstown who are doing phenomenal work. We’re so proud of Allison.”
Davis said her latest novella would especially find an audience among those interested in the struggles of deindustrialization and its impact.
“I think it would be the focus of interest to anyone interested in late ’70s Youngstown history, anyone interested in working-class culture,” she said.