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Village life: Flint is full of ghosts

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Saturday, June 25, 2011

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One thing writer Connor Coyne and I agree on — Flint is full of ghosts.

Consider this paragraph early in Coyne's 2010 debut novel, Hungry Rats, a dark and violent narrative more than half situated here.

"Flint, Michigan, grew up near some old Indian battlegrounds. The warriors left their ghosts when they died. The fur traders came and left their ghosts, and so did the lumberjacks. Carriage makers and auto barons. Then, great waves came from Germany, Ireland, England, Hungary, New York, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky. They built cars through the Second World War, tore down buildings and threw up huge pieces of concrete. Sheet metal and train tracks stretched from one end of town to the other and the factories pushed up through each neighborhood like mountains from the early earth. Then half of the people left. They left their ghosts behind, too ...

"By the time you were born," Coyne's sinister narrator continues in an aggressive second-person voice, "the ghosts outnumbered the living. Sitting in the parking lots. Floating on the river and crouching on the runways. Leaning out from up top the radio towers. Their wails cried like freight trains driven through the night ..."

The "you" in this case is Coyne's memorable main character, stubborn and remarkably street-smart East Side teenager, Meredith Malady.

(Yes, the names are Dickensian.There's also a Mr. Catgut, an Ashley Fulcrum, a Brian Crux and a whole family named Grim offed by a serial killer).

Reading Coyne's novel was thrilling, I told him one day over breakfast at Steady Eddy's — an addicting literary luxury because the novel takes place here. Somehow, I managed to deeply imagine his troubled Meredith moving around in her scary fictional life while my own real life has been going along in the same streets, in the same places. It was exhilarating, our locale suddenly harboring fictional drama, a shadow world just beyond detection but once in a while, on a lightless angst-ridden night, slipping through.

There's my Flint, in other words, and then that other Flint — rats crawling out of the sewers, lurid homicides, crazy mothers, kidnapped slow-witted brothers and ghosts, always the ghosts.

As Coyne's narrator might say, "You always knew they were here, right? They are always here."

Meredith lives on Maryland and hates Lewis Street. She finds her way to the mansions of Linwood and Parkside, takes refuge in a coffee shop much like Good Beans, swings in Burroughs Park, hangs out at the Kearsley Park Pavilion, hides in the atrium of the UM-Flint Library, clambers up into the parapet of Central High School.

Anyway, you will have to read Hungry Rats yourself to come to your own conclusions. It is not for the faint of heart. It is a challenging piece of writing, and you are likely to be confounded and confused. But you'll also find something in Coyne's noir-ish telling that gets at the dark heart of Flint.

You'd never imagine Coyne to be the author of the novel's murderous plots. He favors bright Hawaiian shirts (the first one I saw him in did feature sharks, come to think of it) and easily delivers a sunny leprechaun's grin.

And the significant news about this Flint-obsessed young writer is that despite — or perhaps because of — all those ghosts, he's decided, at 32, to move back to his hometown. He has daringly brought his wife Jessica, who has obtained a good job, and their infant daughter Mary, and they are looking for a house to buy.

He grew up on Gold and Lafayette, grateful alum of the Flint Youth Theater, which he says was "huge" for his youthful development.

Coyne remembers the "psychological and cultural divide" marked by Robert T. Longway. Kids were warned never to go north of Robert T. without supervision, he says. His fascination with that other side of Longway plays out in Hungry Rats where much of the gothic action occurs.

A real event triggered the novel's genesis. Back in Flint for an unhappy reconnaissance mission in 2003, Coyne and his wife-to-be went out for a light dinner and instead came upon a body in the road somewhere on the East Side.

"It wasn't a dead body," he recalls, "I think somebody just passed out."

But it started him thinking, and that body became the first corpse of Hungry Rats — a teenager named Maria Puerta killed by the mysterious "Rat Man."

Coyne has been gone for years, getting a bachelor's of arts from the University of Chicago and a master's of fine arts from the New School in New York, among other adventures.

"I've wanted to get back here ever since I left," he says. At first his wife hated the idea, but now, he says, she's hopeful. "If the experience doesn't deliver, I'm an a**hole. But we've really looked at it seriously."

Interestingly, for those hoping for Flint's rebound, Coyne and his wife think it makes financial sense. They can buy a good house here cheaper than renting in Chicago, for instance. But there's also a deeper pull.

"The things I was struggling with here made more of a difference to me, somehow," he says. Coming back seems to represent transformation from an old misunderstanding.

"When I was a kid here I thought my intense experiences were entirely unique. And I thought if I wanted my life to be that intense again, I'd have to be in Flint," he says. "Now I realize what I experienced was more about me than about a place."

So, he explains, it is now possible for him to be wherever he wants, to build an adult life full of literary, familial and spiritual satisfaction.

And maybe the ghosts will welcome him back.

After all, they could be muses.

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Print and electronic versions of Hungry Rats can be purchased from http://www.lulu.com/ or at Pages Bookstore in downtown Flint. Read the first chapter for free at http://hungryrats.com/.

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Columnist and Poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the interim director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.

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