How I Got to Cleveland

By Karen Williams

Book Overview

Five short stories of Americana: An artist stuck in a low-wage job at a movie house as the punk rock era kicks off in San Francisco. An 18-year-old's eye-opening road trip in the early 70's. A New York City high school teacher gets to know an FDNY fireman post 9/11. A Midwest Boomer coming-of-age diary. And a comic monologue about death. Memoir-like stories of fear, vulnerability, sexism, moral ambivalence, illusion & delusion-life experiences of contemporary women.

"Jack Kerouac's On the Road was a bible... How I Got to Cleveland makes the same journey through the eyes of a young woman. Although the story may be about one person, we can imagine many women to have traveled a similar road."

--Gregg Wilson, Back Stage

How I Got to Cleveland follows a circuitous and emotionally desolate path that covers ground from Little Rock to Cleveland... from affection, hopelessness to embarrassment."

-David Lyman, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"I loved Cleveland ...a contribution to the literature of bizarre journals." -Eric Bogosian

"Writer Karen Williams takes us down two dazzling different roads: one illuminated by stark experience and a dead-end road of blunted emotion ... intimate performances that flash and burn like sparks from a blowtorch." -David Fischer, The Seattle Fringe Festival

Adult Fiction, Memoir-like adventures of women of various generations

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H4S5T767
• ISBN13: 9798995438106
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Kindness, Inc.
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.5"