Plain Secrets
"Joe Mackall's Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish meets the biggest challenge of a book such as this by living up to his subtitle: Mackall is both outside and among in equal measure, and it's the most difficult terrain to occupy. Plain Secrets vibrates in that in-betweenness, in ways that only songs or poems usually can, and it does so in prose that's as clear as water. It's built the way the Amish build their barns -- everything here is plumb and level."

-Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America

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About the Author

the author

Joe Mackall is co-founder and editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and co-editor of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize Series (in partnership with the University of Nebraska Press). His memoir, The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage, was published in 2006 by the University of Nebraska Press. His articles have been published in a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Washington Post and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

He wrote for The Washington Post for two years. He also served as editor of Cleveland Magazine. His essays have appeared in several anthologies, literary journals, and on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Mackall has a BA in English from Cleveland State University, an MA in English from the University of C. Oklahoma, an MFA in fiction writing from Bowling Green State University, and a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is director of the Creative Writing program at Ohio's Ashland University.