East Pittsburgh Downlow

East Pittsburgh Downlow focuses on characters who struggle to pay their bills but know they want a better life or, at least, the chance to wreck the life they're living. The characters are waitresses, UPS employees, and bartenders. They are former professional athletes and drug dealers with dreams. They are students of all ages who don't know what they want to be or even what they can be. Told in the first-person by Sterling Hart, a former welder turned community college professor, East Pittsburgh Downlow narrates the lives of characters who understand now is the time to make their dreams come true. Every day the world is a little uglier. Every day, you get paid a little less. Sterling wants to write a literary novel set in Western Pennsylvania about the working-class people he teaches, students who work full-time while taking classes in Air Conditioning & Heating Repair. Sterling knows about careers. He grew up in dives and trailers, attended university on a wrestling scholarship, and graduated with a useless English degree. He learned a trade and spent the next 11 years welding on bridges, dreaming of being a writer, eventually publishing western novels under the name Montana Jones. East Pittsburgh Downlow is the story of Sterling's mom-"Call me Joanie, mom makes me sound old"-who lives on artificial sweetener and mangos.