Seeking a Small, Fictional Town

Like a lot of us in rural New England, I come from a small town where we value our farmer’s markets, town festivals, and libraries.  People think we’re not as friendly as Southerners, or as wholesome as Midwesterners, or as laidback as our counterparts in the West, but just as they don’t all match their stereotypes, we New Englanders are not all brainy, aloof types.

I sometimes wonder how much a writer’s place of living has to do with what she writes.  I don’t mean just scenic details for settings.  Obviously, it helped writing Birthmarked that I’d spent time by Lake Superior in my girlhood, and it helped writing Prized that I’ve gone canoeing and camping in Canada, but I wonder how much we try to validate our life choices in the fiction we write.

Where I live, life is comparatively simple.  People walking their dogs down a quiet road will smile at strangers and stop to chat a minute.  Moms and dads volunteer in the elementary schools, coach their kids’ soccer teams, and vote to fund the music program at the middle school.  We know to slow down and watch for the partying college kids walking on the shoulder of the highway on Friday nights, and we show up when the Governor comes to town to break ground for a new development.

We’re not incestuously close, but we know our own.  I don’t think this is unique to New England, but I do think it’s unique to small towns.  I think knowing each other and being known are what a lot of us crave, and if we don’t get it in real life, we seek it in our fiction.  One of my favorite fictional small towns is Jan Karon’s Mitford, North Carolina, a kindly place with its share of small troubles.  I’m fond of Harper Lee’s Maycomb, Alabama, too, including its injustice and Boo Radley.  I’ve been intrigued by the prison-like aspects of Truman’s island home in The Truman Show.

It was important for me to create a village in Prized that provided both a loving community and a stifling prison.  People there have pot luck dinners and traditional sports, as well as stocks for punishment.  I think there’s a richness to play with there, something that strikes at my own need to feel safe and my competing desire to feel unfettered, free to take risks.  We keep wanting Eden, don’t we?  A garden of beauty and health.  But we also long to step outside, to sidestep decay, to risk the knowledge of seeing the dark world beyond and what that will teach us of our own hearts.