{"id":1173,"date":"2011-10-03T13:17:24","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T17:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=1173"},"modified":"2011-10-03T13:17:24","modified_gmt":"2011-10-03T17:17:24","slug":"seeking-a-small-fictional-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/prized\/seeking-a-small-fictional-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking a Small, Fictional Town"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like a lot of us in rural New England, I come from a small town where we value our farmer\u2019s markets, town festivals, and libraries.\u00a0 People think we\u2019re not as friendly as Southerners, or as wholesome as Midwesterners, or as laidback as our counterparts in the West, but just as they don\u2019t all match their stereotypes, we New Englanders are not all brainy, aloof types.<\/p>\n

\"\"I sometimes wonder how much a writer\u2019s place of living has to do with what she writes.\u00a0 I don\u2019t mean just scenic details for settings.\u00a0 Obviously, it helped writing Birthmarked<\/em> that I\u2019d spent time by Lake Superior in my girlhood, and it helped writing Prized<\/em> that I\u2019ve gone canoeing and camping in Canada, but I wonder how much we try to validate our life choices in the fiction we write.<\/p>\n

Where I live, life is comparatively simple.\u00a0 People walking their dogs down a quiet road will smile at strangers and stop to chat a minute.\u00a0 Moms and dads volunteer in the elementary schools, coach their kids\u2019 soccer teams, and vote to fund the music program at the middle school.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not incestuously close, but we know our own.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think this is unique to New England, but I do think it\u2019s unique to small towns.\u00a0 I think knowing each other and being known are what a lot of us crave, and if we don\u2019t get it in real life, we seek it in our fiction.\u00a0 One of my favorite fictional small towns is Jan Karon\u2019s Mitford, North Carolina, a kindly place with its share of small troubles.\u00a0 I\u2019m fond of Harper Lee\u2019s Maycomb, Alabama, too, including its injustice and Boo Radley.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been intrigued by the prison-like aspects of Truman\u2019s island home in The Truman Show<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It was important for me to create a village in Prized <\/em>that provided both a loving community and a stifling prison. \u00a0People there have pot luck dinners and traditional sports, as well as stocks for punishment. \u00a0I think there\u2019s 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.\u00a0 We keep wanting Eden, don\u2019t we?\u00a0 A garden of beauty and health.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like a lot of us in rural New England, I come from a small town where we value our farmer\u2019s markets, town festivals, and libraries.\u00a0 People think we\u2019re not as friendly as Southerners, or as wholesome as Midwesterners, or as laidback as our counterparts in the West, but just as they don\u2019t all match their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prized","tag-prized-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1173"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1176,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1173\/revisions\/1176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}