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Small Town

I was born in a small town.  That’s not a quote from John Cougar Mellencamp; it’s the truth.  My hometown, which shall remain nameless here since it is sometimes easy to identify a person by such a small place, is who I am.  We are defined by where we’re from.

After spending my first decade, which I didn’t realize was a decade at the time, in my hometown we moved.  We moved to an even smaller town.  A community of less than a thousand.  Industrial, dirty, and drug-ridden.  I began to write.

Like most restless minds in small towns, I wanted to escape.  When I first saw the city, I was enamored.  So many people.  So much excitement.  So little community.

This week I received the happy news that my story “Prom Night Redux” was accepted for publication by Exterminating Angel Press: the Magazine.  (More details to follow.)

The story is close to my heart.  It is a story about being from a small town and wanting that small town to thrive.  I first wrote it over five years ago.  I’ve wrestled with it, chopped it up, polished it, then chopped it up again.  There was so much to say and I wanted to say it well.

We tend to think writers live in the city.  When Garrison Keillor became famous after Lake Wobegon Days, he moved from Minnesota to New York City to become a writer.  I think perhaps his writing suffered.



I remember sitting on my run-down front porch on a hot summer afternoon with a pad of paper left over from the school year and a pencil.  Looking out over the green hills and the industrial blight in the valley below, I began to write.  My earliest stories, I believe, are among my best.


Stories, to me, take the reader away.  To take someone away, you have to have a place in mind.  I like reading about other people’s places.  Not too many, I know, care to read about mine.  That’s life in a small town for you.  And it’s no less dramatic than what goes on in the city.
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