“Could someone like me live in rural America?” If you have to ask, you believe you know the answer. “It’s not for me,” you’re pretty sure, but then you think, “they don’t want me, either.” If there’s one thing about rural life we feel we can grasp, it’s the stereotypical suspicion that rural people have of outsiders. Either socially, politically, culturally, one of the -ly’s, we feel we’re on the wrong side of their fence. We can sense bad vibes whenever we find ourselves in their neck of the woods. When stopping for gas on a rural interstate, while we fill up, we glance around and take in a rough, unwelcoming landscape. We think, fleetingly, “Sure glad I don’t live here,” as we climb back in and speed off to what’s familiar. Never mind that interstate gas stations aren’t the nicest places anywhere you go, certainly not in the city. You’re ready to believe it’s all rural is, a place to stop, fill up, and leave quickly. But then, we watch as the years pass by and observe the world change dramatically. To our surprise, we think about living in the country. What changed? Our familiar city became more rough and unwelcoming than we bargained for. We reevaluate the great rural divide and wonder, can we bridge it?
Maybe rural people aren’t wary of outsiders. Don’t the waitresses call you “hon?” Or, maybe the bad vibes are there for a good reason. Locals are wary from a sense of self-preservation. That rifle in their car isn’t meant for you.
If you make a rural town your home, you’ll likely run across a truth. The -ly’s are pointed double-barrel-like by the city at rural life, and it’s rough. Socially, they say, rural people follow traditions, while city people accept science. Politically, rural people cling to guns and religion, while city people promote equality. Culturally, rural people are living in the past, while city people embrace new trends and fashions. Each side has its way of life (they say), and yet, in practice, one side is more equal than the other. The city dictates its way of life from the Federal level on down. The rural view is on the defensive. Sure, rural America may receive a shout out from the media for its salt-of-the-earth values during a natural disaster, and for sending a bulk of the recruits to the Armed forces. The esteem isn’t there. When rural life is talked about by the city, it’s to criticize values that the city is moving full-steam away from. Rural life is a foil for all the ways the city is better.
A curious urbanite going to a rural town might face awkwardness. You might be seen as someone with a hypodermic vaccine, ready to wipe out their way of life. Rural life is, in some ways, the absence of city thinking. It’s the previous state of being, when life was horizontal and lived one moment at a time, before ideas like multitasking and life hacks were adopted to live at a faster speed than before. If you enter the rural world with a pushy mindset, you might upset their balance. The question becomes, why try? Why would a city person who has it all go west?
Others will encounter no problems fitting into a rural milieu (to use a pretentious academic word that reminds us why we go rural). You don’t need a flannel shirt or a gun rack to land in the country. If you’re a joiner, a belonger, and/or truly fed up with the city enough to tackle a new way of life, you will be welcome. When arriving with a humble mindset, you’ll find it isn’t difficult to assimilate into country ways. Many people in a small town have never left, or have moved from one small to mid-sized place to another. But there are always a few transplants from the big city or abroad to befriend. The key to a smooth transition is having things in common with the community you join. Maybe you love the outdoors. You want to cultivate a small farm on your property. You plan to open a business in town, or maybe you’re a sociable type wherever you go and like to broaden your horizons. If you move to rural America with an open mind, and you’re not heavy into cultural politics (there are both sides of the argument to run afoul of here), you should do fine. And yet, what if you don’t fit into the aforementioned categories?
I didn’t. I was a creative person with an ambitious goal. People like me often came across as anti-social, living as we did with our heads in the clouds, often solving a creative problem while we were around others. Creative types lived under self-imposed deadlines and viewed fun activities like hobbies and shooting the breeze as lost time. Our calling was making things in isolation for hours. It kept me from being a sociable type, not a joiner nor a belonger, nor was I fed up with the city. I wasn’t a social artist like an actor or a musician, someone with stories of life on the road. Instead, I was the introverted kind, a writer. Not just a writer, but an aspiring novelist; a bad combination for connecting with farmers, dentists, and real estate agents.
The life of a book writer is mostly hidden. “So, what do you do?” isn’t easily answered, and so a writer relied on city people to understand the glacial pace of the writing craft. In a place like rural America, sitting in your room and writing is viewed as a strange, even unmanly, life choice. “Is that even work?”
Not to most people, it isn’t. To be accepted as a real writer by the masses, you have to be a major success. Everyone has a view of the sociable, successful writer found in the media. We see the writer smiling at a film premiere of a movie based on the writer’s book. If we’re on Twitter (now X.com), we might follow a writer weighing in on important topics. The greatness of a writer draws people together for book clubs. It’s a nice life for the writer who a) gets published and b) finds major cultural interest. Most writers have neither. An overwhelming number of writers cannot escape their home offices. It’s a failure to launch. Most writers spend years planning, plotting, writing and rewriting their books. The goal is to reach the point where the writer counts.
I never could reach that point despite years of trying. I had been excited to join the noble writing profession, a fraternity of elite minds. I earned a masters degree, wrote a book for a decade, and became a failed writer. It was a misfortune that led me to rural America. I had nowhere else to go. The outcome was a shock as the writing I specialized in, city fiction, was tied to the urban experience. It was my identity. Being an urbanite was everything.
If I could misjudge my own career, you might wonder what good this book is. Why read a memoir of a failed writer’s ideas and opinions? Maybe my judgment isn’t worth investing in. I wouldn’t blame a reader for thinking it. Lest I be seen as a crazy dreamer, I should explain why my unsuccessful literary career was a product of historical shifts that caused the city to fail right along with me. These shifts are connected; the usual and normal are becoming obsolete. The changing culture with its redefined habits has led to new winners and losers. Unprecedented outcomes have affected millions of people like me. It was a shock. As a member of Generation X, I grew up in a Boomer system that seemed to be the way of things, unchangeable, secure.
After all, didn’t the Boomer parents get to the moon? Why wouldn’t you invest into a winner’s system as a young, impressionable kid reading Huck Finn and saying, I want to do this. I want to write books and join the cultural conversation.
All to say, the literary dream I sought after was not an unheard-of kind. It wasn’t like trying to be a pro quarterback or a starting point guard at 5’ 6”. It was a lunch pail dream, something you chipped away at it behind the scenes, with a 2 x 3” author photo on the back of a book the only glitzy aspect. Back in those days, trying to get published wasn’t seeking to be a member of the cultural elite. It was a pursuit of honest storytelling. “Writing is really quite simple; all you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and open a vein,” critic A.J. Liebling famously said.
The challenge was to discover the truths we lived by, the unexpected and revelational, emotional and profitable wisdoms buried underneath the daily lies we told ourselves. These human revelations were the basis of literature. They could come from anyone who mined its depths, such as a working-class poet like Raymond Carver. The search for literary truth made publishing a commercial art form, and the publishing industry called for manuscripts from anyone who played the game. Manuscripts that accumulated in New York publishing offices became known as the “slush pile.” Many writers were discovered there, going from obscurity to literary success. The slush pile made book writing a viable career path in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, the era of the screenplay, novelists shifted to writing books that would be optioned by Hollywood. When I entered graduate school in the 1990s, the pipeline had slowed a fair bit. Indie filmmakers took to writing their own original screenplays. Books were cultural touchstones with the absence of competition. Writers flocked to graduate schools to get trained in a literary career, which included a teaching gig and a book deal. As far-fetched as it seems that “book author”was a responsible career, serious writers earned their turn with New York back in those days. If you showed promise, they would assign you to an in-house editor and try to make you a commodity that paid off as time went on. It was a farm system of a sort, beginning in the fiction programs at top graduate schools. I had gone to a notable writing program for just such a reason, to have done all my homework and have my ducks in a row. I worked and reworked my manuscript. I could sense I was close to getting accepted into the New York farm system. I sought to make it as easy as possible.
By the turn of the century, the publishing system was about to change forever. The Kindle threatened to erode the profit from hardcover book sales. The ability to stream movies and TV shows on a computer, a tablet, and a phone was a habit changer. An aspiring author had more to worry about than quality of manuscript. Could just anyone break into a system with fewer books published? New writers competed for limited spots. You had to be lucky or connected to get chosen now.
Technology that could turn avid readers into screen-captured zombies wasn’t enough of a problem for the dreaming writer. Another barrier emerged. While I was busy writing (and rewriting), the New York literary scene fell in love with socialist politics. The publishing system went “woke.” It happened sometime in the early 2010s. The measuring stick for good writing, a humanist approach used for centuries, was changed to an unrecognizable degree, to an opposite way of evaluation. Writing became an expression of political grievance and even revolution. Publishing houses sought writers who captured this political thinking.
The traditional way of literature was branded old and no longer universal. And yet, certain books hang around down through the generations for a reason. There’s a universal draw to the literary classics which offer us a poetic examination of our frailties. Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Dostoevsky; they followed a path of promoting virtue and exposing vice within the human heart. Modernist authors such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald gave a cynical spin. They leaned into humanity’s vice and questioned the existence of virtue, while still seeking it out. Great books show us the potential in ourselves for good and evil. A writer of my generation grew up idolizing books of this type. It was writing.
New writers were now told: add trendy politics, as tares into wheat. The thing is, people have never wanted artists to be politicians. They will tolerate artist types who dabble in political expression, but they could as easily live without it, as was the case with Bono and U2 in the 1990s. Lead singer Bono used his fame to share granular political views from third-world debt relief to African aid. Fans understood his heart was in the right place. They nodded along and even donated to his causes while wondering what politics had to do with creating great music. Today, U2 is a legacy band, and Bono has less of a license to tell us what to do. He’s viewed as a bit of an aging busybody who should stay in his lane.
Politics are a distraction because art is the business of stirring the human soul. Art is not in the business of saying the correct things to teach us to behave.
Publishing got into that business. Embrace diversity. Champion inclusion. Teaching us correct behavior has been a goal of our cultural betters, the elites, ever since the Internet gave our leaders a vision of educating us on a mass scale. All aspects of our society, from local politics, to national education, to gender debates in sports, to cultural messages in movies, shows, and in books, unite in this pursuit. We are to accept what is good for the modern society they envision.
In books, the “woke” message is particularly obvious and off-putting. Of all the artistic mediums, a book can convey the soul longing that people feel under the surface. It’s why people will “work” to read a book instead of watch something. Readers want to see their hopes and dreams on the page, and to marinate in the possibilities of life. Most people do not add up their lives by their gender, their weight, their sexuality, or their skin color. Those details are secondary to their soul identity. We are all humans first, but the cultural elite changed the paradigm.
I found myself on the outside of this a orthodoxy. I was the wrong color, the wrong orientation, and the wrong gender, to name a few disqualifications. I had raced to get to the literary party, as long as it had taken to don my tuxedo. I found out that I lacked the requirements for entry based on the qualities of my birth.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Could I write a story that romanticized a cultural victim winning against an oppressor? No, sorry. Could I demonstrate that I embodied the political struggle with pronouns in my bio? Sorry, no. My writing wasn’t about this, nor was I.
Then I couldn’t get my manuscript invited to the slush pile. New York, or, at least, this version, wasn’t interested. I should give up, I thought, cut my losses. You were warned, just because you spent years doing what you couldn’t succeed at didn’t mean you should spend another ten years. It was the sunk costs fallacy.
Then, the rural opportunity presented itself. It was cheaper to fail in the country. Delete
Not that failure was my goal, far from it. But as my book writing took on a speculative reality, going from a pretty doable career path to a lottery ticket, I had a decision to make. I would have to go back to full-time work, or go rural.
I was being offered the rural way out by my spouse. She wanted to live in the country. She knew I didn’t, and so, a carrot was dangled. My wife had found a job in rural America. It was a dream job for her, with corporate ownership and a rural lifestyle. Anyone would take it, except a die-hard city person like me.
The deal my wife offered me was a writer’s dream. I could continue to work on my book and try to get published. I could do part-time freelance on the side. Any writer would jump at the chance to avoid the full-time office grind. You could write a book with a 9-5 job. I had done it for years. And yet, there came a point in a writer’s career (such as it was) when a freelance schedule was better for productivity, even though it wasn’t enough to live in. For that reason, I was ready to pack it in. I had begun interviewing with companies in the city we lived in, looking for a company that would take me after a long writing sabbatical. I was ready to shelve the dream that New York made impossible. If I went back to full time, I would quit writing. A rural path was a way to keep the dream alive. Delete
If you survived my literary explanation, you know something important about this book. I wasn’t trying to improve my lifestyle with a new rural life. I was in the thick of a career battle, as ambitious as any city person could be. I saw potential benefits of rural living as transactional, at best. I hoped I would land in an ideal remote-work situation where costs were lower. I thought maybe the rural landscape would be like a locked room, a serene backdrop to an intense work life. I even thought, hey, maybe I would get published and punch my return ticket to the city. I took energy and purpose from the city, loved its innovation, and regretted leaving. There were few city problems to escape in the 2010s when we moved to a rural town. High housing costs were probably the worst issue, but to a lifer like me, they were a given. It was like complaining about the heat in Las Vegas. You could do it, but better to adapt. No, when we left the city, it had not yet lost its way. The city hadn’t come undone over crime, homelessness, and mass immigration, which overwhelmed city policing and the will of liberal politicians.
When I said the city went from a winner’s circle to a loser’s den after unexpected shifts in cultural habits, it was yet to happen. The downward spiral of my literary career, and the daily destruction coming out of the cities, would oddly coincide. Through it all, rural America was there as an alternative that promised nothing more than, it existed. It didn’t pretend to be antidote to our problems. Nonplussed, like a cow in a field staring back at you, rural life was there.
Some move to a rural place for lifestyle upgrades and it’s a wonderful thing. They dream of escaping the traffic and smog, of buying kayaks and floating on a glassy mountain lake that’s a five minute drive away rather than five hours. They dream of perfecting a steak marinade recipe on a barbecue in a huge backyard.
Me? It was a time-waster to a creative person trying to emulate Dostoevsky. And yet, here I was, right along with the lifestyle chasers. Anyone skeptical about going rural will benefit from my story. It will be a way to test the waters. Even if you’re looking forward to kayaks and barbecues, it’s a worst-case scenario. How is rural life for a city person who doesn’t appreciate it?
