MY MFA AESTHETIC: SMALL TOWNS ARE NOT SMALL LIVES

A lot of my work is about loss.

That probably does not come as a surprise.

Loss has been one of the central facts of my life, and writers tend to circle their central facts whether they mean to or not. You can change the names, the genre, the town, the ending, the weather. Eventually, the same ghost walks into the room wearing a different coat.

There is nothing novel about loss as a theme.

I know that.

Most superheroes lost someone. Most great dramas are haunted by absence. Most comedies, if you scratch deep enough, are about the fear that something essential has already gone missing.

I am not interested in loss because it is original.

I am interested in it because it is universal and still somehow private. Everyone loses. No one loses the same way.

But loss is not the only theme I come back to.

The other one is expectation.

Who people expect you to be.

Who you expect yourself to be.

What a place supposedly means.

What kind of life is considered ambitious, and what kind is dismissed as settling.

I grew up in a small town in Southeast Missouri, just north of the Bootheel. There was an old joke that if Arkansas took the Bootheel and annexed it, both Missouri and Arkansas would raise their average IQ.

That is the kind of joke people tell about places like where I am from.

The cultural shorthand is easy. Small towns are full of country bumpkins. Carhartt. Country music. Bible thumpers. People who hate cities and fear difference and never dream beyond the county line.

Were there people like that where I grew up?

Sure.

There are people like that everywhere. They just dress differently depending on the zip code.

But the place I knew was more complicated than the shorthand allowed. It had farmers and punk kids. Church people and theater kids. People who stayed because they lacked options and people who stayed because they loved someone. People who left and came back. People who left and never stopped being shaped by it. People with huge imaginations and tiny audiences. People who wanted out. People who wanted to make home better.

Small towns are small places.

They are not small lives.

That distinction matters to me.

A lot of movies treat small towns as traps. If the protagonist has ambition, they leave. If they stay, it means they failed. The big city becomes the site of self-actualization: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, anywhere with a skyline large enough to symbolize becoming.

I understand the appeal.

I have lived in or around big cities. New York. Philadelphia. Atlanta. Denver. Washington, D.C. Houston.

There is energy there. Opportunity. Culture. Velocity.

There is also machinery.

In a city, it can be easy to mistake motion for purpose. Everyone seems to be going somewhere. Everyone has a meeting, a train, a reservation, a deadline, a version of themselves they are trying to outpace. You can lose yourself in that current and call it progress because the scenery keeps changing.

Small towns do something different.

They give you fewer places to hide.

That can be suffocating. It can also be clarifying.

What interests me is not the story of someone escaping their hometown to become their real self somewhere important. What interests me is the opposite possibility:

What if you have to go back to the place you ran from to meet the most honest version of yourself?

Not because the town is magical.

Because you are.

Because the self you abandoned is still there, sitting in some parking lot, waiting to ask what took you so long.

In one of my scripts, a man identifies his hometown as the source of his pain. He thinks the place is the wound. But really, it is only where the wound happened.

You do not thank the plate for a beautiful dinner. You thank the chef.

Likewise, you cannot blame the plate for poison.

The place held the pain. It did not necessarily create it.

That confusion fascinates me. The way we assign power to geography. The way we believe leaving will cure us, then discover we packed ourselves in the suitcase.

I want to tell stories about regular people in overlooked places. People with grief. Humor. Contradictions. Bad tattoos. Good intentions. People who listen to punk rock in towns where everyone assumes the soundtrack is country. People who work ordinary jobs and carry mythic wounds. People who do not get a spotlight unless someone from somewhere else decides they are useful as color.

I want to give them the frame.

Not as symbols.

As people.

A small town can be a cage.

It can also be a forge.

Sometimes it is both.

That is where the story is.