San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Channeling small-town life in ‘A Place Remote’
Cardiff-based writer’s new short-story collection features startling portraits of rural Ohioans
When it comes to small-town life, we either escape or live out our lives wishing we had escaped.
For most of the characters in “A Place Remote,” Gwen Goodkin’s new collection of short stories, the idea of escaping their lives in rural Ohio often remains a fantasy. Having grown up mostly in Ottawa, Ohio, herself, this feeling is something the Cardiff-based writer knows all too well.
“I’ve been grappling with rural Ohio a lot personally,” says Goodkin, who moved to Detroit after college before moving to Southern California in 2003. “I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about Midwesterners — the idea that they’re simple, but they’re just as complicated as anyone else. And yes, you can relate to them through fiction, but they have some of the same issues all of us have. They’re dealing with the same problems and ups and downs we all are.”
In “A Boy With Sense,” a young boy is forced to grow up fast when visiting his grandparents’ farm. In “The Widow Complex,” a stay-at-home dad wrestles with his own feelings of masculinity and what it means to not be the primary breadwinner in his family. In “Winnie,” a traveling construction worker attempts to reconnect with an old crush, only to find that their divergent lives have changed them.
The stories within “A Place Remote” are unique in both tone and style, but when presented together, they seem to coalesce into a Steinbeckian portrait of American life. There is a sense of interconnectedness,
even though most of the stories had already been published in various literary magazines and websites.
“When I first had the idea for the book, I hadn’t intended to collect them all together,” Goodkin says. “I just wrote them one at a time, but after I published a few of them, I realized I was writing about Ohio in all of them, for the most part. And then I thought about putting them all together, and once you do that, you have to think about what connects them and what is the through line.”
In fact, Goodkin says it was almost six years between writing the first story and the second one. The story that appears second in the book, “A Boy With Sense,” was actually the first one she wrote, and it ended up winning the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction. Goodkin admits that winning the award was both inspiring and intimidating.
“That gave me a boost, but also scared me a bit,” Goodkin
says. “You start to think maybe this was a fluke, so you have to work even harder to live up to that first story.”
This mindset to work harder even inspired her to be a bit more experimental in some of the stories. “Just Les Is Fine,” for example, is the story of an aging optometrist who may be slipping into a midlife crisis. It is written in a more idiosyncratic style, with Goodkin inserting herself into the narrative via bracketed character studies that break up the otherwise first-person narrative. There’s even a point where Les begins to argue with Goodkin on the page about how she’s characterizing him. The effect is jarring at first, but Goodkin makes it work.
“It goes a little nuts,” admits Goodkin, laughing. “I read something years ago about Alice Munro writing something like 200 pages worth of backstory for a character. So I thought I’d try that and I got to about a page and a half, but then I set it aside. I picked it up again a few months later and the notes just cracked me up. So I thought to just put them in the story, but they needed to be active, so that’s why I had Les and I arguing.”
And while there’s a concurrent sense of small-town life that runs throughout “A Place Remote,” the stories don’t fall into some of the literary traps that often come with portraits of rural existence. Yes, a story might take place in a trailer park or a farm, but Goodkin’s characters never come across as farcical facsimiles of country life. Much like recent works of fiction such as Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School” or Kelli Jo Ford’s “Crooked Hallelujah,” the characters within “A Place Remote” are relatable and complex despite their respective circumstances.
“I wanted to make sure they weren’t all blue-collar and working class, because small towns are made up of all kinds of people from different kinds of backgrounds,” says Goodkin. “A lot of times, where we’re reading rural fiction, everyone is doing the same thing and all living the same way.”
Goodkin says her next collection — currently titled “Come Disastrous Water/rise O Deadly Sea” — will include stories that mostly take place in California and will be much more based in magical realism than straight-ahead fiction.
“I call it my covertly feminist book, because I have written mostly from a male point of view,” Goodkin says. “It’s definitely more about women coming into their own and finding their power.”
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