Small-Town Writer

By Jules Older

As a writer living in a small town, you sometimes feel you don't have much of a contribution to make to community life. No, not as a person—every resident has that opportunity—as a writer. If you were a painter, you could paint the firehouse. If you were a plumber, you could fix the old furnace in the school. But what’s a writer to do?

For many years, I was a writer in a small town; actually, in a poor and tiny northern Vermont village. A calamity there made me think about the role of the writer.

Small-town calamities are the worst kind. Whether it’s fire or flood or frantic parents desperately searching for a bone-marrow donor for their daughter, you either know the people involved or your next-door neighbor does. If you were born there, you're probably related to them. In a small town, all tragedy is personal.

This time it was not only personal but sickening. Six seniors from our local high school went drinking in Canada ... and four of them never made it home. They died beside the Interstate, and a piece of each of us died with them. 

Drinking in Canada: when you live in a border town, you know the routine by heart. “Tomorrow’s my 18th birthday— let’s go celebrate!” Across the border, the drinking age is 18, and nobody’s too particular if you're a year or two younger. They'll take your money, hand you your beer and later, watch you stagger back to the car for the long trip home. The car’s the problem. Young driver, too much alcohol and 3,000 pounds of steel, glass and gasoline, all traveling together at 65 MPH. Or faster. Sometimes they make it home. This time they didn’t.

It couldn't have been much worse. The driver and the front-seat passenger survived. The four in the back... when the car left the Interstate, it dove upside-down into a stream. The four in the back drowned.

But this is about small-town writers. And the deaths by I-91 got me thinking about what writers can do for a small town.

I remembered that when the school is casting about for adults with “interesting jobs,” local writers are the first to be called. Actually, besides showing up for Interesting Jobs Day, I test out my new kid’s stories in Mr. Keppler’s class. (I got into kid’s writing when my own children were in school by turning up in the afternoon to tell stories and give teachers a break from my daughters and their classmates.)

Another thing the small-town writer can do is mentor other promising writers. I did that with Tyler, an eleven-year-old who came by whenever he finished a new story. They’re all about hunting: bow-hunting, musket-hunting, deer and partridge hunting. Tyler’s got a good ear for telling a tale. Our next lesson — dialog. Don’t tell the reader what the farmer said, have him say it, himself.

I also wrote the occasional letter to the paper for an old neighbor who wanted to express her gratitude to all the doctors and nurses at North Country Hospital who took such good care of her. She took care of me with freshly baked finger rolls. It’s what she calls “a fair trade.”

Town Meeting took place just a day after we learned about the deaths of our four kids. After we finished voting to buy a new front-end loader and resurface the blacktop, talk turned to what was hovering in the air — death. Judy, who lives up by Page Pond, stood and said, “These kids came through Customs just a few minutes before they crashed. We should write a letter. It should say that Immigration officials have to stop drunken drivers at the border. If they’d only done that this time...”

The Moderator said, “Judy, do you want to write that letter?” Without a second’s hesitation, she snapped, “I'm not good at letters. Let Jules do it.”

I did it — of course. I wrote it at lunch, then brought it back for the town’s approval at the afternoon school meeting. Here, in part, is what it said: “The Town of Albany, Vermont proposes that beginning immediately, United States Immigration Officers detain drivers who show evidence of intoxication. They could turn these drivers over to the police, to the local sheriff or to their parents; all would be preferable to sending them off to dice with death at 65 miles per hour. 

“In this week’s crash, the teenagers passed through American Immigration at three in the morning with alcohol in their bodies and beer cans in their car. Had they been detained at the border, they would not have died just minutes from the border.”

The town approved; the letter was sent.

That's what a writer can do for a small town. And that’s what living in a small town can do to a writer.

Hardly a model of constancy. Jules Older has been a disc jockey and ditch digger, medical educator and clinical psychologist, TV villain and children’s/adult author, journalist and editor. He's an executive consultant, crisis counselor and creator of the award-winning course, Writing For Real. His work has won awards in four countries. Jules has written for airline magazines, business magazines, e-magazines, leading medical and psychology journals, sports magazines, writer’s magazines, travel magazines, blogs, websites, and the Times: London, New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Vermont.

Jules’ latest kid’s book is Special Ed and the White Force.