Most bad writing about small towns fails in one of two directions. Either the town is a postcard, all porch swings and homecoming, or it is a punchline, populated by rubes the narrator is smarter than. Both are ways of not looking. The pieces that hold up, in this archive and anywhere else, come from writers who looked at one particular place long enough to earn it. What follows is practical advice, each point tied to a story or poem from the Inwood Indiana archive that does the thing well, with links so you can check the claims.
Be specific past the point of comfort
A generic small town (a diner, a water tower, a nosy neighbor) is stage furniture. A real one has particulars that could not belong anywhere else. Leah Angstman’s poem There Are Railroad Tracks that Run Through this Town is built almost entirely out of them: a grain elevator that recovered from a fire, a cemetery so small a passerby would miss it, the old depot that is now a diner “still selling sarsaparilla pumped from a fountain.”
Notice that most of her details are economic. Buildings that changed use. Things the town sold once and does not sell now. What a place makes, and what it stopped making, tells a reader more than scenery does, because commerce is where a town’s history shows on the surface.
Local speech without caricature
Phonetic dialect, spelled out letter by letter, reads as mockery almost immediately. The better tools are word choice and rhythm, with one small deviation doing the work of ten. Angstman again, in Sweet Corn from a Roadside Stall: “Quarter a ear,” the seller says. “I’ll shuck it for a extra nickel.” Two nonstandard articles, and you can hear her exactly. The rest of the poem stays in the narrator’s own English, which is the point. The poem is about coming from a place and no longer sounding like it. “Not from here, are ya,” the woman tells her, and does not pose it as a question.
Write the grammar people actually use, keep the spelling mostly standard, and trust the reader’s ear.
The economy of who-knows-whom
In a city, anonymity is the default and connection is what you build a plot from. A small town runs the other way. Everyone’s business is partly public, information moves along fixed routes (church, the school pickup line, the feed store), and privacy is a scarce good with a price. Helen Falandes gets a whole poem out of this arithmetic in Breaking Up in a Small Town: if the couple ever reconciles, “so much will need to be ignored at the next potluck,” because half the town will already have offered the view that the lover was bad news all along.
The craft test is simple. For any scene, know who will hear about it by Sunday, and from whom. If the answer never changes what a character does, the story is set in a small town the way a postcard is.
Hold decay and nostalgia in one frame
The rust-belt misery tour and the golden-light memory piece are the same mistake pointed in opposite directions; each replaces the town with a feeling about the town. Andrew Hubbard’s Scraping By stays bleak and earns it by being exact about mechanism: little Midwest cities that made parts and sub-assemblies for the motor city, then died when it did. “Everything has a life expectancy,” the poem says. “You just don’t know what it is until it unfolds in front of you.”
The corrective for both distortions is layered time: what the building was and what it is now, held in the same sentence, without instructing the reader to mourn. Angstman’s depot, essential once and a slow-business diner now, does this in a single image.
Let a real place seed the fiction
This journal is named for Inwood, a real unincorporated community in Marshall County, Indiana, and its short history is documented. The site was platted in 1854 as Pearsonville. For a while the town was Ironwood, after the ironwood trees, whose wood is hard enough that settlers made tools from it. When the railroad came through, the name became Inwood, for the woods around it. A gazetteer puts the population near two hundred by 1866; by 1882 it was around five hundred, busy mostly with lumber. Then the timber ran out. A directory of the period says the village “used to be quite a lively one, especially in the lumbering business, but now that the lumber has nearly all been cut off, it is quite quiet.”
That is a story engine sitting in the public record: a town named for its trees, twice, that sold its trees. Everything this journal published rests on that armature, and the site has always been plain about the seam. The town and its history are real. The strange happenings in the stories are the fiction writers sent us. The full history, and the honest accounting of which is which, is on About Inwood Indiana.
Your own county has an Inwood in it somewhere. Plat maps, old gazetteers, and county directories are free to read, and they are full of premises nobody has used yet.
Where to see it done
The whole archive is free: Fiction, Poetry, and Micro & Flash Fiction, plus the Long reads list on the front page, which gathers the ten longest pieces in the archive. If your small towns run dark, the companion essay What Is Midwestern Gothic? defines that mode and points to six pieces from this archive that work in it.
This essay and its companion on Midwestern Gothic are two of the guides collected on the guides page.
