Why Small Towns?

November 1, 2026

People sometimes ask why I set my stories in a small town. The easy answer is that I love them. The truer answer is that small towns are the best place I know to tell a story about being known.

In a big city, you can disappear. You can walk down a crowded street and nobody will look twice. There's freedom in that, I suppose. But in a small town, everybody knows your name, your mama's name, and what you did in the tenth grade. They know which pew your family sits in. They know when your car hasn't moved from the driveway in three days, and somebody will be on your porch with a casserole before you can say you're fine.

That kind of knowing cuts both ways, and that's exactly why it makes for good fiction. It can feel like a warm quilt or like a spotlight. When you're grieving, a small town can hold you up. When you've made a mistake, it can feel impossible to outrun. When you come home after years away, you find that the town remembers a version of you that you may have spent a long time trying to leave behind.

My heroines live in that tension. They're surrounded by people who love them and people who think they know them, and sometimes those are the same people. They have to figure out how to be fully themselves in a place that has already decided who they are. That's a struggle I think most of us understand, whether we grew up on a dirt road or in a high-rise.

Small towns also slow things down. There's time for long conversations on the porch. There's time to notice the way the light changes in the evening, or the smell of rain coming over the fields. Relationships unfold at the pace of real life. In a small town, you can't avoid the person you've hurt. You'll see them at the grocery store, at church, at the Friday night ballgame. Healing becomes something you have to walk out in front of everybody.

And then there's faith. In the small Southern towns I write about, church isn't just a building. It's the center of the community, the place where babies are dedicated and funerals are held and potlucks are fiercely competitive. Faith shows up in everyday conversations, in the prayers whispered over hospital beds and the hymns hummed while washing dishes. It's woven into the fabric of the place, and that lets me explore faith in a way that feels natural rather than preachy.

Most of all, I write about small towns because they remind me that every life matters. In a small town, nobody is just a face in the crowd. Every person has a story, and every story is connected to a dozen others. That's the kind of world I want to spend my days in, and the kind I hope you'll love visiting.

Thank you for sitting a while. If you'd like the next letter from home in your inbox, along with news about Bluebonnets and Magnolias as it comes, you're welcome here.