Small town, big love

The stories behind Robyn Ryle's new novel, Sex of the Midwest

Before we begin…

What is the smallest town you’ve ever lived in? What did you love/hate/both? If you’ve never lived outside of a city, how do you imagine life in a small town?

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One town, so many stories

A few issues back, when it was still summer, I told you about Robyn Ryle’s new novel Sex of the Midwest. I also told you I’d gotten hold of an advance review copy and was devouring it. This book turned out to be one of the bright spots in my summer – not just my summer reading, my summer. It is, by turns, witty, wise, thoughtful, and always honest. Its characters and their voices are so real I still think about them. At its heart, it is not about sex - not entirely - it’s a love letter to a small town and an invitation to anyone who has never lived in one to get a glimpse of what makes small towns unique and, yet, like every other place on earth.

Sex of the Midwest. constructed in a series of linked stories a la Olive Kitteridge, launched this week. I asked Robyn to answer a few questions about how this book came about, her own love affair with a small town, and her journey as a writer. You can learn more about Robyn and her work at her website and on her Substack I Think Too Much. She can also be found on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. A little while back, she contributed this essay to Spark about awe and community. She, her husband, and her two cats, Gilly and Kevin live in Madison, Indiana, population 12,000+.

Robyn Ryle and her new book, Sex of the Midwest

The book’s journey

First, the obvious question: what was the inspiration for this novel? Why did you find it compelling? What were the toughest hurdles to get past in order to write it (if any)?

I was at a writer’s conference where Luis Alberto Urrea was giving a talk. He said, “Pick up the pen with love or don’t pick it up at all.” I think he’s right. It’s certainly possible to write characters without loving them. But I can’t imagine it’s pleasant, to have to spend that much time inside the head of someone you do not love. And I think that once you step inside the head of a character, even if they’re very different from you, you begin to see what’s lovable about them. They become human to you in a way they might not have been before.

These stories started with Don Blankman who, as a character, is very different from me. He’s conservative and a little pompous. We all know people like Don and I thought, what if I tried to write a story from his perspective? What would that be like? What would I learn about how he sees the world? How could it help me to be less angry at the real-life Don Blankman’s in my life?

Obviously, climbing inside Don’s head wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t always easy to walk the line between making Don sympathetic but also holding him accountable. But it seemed worthwhile to me because, in the end, I don’t want to spend a lot of time being angry. That’s a hard thing in today’s world. There are so many reasons to be angry. But to live inside anger all the time doesn’t feel good to me. Writing Don was my attempt to process the anger I think a lot of us are feeling in the world now.

“In Madison, if the world ends, we’re all going down together.” Which is kind of how I want to feel. If the world ends, this is where I want to be and we’ll all go down together.” - Robyn Ryle

Small town life and love

Tell us about your love affair with this small town of Lanier and perhaps the town (s) that inspired it. You mention in your acknowledgments, for example, that arriving in the town where you now live “saved your life.” Was it love at first sight? Was it an acquired thing? How does one go from being an outsider to a member of a community where new people tend to stand out for one reason or another?

What a great question! The town that inspired Lanier is Madison, Indiana, and before I moved here, I had no idea such a place existed, even though I grew up just 60 miles up the Ohio River in northern Kentucky. I did not seek Madison out. I just got lucky. I loved the idea of living in a house that’s almost 200 years old and when I bought my house, it was very affordable. That’s much less the case now, as the town has gentrified.

So it wasn’t love at first sight. It crept up on me as I started walking to the coffee shop every day in the summer. And as I became a regular at various places in town. As I went to the amazing music festivals we have in town where you get to hang out with your neighbors and listen to incredible bands while our daughter ran around with her friends. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I looked around and realized how much I loved this place. But I try hard not to take it for granted.

Right as the pandemic was in its early days, before everything had shut down, there was a concert at one of our local music venues. We had the sense that this would probably be one of the last concerts for a long time. It was Joan Shelley, a great singer-songwriter out of Louisville. And the event venue owner (who is also our veterinarian) said, “In Madison, if the world ends, we’re all going down together.” Which is kind of how I want to feel. If the world ends, this is where I want to be and we’ll all go down together.

One of the moments that hit me like an arrow to the heart was when a character realizes that it is difficult, if not impossible, to convey exactly what it means to grow up in a place that looks so small and far from the heart of things as a small town like Lanier and where most people know each other or about each other. I grew up in a small town, a lot smaller than Lanier. When I arrive back in San Diego after visiting, I tell my husband, who grew up in LA, all kinds of things and I can tell that none of them register in quite the way I mean them to.

Yes, there’s this great passage in The Circus in Winter, another linked short story collection by Cathy Day (a fellow Hoosier) in which a character describes our relationships to our hometowns—“Maybe every town in America transmits that radio signal, and on certain nights when the weather and the frequency are just right, we can all hear our hometown talking softly to us in the back of our dreams.”

I love that image so much and I thought about that passage a lot, especially in the story, “Ava and the Pink Lady,” which is very much about that inability to translate your own experiences with the place you call home. Sam, the young woman in that story, realizes how unique her own childhood in Lanier was and that she’ll probably never be able to communicate those experiences to her girlfriend.

My college roommates used to joke that I must be a Russian spy, because I didn’t know a lot of the things they felt were standard knowledge for American teenagers of a certain age. There were bands I didn’t listen to. Trends that I’d never heard of. But I was just from a small town and that is its own sort of universe.

What will you tell the people of Madison when they come up to you with a copy of the book and tell you they know each real-life person who gave rise to the characters in your stories? Will any of them associate you with one of the characters in the book (I’m thinking Rachel)?

This is such a weird thing for me to think about, Betsy! Of course, many of the characters and situations in the book began with the seed of a real story or person or situation or place. All fiction, I think, has to start with some moment of reality. One of the very useful things Elizabeth Strout said in a workshop I took with her was that you have to start writing every day with one true moment. One true moment from your own life. Then how can you alchemize that into fiction? I followed that very closely when I was writing these stories.

My college roommates used to joke that I must be a Russian spy, because I didn’t know a lot of the things they felt were standard knowledge for American teenagers of a certain age. There were bands I didn’t listen to. Trends that I’d never heard of. But I was just from a small town and that is its own sort of universe. - Robyn Ryle

All my weird thoughts and feelings and experiences show up in all the characters. Yes, like Rachel, I’m a writer. She’s about the same age I was when I was writing the stories. I feel all her same aches and pains. I also really hate having to floss my teeth. I did go to a writing conference partly because I wanted to stay in the Virginia Woolf room, which is in a real hotel—The Sylvia Beach Hotel—in Oregon, not Florida. I did get very excited when I saw a wood stork in St. Petersburg.

But Joyce’s story of growing up in a church where people wash each other’s feet comes from my mother, who did, in fact, have to get re-baptized when she joined my father’s church. The sex book Loretta and Tom talk about is the one my parents gave me—I can still picture the illustrations! When James leaves San Francisco to live in the shack in Lanier, he’s following one of my own fantasies of just picking up and moving to some small town where no one really knows who I am.

So in some ways, all the characters are versions of me. Even Don.

I was at a writer’s conference where Luis Alberto Urrea was giving a talk. He said, “Pick up the pen with love or don’t pick it up at all.” I think he’s right. It’s certainly possible to write characters without loving them. But I can’t imagine it’s pleasant, to have to spend that much time inside the head of someone you do not love. And I think that once you step inside the head of a character, even if they’re very different from you, you begin to see what’s lovable about them. They become human to you in a way they might not have been before. - Robyn Ryle

Sharing space even if is uncomfortable at times

In these stories, the elements that polarize our population nationally, have not quite had the same effect in Lanier. We see people coping with the aftermath of Covid in different ways, adhering to certain beliefs, and yet somehow all sharing space with one another – even if it is uncomfortable at times. Is this something that you hope is true or what you have observed yourself or is it something I am overlaying onto your story?

No, you’re definitely not overlaying that onto the stories. It’s not perfect, but the characters in Lanier are sharing space with people with whom they have deep differences of opinion. Nancy can’t endorse Don because he’s disappointed her too much, but she hasn’t stopped speaking to him, either. She really does hope he gets that new lung. She doesn’t wish him ill. He just makes her very sad.

I feel like this is an accurate description of at least the small town where I live. Other people who live here certainly might have a different perspective. And it’s certainly not easy to stay in community with people who have acted in ways that are so baffling and disappointing and, quite frankly, dangerous to the lives of people I love. And I would never ask or expect this of everyone. There’s no reason that anyone should have to be civil to someone whose behaviors actively put them in harm’s way.

But I’ve also seen how, if we can stay in conversation with people across these very big divides, it can sometimes have positive effects. It can sometimes change minds. It can create a space for change. And I guess, in the end, I’m not sure what other option we have.

It’s also what I do as a sociology professor, after all. I make room for the students to have conversations about controversial topics, even the ones with whom I fundamentally disagree. I do that because I believe that’s the best way for them to learn. If I can do that in the space of a classroom, it seems I should be able to do it in my community, too. That’s my hope, at least.

What sorts of research did you have to do for Sex of the Midwest? Has such a survey as the one that the stories all revolve around ever been done? How did you arrive at the decision to use this survey as a device to kick off the stories and bring us into the lives of the characters who live in Lanier?

When I started the first story, which was “Don Blankman Saves the Youth of America,” I wasn’t really sure if I was writing a novel or a linked short story collection. I did know I wanted something to hold the stories together. I wanted something that would flow through all of them. And something that was maybe a little sexy. Something that introduced a bit of mystery. The survey did all those things.

I’d also recently read Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which blew me away. So I was thinking, what would stories about the secret sex lives of Midwesterners be like?

Also, I got my Ph.D. at Indiana University, home of the Kinsey Institute. Some of my professors were part of the Kinsey Institute, doing sex research. It made sense to me that someone in Bloomington at the Kinsey Institute might have heard of or visited Lanier.

On top of all that, the famous study of “everytown” U.S.A.—Middletown—is actually a study of Muncie, Indiana, another Hoosier town. I was interested in this idea, from a research perspective, that one town can stand in for all towns. Which is bullshit. Each town is unique in the same way each city is unique. But I liked the idea of characters coming up against that sort of leveling force. The survey wants to treat Lanier as generic, but Lanier is not generic. It is its own place.

Gilly: writing coach to Robyn Ryle and resident of Madison, IN

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The writer’s journey

Tell us about your own journey as a writer. How did you get started? What keeps you going? What are you working on now?

Every couple of years I flirt with the idea of giving up on writing. That lasts for about a week. Then I’m back at it. I wonder if it’s a compulsion. An affliction. A disorder. A coping mechanism.

It’s funny, I’ve recently started playing with watercolor and drawing. I find painting to be so satisfying. It takes me totally out of my head. And it is so much FASTER than writing! I can see immediately how the painting turned out. I can look at the painting I’ve done every night before I go to bed (which I do). Also, people spontaneously offer to pay me for these paintings, which I do for fun and which sometimes take all of five minutes to do! This seems insane to me compared to the amount of time and heartbreak that goes into writing.

Sometimes I think, So, should I just give up on the writing and paint instead? But I see no signs of that happening. It seems that writing is a part of who I am that I cannot leave behind. Even when it makes me insane. Even when I think, What kind of masochist signs up for this? Still, I keep going. I’m not really always sure if that’s a good thing or not.

What will you be doing to promote this book? What have you learned about this aspect of being an author from your previous books?

First, I’ll be having a big-ass launch party in that event space I mentioned earlier in Madison There will be music and signature cocktails (a gin-based drink called The Sex of the Midwest and a bourbon-based on called The Lanier). There will be almost a hundred people. I wish I could invite everyone in Madison, but I don’t think I can afford it.

The party is not about book promotion, but about what I’ve learned about publishing—celebrate your victories when you can! It is an incredible miracle that this book is in the world, thanks largely to the work and wisdom of Henriette Lazaridis and Anjali Duva of Galiot Press. So I’m having a big party to celebrate that.

Then in November, I’ll go to Boston to celebrate the official launch of Galiot Press with Anjali and Henriette and the author of their second book (Swallowtail), Emily Ross. We’ll be at Belmont Books on November 18 and Concord Arts on November 20.

The amazing people at Midas PR are working with Galiot because they’re really excited about what Anjali and Henriette are doing with their press and their vision of how publishing could be different. They’ve been great and have all kinds of amazing promotional things lined up.

Kevin, writing coach #2 who approved the use of this photo

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Ciao for now!

Gratefully yours,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…backyard at dusk

From Robyn Ryle: My moment of Zen...a picture of our backyard at dusk. We call this the party pavilion, though it is also where my husband and I spend a lot of time chilling and reading and watching birds and clouds and trees and small lizards hiding in the paving stones. I included my watercolor painting of the same photo, because lately, watercolor is very much my moment of Zen.

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”:

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.

I can’t wait to see what you send!

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