Tom Averill and Tom Prasch: a discussion inspired by Kent Haruff's Plainsong.
Tom Averill: Yeah, I’m particularly interested in Plainsong as a branch of small town literature that I study, whether it is in eastern Kansas or on the High Plains – small town literature and probably small town film, sort of have a certain number of things in common.
Tom Prasch: Yes.
Tom Averill: One of those is you have this sort of closed-knit and somewhat inescapable community which is in some ways very democratic because people have to deal with each other and their own selves. And, it is enclosed in that way, but it is equally maybe prejudicial in terms of looking at people when things go wrong, but it’s also very equal in terms of people having to work things out together.
Tom Prasch: Simultaneously liberating and confining in a sense?
Tom Averill: Exactly! It’s like the advantage is, everybody knows your business. The disadvantage is that everybody knows your business. I think, too, a book like that accentuates the notion that there are sort of types, and often types in the literature of the small town is that one of the things that happens is that something or somebody comes in, who’s outsider comes in and changes -- or an event changes the balance of everything. It might be the stranger or it might be . .
Tom Prasch: William Inge is classic in that. It’s when the stranger shows up that things go awry in Picnic, you know. It is a classic trope.
Tom Averill: Yeah, it is and then when something goes wrong in a small town, you have these people who all have to deal with it in their different ways. I mean, in Plainsong, one of them is the mother who is not doing well with her children. The teenager who is pregnant. What do we have to do with these things now that we have to recognize them? And what are we made of that we can deal with situations like this?
Tom Prasch: And then there is the environmental. When we are talking about small towns and agrarian communities on the Great Plains, there is the particular environment of the plains that is also informing in the memoirs, in the literature, in the film, it’s not an accident that the Wizard of Oz start with that tornado . . and that tornadoes pop up again and again in Kansas film, you can see that it’s there. In Learning Tree it’s there. And lots of other places. Dealing with the harsh environment is one of the major tropes as well. It complicates the dynamics of a small community. It’s automatically imperiled and struggling existence.
Tom Averill: Yeah. I don’t know of any High Plains book in which the weather and the environment aren’t sort of equal characters – with the people characters that are also in it. There’s also a focus on animals and what animals are doing. That’s very important on the High Plains and it is not so much in say small town literature of eastern Kansas or whatever. The drama of the High Plains. The isolation is sometimes accentuated by writers.
