Welcome to Langston, Virginia, a small town in deep southwestern Virginia, somewhere near the West Virginia state border. Don’t bother looking for it on a map in the real world, though; you won’t find it there. Langston is a fictitious town, as are its neighboring towns of Bakers Branch and Carters Corner.
Why should you care about a town that doesn’t really exist? Because it’s the setting of my new collection of short stories, Miles Away from Nowhere, due out in late October or November, from Mountain State Press in West Virginia.
Why Miles Away from Nowhere? It’s not a thousand miles from nowhere, like the Dwight Yoakum song, but I do like that song. And it isn’t the middle of nowhere. It isn’t nowhere, at all. Langston is somewhere between all those places. (Plus, it’s part of a line from a Duran Duran lyric. Bonus points if you can tell me which song without Googling it!)
Is Langston based on Tazewell, Virginia, where I grew up? Langston is a conglomeration of every small town I’ve lived in and known, which is a bunch. But yes, there’s a lot of Tazewell in it, including the Clinch River. The Clinch is a focal point in the short story collection, with lots of stories having it in the background or foreground. When I was a kid growing up in Tazewell, the Clinch River went by my elementary school. I remember people fishing out of it. It ran by most of the places I lived. It wasn’t very wide in most of those places, but rivers don’t have to be wide to be rivers. Some people say they just need to be more than one hundred miles long. And the Clinch is more than three hundred miles long. So, I guess it qualifies.
What else can I tell you about the town of Langston? There are three main churches: the Methodist Church, which is uptown; the Baptist Church, which is also in town limits; and the Lily of the Valley Tabernacle, a nondenominational church, which sits outside of the town limits.
There’s a cruising strip about five miles long that the kids in town cruise along on weekends. It stretches from one end of the town to the other, from the Chilly Dawg (the local burger and ice cream joint), to the Fuel N Fun (the only gas station in town limits, that also doubles as a game room with arcade games and a pool table in the back of the store that were purchased at an estate sale in Georgia on the owners’ way back to Langston from a trip to Six Flags Over Georgia). The hospital is near the Chilly Dawg, as is the only sit-down restaurant in town, the River’s Edge Restaurant, which hosts Ladies Night every Thursday. (There is no liquor store in Langston, but the River’s Edge does serve alcohol.) Across from the courthouse is a locally owned hardware store, owned by Abe Howard. And across from the Methodist Church, you’ll find the Langston Public Library, where Miss Lydia is the Library Director.
The high school sits about halfway between the Chilly Dawg and the Fuel N Fun. The town’s high school mascot? The Dawgs. No specific kind of dawg. And it’s dawg, not dog. Their high school colors are black and orange.
There are lots of out-of-town places in the stories, too, some named, some unnamed. One story, “Second-Hand Girl,” takes place in Hale’s Hollow, or, as the locals call it, Hell’s Holler. There are lots of ridges and valleys that go unnamed that make up Langston; those communities breathe life into the town just as much as the streets of town do.
Langston is much more than places, though. Langston is every person who lives there. Each person who makes up the small population of the town and its activities. There are stories told from various perspectives and about all age groups. People who are teenagers, all the way up to 93-year-old James Robertson. People from every socioeconomic group in town. People representing every color, race, and gender, every underrepresented group that needs a voice. I won’t get into all of that right now. Those are stories within stories, and they’re stories for another time.
For now, I just want you to know that Langston exists. In my book, even if not on a real map of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Watch for more information here on my blogs and on my website. And on my Facebook and Instagram accounts, too. Now that we’ve decided on a title and have a timeframe for publication, I’ll be talking about it more. I hope you’ll make plans to visit Langston. It’s a nice place to visit. Some find it a good place to live. A whole lot of people who leave find their way back home to it. That’s the way of small towns. Because small towns are places where people have family, where people get second chances and survive. They’re where people find friends. And with friends, all things are possible.
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