SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
One morning, with fog on the river, all inboxes in Lanier, Indiana -population 12,234 - receive an email.
ROBYN RYLE: (Reading) Invitation to participate - sexual practices in a small, Midwestern town. As subject lines went, it left a lot to be desired. It wasn't surprising that the email ended up in the spam folders of half the people in Lanier, and there it remained undiscovered. Another fifth went to email addresses that no one checked or had long since forgotten the passwords for. And so these people, too, were saved the shock or titillation or outrage.
SIMON: Ah, but maybe not for long. Robyn Ryle's new book, "Sex Of The Midwest," knits more than a dozen small-town short stories into the lives of more than 65 characters, some of whom find this survey pushing and pulling on parts of their lives they thought had been pinned into place. Robyn Ryle is a professor of sociology and gender studies at Hanover College in Indiana, and she joins us from the studios of WFPL, Louisville Public Media. Thanks so much for being with us.
RYLE: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: What's the range of reactions that roll through this town?
RYLE: Well, Don Blankman, who is the character in the very first story is...
SIMON: Coach.
RYLE: ...Outraged.
SIMON: Coach.
RYLE: Coach Don Blankman, a former basketball coach, retired now, recovering from COVID, waiting for a lung transplant. He's shocked and a little outraged, also a little confused 'cause, you know, he's not real great with technology. But at the same time, he finds out from his wife that there's a outbreak of STDs at the junior high school, and so he decides that he has to do something about it. His solution to that is to run for the school board.
Loretta, who works for the health department, is kind of indifferent to the survey. You know, she's not really titillated by sex. But she is sort of obsessed with making sure that the hot dog vendor, the hot dog cart guy, is prevented from running his hot dog cart, which is what the city government has tasked her with. So she has a hot dog guy obsession.
SIMON: How - what are some of the ways in which the pandemic changed Lanier that we should know?
RYLE: I think for Don Blankman, the character, one of the things that I was thinking about when I wrote Don is trying to get myself inside the head of a certain type of person who thinks very differently from me. And I think Don, and a lot of people like him, one of the things the pandemic really brought home was thinking about death and a fear of death. And so one of the things that Don's confronting, he hasn't thought about his own death. And I think that's one of the problems with a lot of people in society today. There's a scene where he literally thinks that death has come for him in the form of these two women tourists and literally gets up and runs away. So I think one of the things is thinking about death, thinking about meaning.
So Rachel, the bartender, throughout the arc of the story becomes interested in writing, goes to a writers' conference. I think she's thinking about, what is the meaning in the face of the pandemic? There's a story about a kid who is in San Francisco and decides to move to Lanier. And I think there's a lot of transition thinking about, where do we want to be now? - so a lot of geographic displacement that happened in the wake of the pandemic. So yeah, I think those are some of the threads.
SIMON: Are you from a town that reminds you of Lanier, or is it vice versa?
RYLE: I live in a town that is very much like Lanier and very much inspired these stories. So I think of the book - one way I've described the book is a love letter to small towns. I think we have a certain narrative about small towns in rural parts of the country, especially in places like Indiana. But I think those narratives often miss the complexity and really just the weirdness of life in small towns. I think people think small towns are homogeneous. Everyone's the same. Everyone's kind of boring and straight and conservative. And that's not my experience in the small town where I live.
SIMON: I confess - and I'm not proud of this - I was surprised to find a drag brunch in Lanier, Indiana.
RYLE: (Laughter) Yeah. And when I - yeah. I workshopped to these stories with people from around the country and I had people say to me, I don't believe that a small town of 12,234 people would have this many drag events. But I have to say, in the small town where I live, there are quite a few drag brunches, drag bingo. And I think that's, you know, part of the misconception.
SIMON: I love the character of Rachel, the bartender. First off, she hates bloody marys, doesn't she?
RYLE: (Laughter) She does.
SIMON: She likes the fact that people can open up to her. She hears a lot of good stories. But if they become tiresome...
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: ...She can just move on, right?
RYLE: Yes. Yes. I've never worked as a bartender. I worked as a waitress in college quite a bit. I spend a bit of time in our local bar in Madison. And it is the beauty. In the end, you can always say, you know, oh, I've got to get those drinks or I've got to get that table, and move away if people become too annoying.
SIMON: What - and I'll put it this way - what drives Rachel to commit literature?
RYLE: That's a good question. You know, I think she goes to the writers' conference purely because she wants to stay in the Virginia Woolf room. But then I think she becomes a writer to make sense of her experiences after the pandemic. She has a little bit of a breakdown at the writers' conference, thinking about, what am I doing here?
And I think in a lot of the stories you see - one of the kids who comes back, he talks about, everyone promised us after the pandemic, everything would be better. And he's betrayed by that's not actually true. It's after the pandemic, or at least, you know, the worst of the pandemic, and things aren't really better. So I think part of Rachel and everyone in the story is dealing with this sense that we had this promise if we could just get through, things would be OK. And things didn't turn out the way that maybe we thought they would or people told us they would.
SIMON: What do you like about small-town life? What made you want to, in a sense, speak up for it?
RYLE: It's a very difficult time historically right now in the United States. There's a lot of anger, and I think the tendency to dehumanize each other is very easy and very tempting. And I think in a small town, because you're living intimately with people who are very different from you, it makes it a little bit harder to dehumanize your neighbors, to think of them as not like you in some ways, even if, like Don Blankman, they think very differently from you. So I think there's a kind of important way in which we have to live next to each other, and we have to figure out ways to get along.
SIMON: Robyn Ryle's new book of stories, "Sex Of The Midwest." Thank you so much for being with us.
RYLE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
