The Places Within Us All: On Gwen Goodkin's "A Place Remote"

Gwen Goodkin | A Place Remote: Stories | West Virginia University Press | 2020 | 183 Pages

Growing up, especially in a small town, means deciding whether to leave home or stay. Some can’t imagine life anywhere else, while others can’t wait to get out. When I left my small hometown for college, although I didn’t realize it at the time, I became one of the permanent leavers. I’m no longer sure what propelled me away, aside from those big life decisions that seemed small enough in youth. But no longer living in my hometown means I can revisit the road not taken, or rather, the road turned off, and that’s a well-worn direct route to wondering what might have been. 

The first story in Gwen Goodkin’s debut collection, A Place Remote, maps the rural roads not taken and illustrates the ways in which leaving the small town can be both a measure of success and a betrayal. Getting out may be a way to achieve something bigger or different, but leaving everyone and everything behind comes at the cost of losing connections to people and landscapes that were once meaningful. This story is about a fleeting romance between RJ, a young man working construction on a traveling crew, and Winnie, a young woman he knew in high school who got a scholarship and went away to college. When his work brings him to Winnie’s college town, RJ gives her a call. The tension comes from the contrasts inherent in the blue collar boy, ironing his best shirt, walking onto the unfamiliar campus scene where he’ll make a play for the girl who seems to be living in a different world. For RJ, leaving home permanently is unthinkable; all his friends are there, he tells Winnie. For Winnie, after whom the story is titled, having someone from her old life appear in her new one isn’t easy either. She’s trying to fit in with her new surroundings and maintain an academic scholarship, not keep connections to her old life. 

After lingering on the edges of an uncomfortable frat party, RJ broaches a question that every kid who grew up in a small town considers at some point:

“Think you’ll move back home?” I asked. We were at the bottom of the fraternity steps. “Or leave for good?” 

She dropped her cigarette and stepped on it. “I’m already gone, baby.”

Despite their initial stances on home, that’s not the way life ends up for either of them. Winnie and RJ part ways early that night, but reconnect a few weeks later when she shows up at his trailer, frustrated by her inability to fit in at college. It’s a what-might-have-been kind of story, but issues of class tug at the edges—going to college versus working in a trade; getting a scholarship, but losing it; falling back into that small-town life and finding happiness there anyway. When RJ leaves home later in the story, it’s to “decide who to be and where to be it.” He is the one who ends up making his fortune elsewhere, running a construction business and starting a family in Texas. What he doesn’t realize is that Winnie, after quitting school, comes back to look for him while he’s away. Despite having the chance to get out, she ends up living back in that small hometown, married to a guy from high school. Years later, when RJ calls home, his mother shares the latest town gossip: Winnie has become the local bank branch manager and just bought the house next to her parents.

Even when a person does pull away from home, they can often find themselves drawn back in. The fact that I haven’t seen home in years bothers me in a subtle and passive way that perhaps only home can. No matter how many years pass, the place still tugs at me from time to time, making me long for the old friends living their lives without me, for the landscape of my formative years that continues to change without me seeing it. In A Place Remote, home recurs similarly as characters struggle to get away, to belong in the places they end up, and to accept who they are and the lives they’ve lived.

The whole collection feels like stepping into something mundane and familiar, yet oddly fraught, like driving through your hometown where everything is almost the same except your old middle school has been torn down. These stories capture so many of the particularities of rural nostalgia so well that it’s remarkable Goodkin, who grew up in the small-town Ohio where they are set, was able to render them in strict short form.

A Place Remote isn’t about tragedies that come out of nowhere, but the ones that build up over time. An elderly veteran misinterprets something between his wife and friend, construing a narrative of deceit that shapes the rest of his life. Tensions grow within a family weakened by loss. Old friends reconcile after a years-long rift. Goodkin’s stories are about the decisions that we have to live with long after we make them. The tension doesn’t grab you; it simmers on the back burner and scents the whole house.

The last story, “A Month of Summer,” revisits the idea of home through the eyes of a thirty-nine-year-old chorus singer, Julian, embarking on his first (and perhaps only) leading role in an opera. From the stage, he flashes back to the first time he left the Midwest as a high school foreign exchange student. His German teacher had brought up the trip, suggesting it would be good for him:

“We both knew what she meant. Being different in a small town was a job. Frau was different—her curly hair, always alight with static, framed her face like fur edging a hood. A year prior she’d started a theater troupe for a few brave souls. She drove an old Japanese car. The Japanese car alone—.”

Here Goodkin conjures yet more microdetails of rural Midwestern American life, the same baked-in intolerances that, as I remember growing up, stay hidden until they hit you over the head. As the idea of studying abroad takes shape for Julian, Goodkin presses deeper into how the long-standing grudges of previous generations have shaped the community (as in small towns, in the Midwest, in America). Julian runs the idea past his grandfather, who is old enough to remember World War II:

“Besides,” I said, “this whole area of Ohio was drained and cleared by the Germans. We’re all just a bunch of Krauts anyway.”

“We’re no Krauts, son.” He paused to catch his breath, leaning his forearm on the gutter.

I moved the ladder a few feet away and made my way up.

“I saw.” He stared at me until I looked him in the eyes. “Germans are a cruel people. Especially to those who don’t fit.” He stepped down a rung. “Like you.”

When he goes abroad, Julian stays with a close-knit German family who welcomes him, and even encourages him to stay beyond the school year. They take him on trips through the country and hire a music teacher who inspires him to study voice, something his grandfather back home might never have approved of. But his experiences and the family’s father, Helmut, also teach Julian the life lessons that will eventually propel him back. When the story closes on the moments just before his first big performance, Goodkin shows us in delicate, lucid prose the deep and bittersweet gratitude Julian feels for home.

The place remote that Goodkin creates is both that out-of-the-way small town and the dreams, longings, and regrets we seclude within ourselves. Compared to the short stories that tend to get published these days, these are definitely quieter, slower burns. But this quality never feels like a weakness. Goodkin doesn’t elicit strong, gut reactions; she elicits thoughtfulness and reflection. These stories make us consider, in the grand scheme of things, what we accept and what we do something about. And in many ways, A Place Remote will feel like a place you once called home, whether you still live there or not.