Trailer Trash, and Conflicted Relationships with Setting
Last November, I attended a writing retreat with a group of local authors. It was fun and very productive, but there was one point where we were asked to name our favorite writer movies. I have to be honest: I hadn’t even seen most of the titles named. After doing a bit of research, I don’t think I’ll go out of my way to change that, either. I like my movies to be fun, light, and entertaining. The words “poignant” and “life-changing” make me run screaming. I took a deep breath and mentioned my favorite writer movie — Orange County — with a great deal of trepidation. Sure enough, nobody there had even heard of it, and I’m sure if any of them looked it up later, they dismissed it as being juvenile and silly. Well, it is, in many ways. But it also has some really great moments. It’s kind of goofy, which is part of why I love it, but there’s more going on underneath than meets the eye.
With the release of Trailer Trash only a couple of days away, I keep thinking about one particular quote near the end of the movie. It’s in this scene:
In case you don’t want to watch the whole thing, the quote is this: “Every good writer has a conflicted relationship with the place he grew up.”
Now, whether or not I’m a “good writer” must be left for others to debate, but the last half of the line really hit home for me. I spent the first eleven years of my life in a small town in Wyoming, and I definitely have a very conflicted relationship with it. In some ways, I love it. I have fond memories of certain parts of it. But in other ways, I hate it. It’s kind of a crappy little place, more of a giant truck stop than a town. Sometimes I miss it, and yet I wouldn’t move back for all the money in the world.
The place we moved to, Fort Collins, Colorado, was bigger and nicer than my hometown in just about every way, and for a teenager, it offered a world of opportunities, but I was very much a hick from the sticks. I knew very little about the broader world. It was 1984, and I didn’t even know who Madonna was, much to the amusement of my classmates. I’m not sure I even quite realized how clueless I was until years later.
Eventually, of course, I found my place. Not only did I go to junior high and high school in Fort Collins, I went to college here too, and I chose to stay after graduation. I bump into somebody from school at least once a year. Sometimes, it’s a nice reunion. More often than not, it’s uncomfortable as hell, and so I suppose even though I love Colorado, I have a slightly conflicted relationship with Fort Collins, as well.
Why am I telling you all this? Because Trailer Trash, which comes out today, is the book born of my conflicted relationship with both of the towns I grew up in. I took my favorite parts of my hometown, and transplanted them into the fictional town of Warren, Wyoming. I also took the worst parts of my hometown, and amplified them by making the town even smaller and more isolated. And then I took some of the more aggravating parts of my teen years in Fort Collins, and tossed them into the mix. My primary goal in writing Trailer Trash was to capture the isolation and hopelessness of a dying town in the middle of nowhere, before the internet came along and made the world easily accessible to anybody with a computer.
But don’t let any of that fool you. Trailer Trash isn’t about me, and it’s not as depressing as it sounds. It’s a coming-of-age story about first love and first times and about finding hope in a place that seems to have none. And I promise, it has a happy ending.
Trailer Trash is available now. You can find it here:
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Happy release day!
