Farrah Field of Small Spiral Notebook interviews Ladette Randolph about her book, This is Not the Tropics.

Farrah Field: Ms. Randolph, you create flavorful depictions of small town life, albeit not through vapid landscape descriptions, but rather through character action-a young girl who awaits the return of a missing neighbor, a handicapped accordion player, and a woman whose husband dies the very night she plans to leave him for another similarly lackluster man. Would you comment upon how you create this sense of place?

Ladette Randolph: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think I’m consciously going about creating a sense of place in my stories, but I’ve been told by people who live in Nebraska that I’ve somehow captured “how we talk.” It may be that the dialogue portrays the values and assumptions that characterize not only a place but people of certain classes within a place. I’m interested in ordinary people and the choices they make, large and small, but I understand their choices much of the time through the details of their surroundings. And, yes, you’re right. This has little to do with the landscape. That’s something of an unusual choice given the western tradition of setting the characters against the landscape since the landscape (and the vicissitudes of the weather) dominates so much for us here. We live in a unique place geographically, neither the West nor the Midwest, but the Great Plains, a place that is often overlooked in most people’s mental maps. If the Great Plains is thought about, it’s often in terms of the part it played in the history of homesteading, ranching, and the Indian wars; therefore, a place frozen in time and no longer inhabited.

Read the whole interview at Small Spiral Notebook.