Welcome to Small Town Dispatches, a new feature on The Peak that recognizes the efforts of sustaining a writing practice in places with unconventional resources. Writing can be deeply isolating, especially when you live outside of cities that are seen as cultural epicenters. So here, Special Features Editor Nadeen Kharputly interviews Shenandoah contributors to gain insights about what it’s like to live in small towns (and towns that feel small): rural areas, college towns, islands, hamlets, and more.
Writer: Shamala Gallagher
Town: Athens, Georgia
Bio: Shamala Gallagher is the author of a poetry collection, Late Morning When the World Burns (The Cultural Society, 2019). Her writing appears in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Gulf Coast, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a community college humanities teacher in Athens, Georgia.
Tell us about your small town: how small is it?
I live in the college town and consolidated city-county of Athens, Georgia, where the 2020 Census says 127,315 people live. The census doesn’t count everyone; unusually, this year it might not have counted me. I’m mixed-race and always want myself counted on the census so those like me feel they count, but this year I think my husband yelled at the census-taker and I’m not sure if that led to counting or not.
Speaking of counting, Athens, Georgia is not in all ways a small town. To me it is: I work at a community college and teach so many people who have lived in the area for years. The place has a being, a specific being, a rootedness to place that is different from the larger cities where I’ve lived (San Jose, where I’m from; Austin; San Francisco). Maybe, though, it’s only a small town for me because I’m not from here.
What makes your town a unique place for your writing practice?
My writing always begins in reaching out from alienation. Here in the gorgeous, devastating, sometimes dull South, I don’t belong–for example, South Asian and White in a town organized by Whiteness and Blackness, I don’t belong–and yet I love the friendly people; and I love the open-mouthed blossoms; in March I walk my kiddo to school and exclaim over and over about the blossoms; and yet here my second child was born this March and is receiving amazing care in the NICU at Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center; and yet my mother has moved here, too, and I think the South to her is more like India because people will talk to you in the street; and yet I love the scorching summers; and I’ve lived here for ten years.
Do you have a favorite writing spot?
I don’t believe in having one favorite writing spot. Right now I’m writing from Birdie’s, a new coffee shop that’s beautiful inside. It used to be a salon where I got my hair cut and my eyebrows waxed until one day, the day Trump was elected, I came late to my appointment and my hairdresser snapped at me, and by the end of the appointment she cried, and I understood, and yet somehow I don’t wax my eyebrows anymore.
Across the street is a clothes store I’ve never been to, but Daily Co-Op used to be there, and now it’s down the street. To the left used to be Avid Bookshop and now is The Lark Winespace. In this restless college town places change, like one of those cities of Calvino’s.
How do you build community with other writers or creatives in your town?
Because I moved here for my creative writing PhD, I know many writers in town who taught at that program or went to that program. There are also lots of artists and musicians in the town; I know them because they drop their kids off at the same public elementary school, or they teach at the community college where I teach, or my mom knows them through the little Indian community she has here.
What do you appreciate most about where you live?
At my job at the two-year college where I teach especially, people are humble and good; they see themselves as one among many instead of as exceptional; they believe in family, in friendship, in love; they are warm when you speak to them. And, as I said, the blossoms.
What sort of rituals have you cultivated in your town?
Every year we submit a picture of one of our pets to the Pets of Boulevard calendar. I drive my son Jasper (now five) downtown to look at the Christmas lights. We wander deliriously through Porchfest. Now and then I forget that I don’t drink alcohol and I go to Normal Bar, one of the first bars where I drank when we moved here before we had kids, and drink again. Then I remember that I don’t drink and [order] mocktails. More and more bars in town have mocktails: Bar Bruno has them, so does The National and 5&10 and Buvez. In the winter I say, “I’m cold.” Eventually it is spring and I talk loudly about the blossoms.