From Kansas, with love: like it or not, my home defies stereotypes

Many in our society are untethered from home by the forces of capitalism, the disembodiment that the digital age engenders and the homogenizing cultural effects of globalization. The class that joins Hollywood meetings via Zoom calls from tropical beaches might even fancy itself post-place. What some of them miss, and what Somebody Somewhere makes ... See more

We carry our backstories with us, and many who leave are eventually summoned home, whether by familial duties or an abiding affection for the complicated place that shaped them.

At a moment when our social fabric is tearing, we would do well to look at the true threads of every unseen and misunderstood place. Efforts to diversify the powerful spaces that tell stories and create culture – newsrooms, publishers, Hollywood writers’ rooms – must address place, geography and class as identity markers.

2018 book Heartland was published, I heard from thousands of readers who were relieved and delighted to recognize in its pages their unsexy place, or a place much like it. The book is an intersectional critique of our ill-addressed socioeconomic class structure, my family’s rural poverty serving as a springboard to analyzing US history, policy and ... See more

To get a place wrong, over and over again, is at once an insult to and an invalidation of its people. To get a place right, then, is a healing of sorts.

Forgoing the caricature of rurality as frighteningly remote and disconnected, Somebody Somewhere also nails the liminality of town and country, for many.

The exquisite accuracy of the show (Somebody Somewhere) – shocking and even moving to a resident of a region more often misrepresented, lampooned or altogether ignored in popular culture – is not just in its unceremonious diversity.

Unfashionable places such as Kansas – “one of the square ones in the middle,” coastal acquaintances have said to me with a smile and a shrug – are often portrayed by Hollywood and news headlines as a homogenous expanse of “uneducated,” white, straight, cis-gendered conservatives who are cooking meth or terrorizing outsiders. Perhaps that is because... See more