All of it suggests to me the role of fiction as a way of holding onto places, especially small, forgotten ones. To depict such places, and to populate them with characters, is to offer rebuttal to assumptions of innocence or cultural backwardness, of their being forgettable, simply because they are being forgotten by so many of us. It is to say that all of the things which make such places unfamiliar to urban dwellers are just surface. They mean very little. In these places, as in every other place, there is character, and story, and the ways in which people succeed and fail, and it’s all worthy of our attention.

— From my Author Note on The Town Crier, written to accompany “Jamboree,” recently published by The Puritan.