Hailing from a small, rural town in North Carolina, I have a strong understanding of small-town living. Time seems slower down here, peace and quiet echo throughout your neighborhood, and your neighbors are fairly familiar with the people in their community, which means they are knowledgeable of your comings and goings.
Anyone else who has lived in a small town knows that gossip travels fast. De’Shawn Winslow knows this well and expertly demonstrates it in his new book Decent People.
Raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Winslow was inspired to write after the death of his father. To navigate the grieving process, Winslow turned to nonfiction. He intended to write a biographical essay that would memorialize his father, but he ultimately hit a wall.
To bulldoze through that wall, he used his skills, his father’s life, and fictionalized events to tell a new story about him, creating his start in writing.
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Now, he’s busy writing books that give insight into the power and dangers of tight-knit communities. Both of his books, In West Mills and Decent People, take inspiration from his life and that of his family’s. The fictional town of West Mills is inspired by his mother’s hometown.
“The town of West Mills is based off of the real town of South Mills, North Carolina, which is right next door to where I grew up,” Winslow tells Queerty. “It’s where my mom and her siblings are all from, born and raised. And I just sort of visualized the town [and] the people.”
His first book introduced audiences to the town of West Mills, where nothing is ever a secret. Focusing on the characters Otis and Azalea a.k.a Knot, readers were exposed to Winslow’s expertise in world-building. Now, with his latest release, Decent People, Winslow takes us back to West Mills, but with new focal points and more rural anxieties to face.
“In the small town of West Mills in the 1970s, three prominent people have been murdered, and the authorities don’t care. And Jo Wright has just moved back to town to find out that her fiancé [Lymp], who is the victims’ half-brother, is the community’s crime suspect,” says Winslow. “Jo, who has had a string of bad relationships, wants this relationship with Lymp to work. And so what she first must do is prove his innocence to the community and to herself most importantly.”
“And as she embarks on this journey to prove his innocence, she learns about three other people [Savannah, Eunice, and Ted] who had a lot of issues with the victims, the Harmons. So the novel is sort of about finding the answer to this murder mystery, but it’s also about four people who are trying to get to the bottom of emotional issues.”
Sounds juicy, right?
Small town life has its perks, but it also has its ups and downs, something Winslow masterfully demonstrates in Decent People. Gossip incites emotions, which generates rash behavior from the very community that’s meant to be a haven to many.
But not everyone has that luxury. The characters Jo, Lymp, Savannah, Eunice, and Ted all have to wrestle with various trials and tribulations that would take most people down in an instant, but not everyone is small town strong or savvy enough to play small town games.
“In those types of small towns, it is so hard to have any sort of anonymity and privacy, because even if you don’t know the person, even if you don’t know some of your neighbors intimately, they know the basics about you. They know who your great-grandmother was and they know where you work, and they know that you are the one that drives the red Ford Escort.”
But when you play these games, you have to be prepared for what they bring.
“If you have an affair, they might not know you or the person you’re having an affair with, but guess what? Their cousin does. There’s no escape and those personal types of everyday life things filter into your job, because you can’t go apply for a job at the local lawyer’s office because he doesn’t want a secretary who he knows is having an affair with the married pastor. All of these things are very insular,” says Winslow.
“And I think that’s why I set both of my novels in small towns where people are very contained and even those who go away and live in big cities, they find their way back to the small town where they have less freedom than they could have had.”
And for many queer folks, freedom is all that they seek. The freedom to be themselves and to live fruitful lives. While there are clear elements of queerness in Winslow’s work, instead of being the centerpiece, they effortlessly build up the storylines within Decent People.
Winslow hasn’t written off writing a queer story, but in the meantime, he’s busy telling stories that feature dynamic queer elements and themes, such as chosen family, identity development, and authenticity.
“I figured, if I were ever to become a published writer, at some point I would bring up the queer experience. But when I first started writing, I was not interested in writing about the queer experience at all because I was more obsessed, frankly, with sort of sifting through and dissecting the lives of all the street people around me,” explains Winslow.
“Once I wrote In West Mills, I realized I’m going to have a queer character or have some queer things in everything I write, even if the center or if the main protagonists are all straight people. I think it’s just one of those things that I’m going to have to do as a queer person.”
With a book tour currently taking place, Winslow is ready to bring the lives and stories of the little town of West Mills everywhere. Decent People is available for purchase at your local bookstore or online.
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Kangol2
I haven’t read Winslow’s new book but In West Mills was really good. Great writing, a rich imagination, and real skill at creating a completely fictional version of reality!