Isolation and Community in Rural America

In 2026, America’s loneliness problem is no longer surprising news. It’s now been nearly three years since then U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy warned us about “Our Epidemic of Loneliness” and described the effects of “lacking social connection” as being as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Of course, tech gurus and marketing professionals have been ready as ever to fill this relational vacuum with ready-made remedies like social media and the proliferation of chat bots. We may be alarmed by the growing penchant for chatbots to fill the gaps in people’s lives as friends and even in some cases spouses, but we are often tempted to see these trends as exceptions that a few folks might struggle with. It’s easy to ignore or rationalize our own loneliness until it is too late.

No corner of America has a corner on loneliness. Loneliness finds us in the anonymity of cities and in the small-town cliques and vast expanses of rural America. Now that we have the world in our pockets, it’s easy to scroll through the seemingly happy, friend-filled lives of peers and wish those lives were our own. Regardless of whether those backlit images match reality, the image is enough. Comparison has done its work. We retreat to the numbing comfort of our glowing screens and Netflix subscriptions.

This is the world we have inherited. It is, to some extent, the world we have all helped make. I don’t say this to assign blame. It’s hard to imagine a person—though perhaps a handful are out there—who is not both a victim of and complicit in these trends. The question I’m wrestling with for myself and for the rural communities I serve as a pastor and inhabit as a person, is what, if anything, is to be done? When the world encountered the COVID-19 pandemic, we fought back against the virus in myriad ways. What are we doing in rural communities like those I know and love to fight back against the encroachment of an epidemic that shows up not on petri dishes but in broken hearts and lost lives?

That’s a question I’ve been thinking about a good bit over the last year. It’s a question two novels have helped me think about in new ways. As is often the case, sometimes fiction tells the truth best.

Two Takes on Isolation

An initial glance at John J. Thompson’s The Ballad of the Lost Dogs of East Nashville (Gyroscope Productions, 2024) and Michael Perry’s Forty Acres Deep (Sneezing Cow Publishing, 2022) reveals few similarities between these two fictional accounts of life in modern America. From their vastly differing covers—one animated and colorful the other a snow-laden photograph with ominous billows of black smoke—to their subject matter, geographic location, and even girth (Thompson’s novel comes in at a thick 329 pages while Perry’s slight volume is only 122), the books seem to have little in common. In fact, if both hadn’t shown up on Byron Borger’s Hearts and Minds Bookstore email last summer, I would never have put them together or even found them at all. (Once again Byron’s excellent work as a bookseller came through for me!)

Thanks to a nudge from Byron and a week of oceanside serenity last July, I read these books—one a comedy, the other a tragedy—in conversation with each other. The result has been a swirl of ideas and emotions that I have not been able to forget. There is something in these pages for a lonely nation.

Loneliness Kills

If there is one constant other than snow in Micheal Perry’s Forty Acres Deep it is isolation. The entire novel stands as a tragic testament to rural isolation, an isolation made not just possible but even likely by the hardships of modern agriculture and the breakdown of small-town life. From the book’s first pages—when we learn that the main character, Harold, has been keeping his wife’s dead body at their farmhouse for a month, we know we are in for a bumpy ride.

His wife had died from an overdose of sleeping pills following the loss of a baby and the depression that followed. Harold had found her the morning after, and had “wrapped her in blankets and placed her on the porch” where the frigid temperatures would hold her, like a Siberian mummy, for the next month. As far as Harold is concerned, “He had no idea what to do. He knew he didn’t want help.”

Unable to come to terms with his emotions, and completely isolated (we don’t hear of a friend or a church community throughout the entire book), Harold focuses on day-to-day events, like caring for the chickens and—most urgent of all—fighting the snow. In the deep winter that Harold faces, snow is more than an annoyance. Snow is weighty—both emotionally and physically. The weather is a factor in Harold’s isolation and despair. The lane to his farm is virtually impassable, but the most immediate problem, as he sees it, is the roof of his pole barn. If too much snow accumulates on the barn’s roof, Harold would lose the barn and everything in it. This would be another devastating blow, because even though he hadn’t milked a cow since another of his barns burned, “he still thought of himself as a farmer.”

Throughout the book, the reader gets the impression that Harold wishes he could stop thinking of himself as a farmer. Farming hasn’t been good to him for a long time. “He quit crops when grain futures became a roller coaster he didn’t want to ride. Forever climbing if you farmed a desk, forever falling if you farmed the dirt.” These realities led him to sell his plow and planter and lease his land to a larger operation. Now he makes a meagre living with his backhoe doing side jobs—often for city transplants with remote jobs and bucolic dreams. With mounting debt and pressures, this isn’t much of a living, but he was scrapping by, as long as he didn’t lose the barn. “Losing the barn meant losing the farm.” Much of the book’s central chapters are devoted to Harold’s efforts to keep his two kerosene torpedo heaters running inside the barn in the hope that the snow on the tin roof would melt enough to loosen and slide off.

In the end, Harold’s efforts to save the barn turn out to be a project akin to saving himself. Both feel like hopeless tasks. When a person is walking alone on the edge of a precipice, one wrong step is all it takes.

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Barring Harold’s dark humor and a lone reprieve from deepening isolation, Perry’s short novel is as dark as the black smoke billowing over the northern mid-west plains on its cover. But there is more in these hundred pages than pointless morbidity. Perry is making a point. He gets what life is like for folks in rural America. As an example, take Perry’s two-paragraph riff on modern hunting with all its game-cam inspired posturing: “The noble hunter downloading all the help he could get. Most bucks were nicknamed and their racks scored before they got whacked.” This sounds a lot like what hunting has come to look like in the corner of rural America I call home.

Perry gets the hardships of farming too. He knows that life has been hard for a long time for small-time American farmers. Debt, changing federal policy, and growing distance and even disdain for the actual work of farming had made farming extremely difficult for many. Farmers and their children have been leaving agriculture in droves. As sociologists Tim Slack and Shannon M. Monnat note in their book Rural and Small-Town America: Context, Composition, and Complexities (University of California Press, 2024), whereas nearly forty percent of the American workforce was employed in agriculture in 1900, by 1970s the percentage was only 4 percent. By 2000 the number had dropped to 2 percent. Even if one only considers U.S. counties that are completely rural, farming only accounts for 10 percent of employment.

Those that stay find often find the deck stacked against them. The toll of increasing debt, decreasing income, and isolation is significant. According to the National Rural Health Association “the suicide rate among farmers is 3.5 times higher than the general population.” It is no wonder that Perry ends his book with a page titled “Where to Get Help.” Perry speaks directly to farmers. “Agricultural professions have among the highest suicide rates.” After listing some national suicide hotlines, he brings his advice closer to home: “Your state department of agriculture and local extension offices will have even more regionally specific source of mental health assistance….Tell someone. Please don’t try to plow it under.”

Loneliness Overcome

John J. Thompson’s novel The Ballad of the Lost Dogs of East Nashville is as warm and hopeful as Perry’s volume was snowy and tragic. A comedy in the Shakespearian sense, Thompson’s volume starts with isolation and misunderstanding but ends in the joy of matrimony and wrong-made-right.

Thompson’s tale follows the life of his central character Jerry Wesley through Vietnam, alcoholism, and the loss of both his family and his dreams. After his wife left him and barred him from visiting their two young children, Jerry moved to East Nashville in 1975. He initially found work as a mechanic and then as a tour bus driver. The latter job fit his loner personality and penchant for all-night drives well.

It was during one of these trips that Jerry heard a rock and roller talking about sobriety. This overheard conversation became the catalyst for Jerry’s own sobriety journey. By the time the book opens, Jerry is 68 and has been sober for 38 years. Along the way he had also found Jesus and gotten involved “at the local aspiring megachurch.” But his desire for church dissolved as the priorities of the church shifted in the 1990s. “As the church became more political, Jerry became less and less interested on Sundays.”

His church wasn’t the only thing that seemed to shift under his feet. His neighborhood was not static either. “East Nashville had gone through quite a shift….Back in the mid-eighties the general opinion was that the neighborhood had taken a dive, and in the nineties crime rates continued to rise and property values continued to fall.” Then, in the spring of 1998, the neighborhood was decimated by several tornados. Amid the devastation, Jerry encountered a silver lining he had not anticipated. As he visited neighbors he had passed for years but never gotten to know, he discovered a wealth of relationships right outside his front door. “He had never felt more connected to his neighborhood or his neighbors.”

But it wasn’t only neighborliness that followed in the path of the twister. Whether it was the influx of insurance money, or the low cost of housing, East Nashville changed in the years following the twisters as gentrification settled into the neighborhood Jerry had long called home. “In just a few years East Nashville went from being a ‘no man’s land’ to being thought of by many as one of the coolest places in the country.”

The remainder of the book details Jerry’s efforts to navigate the complex pressures that accompanied gentrification in a neighborhood that was now home to folks from a wide array of backgrounds. It is Jerry’s love of music and his long-hidden chops on the guitar that lead to the book’s breakthrough moment when Jerry decides to play guitar, not in his front room as usual but on his front porch. This was only a relocation of a few feet, but it made all the difference.

When Jerry plays outside, two young musicians who live next door discover his ability and convince him to take part in a jam session with them. Something shifts when they play together. Soon they play regularly. They play at Jerry’s house, on his porch, and, eventually, in a local park. Along the way they pull in a variety of musicians from different walks of life. There’s Brother Louis, who, in addition to his powerful voice, brings the experience of being a black man in East Nashville to the band. Ceasar, the band’s accordion player, had migrated to the U.S. and paid for amnesty in 1986 under Ronald Reagan’s Immigration and Control Reform Act. Since then, he developed his landscaping business into one of the most successful in Nashville.

Together, the Lost Dogs, as the band comes to call themselves, do more than make beautiful music. They launch an experiment in community engagement and free music education that captures the heart of folks in their city and beyond.

***

In the end, Thompson’s tale is beautiful. It’s also just possible enough to arouse longing in the reader. One can’t help but wonder, what if something like this happened in my community? What if neighbors could come together to create something beautiful? What if talented folks could use their talents, not simply to buttress their bottom line, but to help others in their community join in, not as passive spectators but as folks with real contributions to make?

Like Perry, Thompson has axes to grind. He gives some pretty direct commentary on the state of the church, immigration, latent racism, and celebrity culture to name a few. Some readers may find him a bit too didactic at points. But the vision he crafts of local folks coming together in a specific community with its own history, problems, and potential is inspiring. While East Nashville may be especially suitable to discovering musicians, one can’t help but wonder what hidden potential and life-giving community one might find in one’s own town if one were to move out of the house and onto the front porch.

Perhaps this is exactly what a lonely nation is desperate for.

Addressing Loneliness

As different as these books are, they are united by the unavoidable human need for community. Both Harold and Jerry are middle aged men with blue collar backgrounds. Both have struggled with their personal demons and the forces of the wider culture that seem almost demonic in their ability to isolate us from the places we call home and the people who live near or with us. Perhaps most telling of all, both books foreground homes and front porches. For Perry, the porch is where death lurks in frozen vigilance. It’s a symbol of the isolation that has stalked Harold all the way home. For Thompson, the front porch is a gateway to his community. It is alive with potential, filled with the voices of friends and the sound of music.

As different as these porches are, I think both help make a significant point about the modern epidemic of loneliness. Perhaps in our efforts to address loneliness, we need to be more literal, more concrete. Perhaps the only way to address loneliness is by giving loneliness an address.

It seems to me that our efforts to take on loneliness in general only lead to more loneliness in the particular places we call home. If the problem of loneliness doesn’t have an address—if we aren’t talking about loneliness in this community and this place—we will only name a problem without ever getting any closer to solving it.

That’s why we need front porches, sidewalks, local churches, in-person reading groups, recreational sports teams, and a wide array of local institutions. Each of these undertakings root us in a specific place. Each addresses loneliness by bringing folks together in a specific town, village, or zip code.

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Many of us might agree with this in principle. But it takes action to make these things happen. Sometimes it takes moving from our screen-lit living rooms to our front porches.

This is seldom easy.

I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a temptation that accompanies local efforts like this, especially if we live in small, out-of-the-way places. We may long for the kind of community that we encounter in Thompson’s version of East Nashville, but, as we often think, nothing like that could happen here. Our rural community isn’t dense with musicians. We don’t have access to folks with connections to studios, media outlets, or celebrities. Furthermore, you might add, if I played music on my porch no one would hear me because the nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away.

While there’s truth to some of these sentiments, I think there’s more potential for community in our small towns and rural areas than we are willing to admit. There are folks who want to play music. There are folks who want to discuss books or try their hand at writing. The question is who is working to build networks to connect these folks?

We need more front porches. We need more folks who are willing to put themselves out there, not as celebrities looking to make a buck, but as fellow practitioners inviting others to join us in the things that have made life more enjoyable, more meaningful, and more human for centuries. We need local churches, and local groups of writers, local rec. sports teams, and local institutions where we know folks not just by their names but by the street on which they live. We need these things not just in hip neighborhoods like East Nashville but in small towns and rural areas. It’s not about creating something that we can scale, market, or give an interview about for a national publication. It’s about meeting and connecting with the neighbors God has given us.

This is how we counter the loneliness epidemic of our times. Loneliness thrives in the abstract anonymity of our times. Fighting loneliness requires that we actually address it.