I spent a college semester in a small town in Italy - and that is where I truly tasted food for the first time.

A small town is a place where there's no place to go where you shouldn't.

Is the small town a place, truly, of the world, or is it no more than something out of a boy's dreaming? Out of his love of all things not of death made? All things somewhere beyond the dust, rust, and decay, beyond the top, beyond all sides, beyond bottom: outside, around, over, under, within?

I was born and raised in Louisiana - a small town called Ferriday, north of Baton Rouge.

I grew up in a suburb of Ohio, in a small town, and I resonated with that small-town feeling where everybody knows your business.

Living in a small town, I knew everybody and everybody knew me.