Birch Clump Village

Do you remember Cabot Cove, the sleepy northeast coastal town in the TV series, Murder She Wrote?

Then there was the ideal little village in another TV series, Little House on the Prairie. Let’s not forget that wholesome town near the Cartwright’s in the long running series, Bonanza.

One of my favorite idealistic fictional small towns is Lake Woebegone, Minnesota. A fair portion of Woebegone culture, in part, because the location, comes the closest to my own Village of Birch Clump in my novels and many of the short stories found in the Birch Clump Village Reader series.

What do the better-known, wholesome family value TV small towns have over Woebegone and Birch Clump?

Those three backwaters had far more violence. Think about it. If Murder She Wrote is a weekly series, then that little town averaged at least 52 cold blooded murders each year. Imagining the town had fewer than 50,000 residents and comparing it to New York City, the latter proportionately would have 10,400 murders annually.

(NYC had around 530 homicides in 2013).

Little House and Bonanza had a fair amount of gunplay, knifings and good old-fashioned fist and cuffs knock outs, though not quite to the level of Cabot Cove.

I’m not aware of a single murder in Woebegone. We are aware of but one murder by a relative of a Birch Clump resident between the two novels, Hawk Dancer and Cloudburst. Even at that, new evidence cleared Jimmy Jonson after he served most of a twenty to life sentence. The murder, wretched as that is, took place in another regional town.

Birch Clump, none-the-less is not without problems. Folks do not like to talk about the domestic abuse and illegal drug activity. The rate of such crime and violence is probably less than in large towns or cit...

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...ng escape from the 1916 flood when major dykes broke in the Netherlands during WWI. Recent findings suggest he hid in a boat to avoid some sort of trouble he had gotten into as a thirteen year old when the dykes gave in and flooded his hometown. There will be more on this in the next issue of the Birch Clump Village Reader.

We learned what the “T” stood for in Sgt. T. Douglas’ name in the last issue of BC Village Reader (#4), 1979. The next issue (#5) includes two short stories of the follow up relations since Sarge met his natural father and some of his previously unknown siblings, including the same Mark that Matt Moore hit and robbed in 1971. There will be more about Nora, the woman indomitably taken with T. Douglas and his tight Jordache jeans from the short story, Changing a Flat in the last issue of BCVR. (As well, T. D. does little to deter her advances).