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As writer Gracy Olmstead was commuting to work in Washington, D.C. from her home in the suburbs, she often thought back to her childhood, being raised in the same rural Idaho town in which her great-great-great grandparents had homesteaded a century earlier.\n\u201cWhen I was growing up, there was a sense in which the cloth of your life was very interconnected,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was a lot of life you lived in one place.\u201d\nHer experience in the city had been very different. She felt as if her life had been fragmented into various places, each of which required that she wear a different hat, present a different persona. \u201cI didn\u2019t get to live my whole life in one spot. I had a really deep thirst for that. I wanted to live a life in which I worked, worshipped, shopped, was part of associations, etc., in one piece of ground.\u201d\nGracy Olmstead is one of our favorite writers. She has bylines in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Week, and The American Conservative, among many other publications. And we\u2019re excited to welcome her as our guest on today\u2019s episode of the Strong Towns podcast.\nIn her conversation with Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn, Olmstead reflects on her family\u2019s decision to return to small town life \u2014 this time in Northern Virginia \u2014 and how her rural background informs her work as a writer and journalist. She and Chuck also discuss what urban and rural people may be missing about each other\u2019s experiences and perspectives, the power of \u201cmembership,\u201d and the obligations and opportunities that arise from binding yourself for a lifetime to a place and its people.\nAlso discussed:\n11:15 - Jane Jacobs\u2019s insight that we need to design cities a specific way because we\u2019re interacting with strangers\u2026and why this is increasingly true for changing rural communities too.\n16:20 - Why small towns really are \u201cstifling,\u201d and why that\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing.\n19:40 - Olmstead\u2019s powerful article on why parents need villages.\n22:20 - The loss of multigenerational homes, and how all of us \u2014 young and old, single or not \u2014 have suffered the more \u201cgenerationally siloed\u201d we\u2019ve become.\n27:30 - The role of public policy in the absence of \u201cthe village\u201d and how Olmstead responds (31:30) to the assertion that public policy programs undermine the reciprocal commitments that are foundational to the village.\n36:00 - The often unacknowledged tradeoffs between convenience and connection.\nWe hope this conversation is the first of many we get to have with Gracy Olmstead. Make sure to connect with her on social media and don\u2019t miss her essential newsletter. We think she\u2019ll quickly become one of your favorite writers too:\n\nTwitter\n\n\nFacebook\n\n\nNewsletter