Rural Life Docuseries to Feature St. Cloud

(KNSI) – St. Cloud will be featured on Season Two of the popular online series, “My Town.”

The brainchild of former Twins Cities television and radio anchor Cory Hepola, it seeks to show rural America in a new light. Whether it is a truly small town or a mid-sized city like St. Cloud, rural can mean many things. Hepola’s series aims to explain rural living the way it actually happens, not through a Hallmark Channel movie.

“One of the things that we want to accomplish with my town is not just, ‘Hey, you know, this is some of the things that they have here.’ There’s power in the word, ‘choice.’ And we want to meet with people who choose to live in this region.”

Hepola is from Perham. He says that after living in a large metro area, he realized a narrative had formed that people only end up in a small town because something has gone wrong. He thinks he has successfully chronicled that there’s more to small-town living than a last chance.

The show will film here this summer with a release date in the fall. An episode runs between 22 and 25 minutes and typically defines a city through three stories. Hepola explains how they choose what to feature.

“There’s a lot of research that goes behind the scenes on my end, and then we’re also meeting with a group of community leaders, and we’re discussing all of these different ideas and themes and stories and people. And so, between the two, we start to narrow down different storylines.”

So far, Hepola’s show has richly mined anecdotes from throughout central Minnesota. Episodes online already include a look at Perham and Willmar.

A link to check out “My Town” while we wait for the St. Cloud episode is here.

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