Kevin Wilson, October 2009

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Kevin Wilson is the author of the collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009).  His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has twice been included in the New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best anthology.  He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts.  He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son, Griff, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South and helps run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Kevin’s story, “Screaming Baby,” appears in Redivider issue 4.1.

Some work online:

“The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys” from Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

“Excerpt from the Big Book of Forgotten Lunatics, Volume 1″

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Kevin Wilson’s Giant Heart

An Interview by Consulting Editor James Scott

If one were to make a Frankenstein monster of writing talent, Kevin Wilson’s first sentences and first paragraphs would be some of the juiciest, most appealing parts to grave rob. Thumb through his brilliant and hilarious collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, read the first lines, and they will inexorably pull to the second, and the third, and so on, until the story reverses its own gravity with a surprising ending (not a surprise ending, which seems like a gimmick—Wilson’s feel organic and controlled).

Wilson’s opening lines often work with his titles to create an immediate tension, as in “Screaming Baby,” the story Wilson published in Redivider (Issue 4.1, Fall 2006), where “We’d wanted a baby for a long time” elicits an instant “uh-oh” from the reader. This happens time and time again; Wilson doesn’t let the reader get comfortable before setting everything in motion, giving everything the propulsive force of a rocket.

But all of this wonderful technique would mean nothing if there weren’t a giant beating heart behind all of it. Wilson creates such interesting personas in such fascinating times doing such inventive things that it would be easy, without first having read these stories, to dismiss them as purposefully quirky or trendy, but he never relents his tenacious grasp of emotion. The characters in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are searching for a connection, whether it be the confectioner who lives downstairs (“Blowing up on the Spot”), the strange boy who may be a stalker (“Go, Fight, Win”), or a fellow unpopular Quiz Bowler (“Mortal Kombat”). This search comes from a certain haunted desperation that most of them share, and Wilson’s great ability is to share it on every page. It may be somewhat at the title’s suggestion, but the inhabitants of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth all seem to be falling, like Alice, through a world that they’re not sure of, where they’re not certain they belong, and they’re hoping, above all else, that what they grab on to will keep them from hitting the bottom.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Wilson recently, and we discussed lit mags, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, how many troublesome babies are too many, new novels, and Aquafresh.

Redivider: Just so we can pat ourselves on the back, can you say a bit about what lit mags have meant to you as a writer and a reader?

Kevin Wilson: As a writer, literary magazines have everything to do with my development. To receive that affirmation from an editor when they accept a story makes you feel a little more confident the next time out that the story you write won’t be horrible.

As a reader, I don’t know what I’d do without literary journals. It’s how I’ve discovered a good number of my favorite writers and it’s reassuring to see how much good stuff is out there.

RDR: Anyone who visits your website or anyone who reads lit mags extensively will note how prolific you’ve been. How did you decide what to include in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth? Looking at it now, were there any stories that were very close but ended up on the cutting room floor (director’s cut, perhaps?)?

KW: I really hadn’t considered a collection of stories, or hadn’t given it much thought. I had a list of about twenty stories that I sent to my agent, who is a very good reader, and she went in and picked the stories that are in the collection. I was just picking the stuff that I thought was good, but she was looking for something larger, a thematic connection between the stories, and I think that made for a stronger collection.

I had wanted to include the story that was published in Redivider, along with a few other stories about weird babies, but it seemed strange to have this interlude of four or five baby stories in the collection, so we took out everything but “The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth)”. There were also a few stories that I really liked but they were only a few pages long and seemed to hold up the flow of the collection, so they didn’t make it.

RDR: A lot of the stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth deal with trust. The trust between family members, the trust between two lovers, and even the trust between the narrator and the reader and you, the author, and the reader. I mean, “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” starts with the line, “First of all, we were never tunneling to the center of the earth.” How do you keep the scales from getting tipped too far? From characters being unbelievable? From the reader getting frustrated?

KW: What I hope is that the emotional concerns of the characters are enough to override any potential frustrations that might arise. Still, it’s a difficult line to walk. In your example, from the title story, there is the issue of trust, but the character isn’t aggressive in trying to make the reader believe his version of the events. He isn’t even sure what he’s trying to say. It’s as if he’s found his psychiatrist to be kind of tone deaf and condescending and so he’s asking for the reader’s help in trying to make sense of the last few months of his life.

RDR: There’s a great sense of hanging onto the childlike in the collection, whether its digging aimless tunnels or building models. What were you like as a kid?

KW: I think I was a normal enough kid. I had a lot of tics and was very shy. I liked to read a lot. I loved comic books. I dressed up like super heroes way into my teens. I was afraid of adults and wanted nothing to do with them. I liked to throw a tennis ball against our house for hours at a time. Sex seemed like the dumbest thing in the world to me. I was infatuated with professional wrestling. A typical, emotionally-stunted kid, I think.

RDR: But it also seems like you haven’t forgotten how terrifying it is to be a kid. I’m thinking especially of “Go, Fight, Win,” where every time Penny was at school I felt anxious. I remember very specific incidents from my childhood and thinking at that time, “Don’t forget this. Don’t forget how awful this is.” Whether the events you describe are ‘true’ or not, the emotions certainly are, and I’m wondering how difficult you find it to dredge them up and mine them.

KW: Partly it’s my neurological and psychological problems, but it was very difficult to be in public, to be around people from the ages of 10 to 20. Leaving my house, being away from my family, was always an ordeal. I was hyper-aware of my body and the space it took up. I had to visualize everything before it happened. Before I would walk into school, I’d think, “You are walking to class. If someone says hi, you say hi back to them. Don’t look at anyone though. Don’t bump into anyone. Don’t let anyone bump into you. Check to make sure your pants aren’t falling down. Don’t make any sound. Walk into the classroom. Don’t look at anyone. Make sure there’s nothing in your seat. Sit down. Sit down carefully.” It would go on like this forever. I was terrified of being noticed and subsequently told that I was a fucking moron, which I already suspected was true.

It’s not hard to remember those moments, because I still experience them to some extent. I love your line about “Don’t forget how awful this is.” I do think the characters in “Mortal Kombat” or “Go, Fight, Win” would have that same feeling.

RDR: This sounds like we’re on the Dating Game, but a lot of your characters have strange jobs– what kind of jobs have you had that give you this kind of outlook? Also, if you were a flavor of toothpaste, what flavor would you be?

KW: I am always amazed at the strange number of jobs that writers have held. I am jealous, but it also makes me wonder how they got any writing done. Those jobs sound really hard. I have only been and probably always will be a secretary. It’s a job that suits me. I sit at a desk. I have access to the internet. I can listen to music while I work. People are amazed if you do what they ask you to do. When the water is empty at the cooler, I replace it and people are happy. After college, I had a job lined up to work on a dairy farm. I had done some similar labor in high school and it seemed like a good job. And then a professor of mine told me that it was a terrible idea. He told me that he had a job picking apples in the northwest and it was so awful that he did nothing but sleep when he wasn’t working and he didn’t write anything. He told me not to do it and so I instead moved to Boston and got a job in the Gender Studies Program at Harvard, which seemed like the exact opposite job.

I write about weird jobs, but I assume they’re like any other job, kind of boring, more work than you wish it was, doesn’t pay great, and so I just transfer those feelings onto the really awesome, weird job.

If I was toothpaste, I’d be Aquafresh toothpaste, because it’s the only toothpaste that doesn’t strip the skin from my tongue. I was housesitting for someone and they had Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, which seemed really adult and worthwhile. So I used it for a few days. I had only, since I was a very small child, used Aquafresh. Tom’s of Maine, in two days, stripped the skin off my tongue. It was horribly painful. I went back to Aquafresh. I used some baking soda toothpaste once, in a pinch, and it did the same thing. If Aquafresh went out of business, I would quit brushing my teeth. We were meant for each other, Aquafresh and I.

RDR: Your first paragraphs are so critical in introducing us to the world of the story; they do a lot of heavy lifting. Do they pretty much come out intact? Do you write the stories straight through for the most part? Because it’s impossible to think of them existing without the directions we get in those openings, and I almost can’t fathom you understanding what you’re doing without having them first.

KW: Yeah, I’ll spend a lot of time trying to figure out the mechanics of the story, but the first line always comes first. Because writing is hard for me, something I still not comfortable with, I need that first line to move things along quickly, so that it will propel me into the next sentence so I don’t get frustrated and go back to watching tv.I then hope that it does the same for the reader, that the story explodes out of the blocks and gets moving before the reader has time to decide that they have no interest in reading this ridiculous story. I am obsessed with first lines in other people’s work; it can be an unsatisfying story, but if the first line kicked ass, then I don’t care. It was worth reading the story.

RDR: Why did you change the gender of the narrator in “Blowing up on the Spot” from thePloughshares version to the version we see in Tunneling?

KW: When it was published in Plougshares, the narrator was a woman. And it was established a little more quickly because I talked about how women were always given the worst letters to sort. Even in this bizarre Scrabble factory, there was still this bullshit gender inequality.

However, my editor felt like the narrator didn’t really work for her, that something was off about her voice. She suggested that perhaps I change the gender and once I did that, it seemed to click for her. It changed some elements of the story, but it ultimately worked for me too.

RDR: You’re working on a novel. Care to give us a quick peek? A dust jacket synopsis?

KW: It’s a novel called Fangs, about a brother and sister named Annie and Buster Fang. Their parents are these famous performance artists, Caleb and Camille Fang, who were very influential in the late 80’s/early 90’s in the art world for creating these bizarre “events” in public places. And they placed Annie and Buster in these situations, made them the focal point of the art, which has kind of messed up Annie and Buster. Now they are adults and not really very capable people and things occur that force both of them to live with their parents.Someone gets shot in the face with a potato gun. Hopefully that will be enough to get people to read the book.

RDR: How has writing a novel differed from writing stories?

KW: I have to keep resisting the instinct to wrap up the story before I’ve reached the end. It was hard to think of the chapters as anything other than short stories, but that didn’t quite work for the larger thing I was working on.In a short story, you make something happen and then walk away from it. You crash your car into a tree and you get out of the car and you are done with that car. With the novel, I have to remind myself not to crash the car just yet, to drive a little bit further before I ruin it.

10/2/2009