How to Make a Life for Ourselves: An Interview with Kevin Wilson

In Issue 67, Kevin Wilson’s “The Lost Baby” haunts readers with the sudden, small-town disappearance of a couple’s infant child. The story, which also appears in Wilson’s newest collection, Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, is emblematic of Wilson’s superb and thrilling prose, his stories as compassionate as they are strange. Every one of his characters, from the grieving mothers to the flailing young men, are so deeply human, so reassuringly like us, we can’t help but root for them in spite of their bad decisions, whether initiating ice fights, or employing the assistance of a mystical razor that rewinds time and erases terrible (or merely uncomfortable) deeds. Here, we talk about his unique writing process, the beautiful weirdness of parenthood, and how to lovingly lead your characters into disaster.

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Rachel Howell: Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? What was the first story you published?

Kevin Wilson: I didn’t really understand that writing was a career option until I got to college. I grew up in a small town in rural Tennessee and it wasn’t like guidance counselors were telling us to be artists. But the summer before my senior year, I went to a humanities program for kids from all over Tennessee and it was so important for me and I wrote a terrible short story about a boy who falls in love with a stuffed animal and I thought, “How do I do this forever?” and then in college my professor, Tony Earley, told me to try. And that was all I needed, I guess.

The first story I published was in Shenandoah, about a man who jumps into a flooded river to retrieve some dresses that are floating by. For the longest time, my parents kept the answering machine message where I called them from Boston to tell them that I got the acceptance and you could hear my voice getting kind of hysterical.

RH: Your novels and short stories strike me as being fairly different from one another, in terms of voice and style. How is your writing process different for each form? Do you prefer one over the other?

KW: I like them both. Like you said, I feel like I do things differently with them, stylistically, so it allows me to try out a lot of stuff and keeps me from getting too comfortable in either form. Both forms arise from intense obsession, recurring thoughts, over and over, until I finally decide to try to write about them. But stories come much faster. I write them so quickly, a kind of incantation, where I’m just rushing to find the end, to make everything blow up. Novels are trickier because I have to keep resisting the impulse to ruin everything and walk away from it. I have to trust that I can find my way to the end even if I’m not sure where I’m going.

RH: Half of the stories in this new collection are written from a female perspective, and your newest novel, Perfect Little World, deals with a young pregnant woman and her unconventional foray into motherhood. You are wonderfully adept at accessing and inhabiting the close interior of your female characters. Does this come naturally to you? What do you enjoy most about getting inside the brain of women characters? What, if anything, do you find most challenging?

KW: That’s very kind of you to say. I think the easiest answer is that I write from the female perspective because it allows me some distance from the material, keeps it from feeling so clearly just a mirror image of myself. Or, rather, it keeps the reader from thinking too much about whether I am or am not the character. It’s a kind of smokescreen, because, honestly, the female characters I write tend to be just me anyway. I live almost entirely inside my head, partly because it’s so jumbled that it’s hard to get out of it, and so my characters are generally just versions of myself that I disguise in some meaningful way.

But that’s the easy answer and I think there’s something more complicated at play and that’s the idea that I want very much to know the world from the perspective of a woman. It’s a desire to understand, from my limited abilities, what it’s like, in order to help me understand the larger world. And it is challenging, and I know there’s stuff that I get wrong (though I get stuff wrong about all kinds of characters), but my hope is that if I can pinpoint the character’s desire, if I know what they want, then I can make the reader trust me that I will take care of the character, and then they’ll give me the benefit of the doubt.

RH: You write a lot about parenthood—mothers with young sons, grown daughters and their mothers, fathers and their grown sons. Absent from this collection, however, is a story featuring a father with young sons, though you yourself are a father of two boys. Is it by design that your sons, or at least their fictional versions, don’t appear in your work? Or do they show up in some other, tangential way? Do you advise your students to avoid writing characters who too closely resemble themselves?

KW: Again, I think it’s just a way to disguise my real life. I think it might also just be difficult for me to write coherently about it because I’m so deeply inside of it and I have trouble seeing it clearly. I think I need distance when I write, a little time and space to look at the thing and figure it out. I get close to it in “The Lost Baby” where there’s a baby boy and a father, but then the baby up and disappears so there’s not much time to actually see the experience of parenthood.

RH: Has fatherhood changed the way you write, or what you write about?

KW: I’m sure it has, but I’m not entirely sure how. I feel like fatherhood has opened me up to the larger world, has forced me to interact with the world in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise. And, as a result, it’s made me a little more curious about that larger world and how I fit into it. It’s made me a little more tender toward my characters, maybe, the desire to care for them even as I lead them into disasters, which is kind of what parenting is all about for me. I think the specific thing is that I simply write less than I did before we had kids. They take up so much of my time and attention, and it’s wonderful, most of the time, and, as a result, it’s made me cherish the times when I can write and maybe makes me a bit more focused, like I need to make good use of this time.

RH: You have a knack for stories that push the boundaries of realism, some wildly so. “Wildfire Johnny” and “The Lost Baby” both feature impossible or implausible events, even as the characters very much still inhabit nearly all the other parameters and expectations of the “real world.” What draws you to these types of stories? Do you find you have to work harder to earn the reader’s trust in these stories, or employ certain techniques to bring the reader on board, or is it no different than the work required to build any fictional world?

KW: I grew up reading comic books. So magic and weirdness was kind of just an accepted form. If you couldn’t get over the fact that Superman was flying around Metropolis in the first panel, you were going to have a hard time with the story. And so I think I utilized that in my fiction, especially when I was first writing. If you give the reader the weirdness and you don’t blink or hesitate, then they’ll accept it more readily and you can do what you need to do in the story.

In college, I was (and continue to be) mesmerized by Aimee Bender, one of my all-time favorite writers, and what I loved was how emphatically she introduced magic into her stories, from the very first line. She’s just masterful at it. You look at her first lines, like, “My boyfriend is experiencing reverse evolution” or “There were two mutant girls in town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.” I would find myself so stunned and so happy to encounter this immediate weirdness, that I was completely on board from the moment the story began.

RH: Along those lines, how do you go about accessing the vivid, specific details required of a fictional world, if they aren’t pulled directly from real life? Is it just a matter of practice, exercising the imagination like you would any muscle, or can you offer any tips or methods that help you achieve this?

KW: To me, detail is one of the best ways to assert control over the story, and I do think it comes from practice, of focusing on the thing until you see it as precisely as your limited perspective will allow. Just yesterday, in my Beginning Fiction Workshop, my students and I spent about ten minutes trying to accurately describe what it would feel like to place your hand firmly on the burning eye of a stove. None of us had ever experienced this, but we just kept at it, bending and twisting the experience until we could approximate something that felt believable. My goal is not to be accurate, exactly, but to refract the detail through my own dumb brain in such a way that it feels, not accurate, but believable to the reader. I want them to accept it. I want to earn their trust that I know what I’m talking about. And that takes time and practice and the hope that how you see the world might resonate with another person.

RH: Inventive as they are, even your strangest stories seem firmly rooted in reality, the plain language of the everyday. It reminds me of a line in the title story, when Gina has begun adding rosemary to everything she cooks, “having learned from her son that things like rosemary and sea salt and saffron made regular things special.” Would you say this is the job of a fiction writer, or one of them at least, to make regular things special? Are you attempting through your work, as John Updike described it, “to give the mundane its beautiful due?”

KW: Because I’m not a lyrical writer, because I don’t have any real talent for rhythm or beautiful sentences, I have to try other routes to pull the reader into the story. Usually that’s character, or the weirdness of a specific experience, but I also think that reproducing the mundane on the page in a way that shows the reader how necessary those elements are to a lived experience, how they serve as a bridge between the more resonant moments of our lives, is what I try to do well.

RH: Several stories in the collection are quite long, epic even, more like mini-novels than stories in a lot of ways. Do you have a sense when you begin a new story how long it will end up being, or do you start with an idea and see where it takes you?

KW: I think this is partly having written stories and novels now. I’m seeing how permeable the barrier is between those two forms. It’s weird, but my stories have gotten longer and my new novel, which will come out this year, is pretty short. It’s like I’m figuring out the exact form for me, and that’s maybe a long story or a short novel. When I start something, I usually don’t know how long it will end up being, but sometimes I can get a sense. Like, Perfect Little World, because of the expansiveness of the experiment, was going to be long. I just figured it would need more space. But with this new novel, I had been reading so many beautiful, perfect short novels and I really wanted to try to reproduce that sensation, so I told myself, “This is going to be shorter than usual. This is how you’re going to do it.”

RH: Could you share some of those beautiful, perfect short novels? Additionally, which writers have had the greatest influence on your work?

KW: There are many, but a few would be: Katie Kitamura’s A Separation; Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!; Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin; Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban; Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. The two writers I most credit as an influence are Shirley Jackson and Carson McCullers. For more contemporary writers that shaped me, I’d say George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Ann Patchett, and Victor LaValle.

RH: Illuminate us: What’s your process like?

KW: It’s all in my head, over and over and over, just a recurring series of images and lines and scenes, and I’ll worry that for months and months (sometimes years). And then, there’s this point where my head just can’t handle it anymore, when I start to get kind of jittery or manic because I can’t contain it, and that’s when I finally start writing. And it’s all computer. I’ve never written longhand. And I typically revise as I go. I write very quickly and if I hit a barrier, I just go back and reread and reread and correct, looping and looping, until I finally build up the momentum necessary to break through that barrier and keep going. I must read the story twenty or thirty times as I’m writing it, just listening to how it sounds and how closely it is to what’s in my head. And then, when I can’t do anything else to it, when I’ve reached the limits of my ability, that’s it. I’m done.

RH: What was the genesis of “Wildfire Johnny?” It’s a deceptive story, taking the reader on a kind of escapist thrill ride with this magical time-undoing razor that lives in Trey’s pocket. It can be easy to forget, as we wait for the next riveting throat slash, that the story deals with some pretty weighty issues, race and masculinity, specifically while male privilege. It also seems to be a story about self-forgiveness, asking whether it’s possible to reckon with our past failures, to learn from them and grow our moral compass, with or without a magic razor to assist us. Was this a tough story to write?

KW: It was a really hard story to write. I have recurring thoughts, for as long as I can remember, and they just cycle and cycle and they can be frightening sometimes because you can’t figure out how to keep the image from coming back. And slashing a throat with a razor is one of those images that I’ve had for a while now. And it was not pleasant and I didn’t like having it in my head, and so I finally decided that I needed to write about it, and I needed to figure out a way for that character to not die, to save him somehow. So that was all I wanted to do at first, write a story where slashing your throat wouldn’t kill you. And then I knew that I needed more and I tried to think of my own perspective, of how issues of race and privilege touch my life, and I tried to work with that. I think I felt like I was writing a little bit about revisionist history, how, instead of dealing with the bad stuff, of facing it and trying to make sense of it, it’s easier to rewrite history and pretend it never happened. And then I think I moved beyond that toward the idea that, for white people of privilege, especially those who feel that they’re aware and socially responsible and woke, simply being told that they’ve done something insensitive can be so shocking that they create some huge chaotic response rather than simply admit their faults, their limitations, and try to do better.

RH: The ending of “The Lost Baby” can be interpreted in a number of ways. I imagine you’ve gotten a pretty diverse range of responses to it, maybe even some frustration? That was my first reaction, but the more I puzzled over it, the more I came to love the questions it leaves me with. Without giving too much away, my interpretation of the ending—and in some ways the story as a whole—is that the lost baby is a metaphor for the experience every parent undergoes as they watch their babies grow into children, quite literally disappearing before their eyes. Recently I came across an old social media post from when my son was about four or five, where I had captioned a tall-looking photo of him: “Help—my baby was replaced by an 8 year old.” It made me laugh, but also sort of gave me chills, to come across that and think about it in the context of this story. What do you make of this reading of it, and how does it differ or overlap with your own or others?

KW: A lot of frustration with the ending, yes. Which I understand. I guess I wanted people to feel the same frustration, the uncertainty, that the parents feel. To my mind, I think what you’re suggesting is right. It is magical, but it’s metaphorical. The parents feel incapable of caring for their child, so terrified that they’ll fuck him up and fuck each other up. And so, those years with the baby disappear, become hazy and unclear. And then the boy returns, a mystery to them, and they’re unsure of what’s happened, how they made it to this point. Before we had kids, and even in those first years, I didn’t ever think about the weirdness of your child growing up, of them becoming, in some ways, a stranger to you. And that’s necessary and it’s beautiful because I want my boys to become the person that they’re going to become, but it’s okay for me to miss what it was like before. It’s okay for me to want to hold all the versions of my child inside my heart at the same time.

RH: In “A Signal to the Faithful,” Father Naylon tells the ten-year-old Edwin “Sometimes we’re not suited for the very thing that gives us happiness. So much of life is learning to live with what we’re capable of doing. Time and time again, you’ll have to accept what is available instead of what you actually deserve.” Have you found this to be true of your own life? In what ways, if so? Would you give the same advice to a young (or not so young) writer struggling to make anything come of their work, or would you tell them to keep at it, no matter how many failures they come up against?

KW: So much of my writing is about how we live with failure, how we acknowledge our own failures and figure out how to make a life for ourselves. To my mind, life feels like a failure because we die. Our bodies will not last long enough for us to fully take advantage of this strange world that we live in. I hate this so much. But in more specific terms, so much of life is realizing how much of your life is not quite achieving what you hope, of not quite being the person that you hoped you could be, of not being kind enough, generous enough, talented enough. And so we live these lives tinged with so much failure, and what I try to figure out is how to embrace that, to realize what exists in that space between what we hoped for and what we have.

It’s hard, with young writers, to feel like any advice will help when it’s so specific to your own experiences. All I wanted when I was young was for someone to tell me to keep going, that I had permission to try and make this thing happen. And I guess that’s what I try to tell my students. You have to accept failure, understand how much you’ll have to contend with it, and not care because the sensation of making something, of living inside your head and creating something that makes you happy, is worth that failure.

RH: What are you working on next?

KW: I’ve written this weird little novel that’s coming out in November, and I’m working on an even weirder little novel that’s built entirely off of this single phrase that I’ve repeated to myself, constantly, since I was nineteen years old. I can’t imagine anyone else caring about this book, but I’m going to write it.