A Message to All the Gold Seekers: Kevin Wilson and the Power of Art
I taught at a performing arts school in South Florida during one of the most heinous periods of my life. I was an MFA graduate with no direction, freshly heart-broken, living at home, and catering to a bunch of kiddos who knew far more about art than I did. I wasn’t even teaching there full-time; it was only one hour of creative writing class as part of their morning rotation. I came in every day before they arrived, cracked my hard-boiled egg brought from home against one of their empty desks, peeled it and ate it while contemplating what to do with my life. In April of 2016, I finally quit the job and took myself on a road trip to Tampa to meet up with a long lost friend. To my surprise, I had kind of made an impact on a few of the art school kids; maybe they liked how out of sorts I was, or maybe they actually learned something about writing from me. But one of my former students emailed me a book recommendation for my travels, Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.
In the title story, a trio of recent college graduates avoid their fate of entering the job force by digging tunnels underneath their town. But the same sort of practical setbacks that would befall them in the adult world seem to hinder them underground as well. Ultimately, they realize that while the tunnels provided a private adventure full of possibility, that the real possibilities lay in their futures above ground— in facing reality. The book arrived in my life exactly when I needed it, and Wilson’s words provided that extra nudge of encouragement that while artists see the world differently and creative people certainly do struggle, I, too, could face reality.
Kevin’s next work of art is his newest novel, Now Is Not the Time To Panic. Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge is a bored teenager living in Coalfield, Tennessee in the mid 90’s. But when she meets an equally lonely, awkward and yet super artistically talented boy named Zeke, the summer becomes one that will alter the course of their entire lives. The novel centers around the topic of art and creation. It’s easily become my favorite of Wilson’s novels because of how deeply it examines the arc of an artistic life, the questions of why feel compelled to create and how our compulsions can turn to obsessions, the true power that art holds- as art certainly holds the key to Frankie’s future as a writer. The story felt most personal to me out of all the fantastic worlds Kevin Wilson has created over the years, since he too is an artist grappling with the breadth of his own creations and he too continues to carve out a literary space for himself on our shelves. The book is a promise to all artists that if we stay true to ourselves, the truth will set us free, that we can get where we want to go in life if only we keep going. This book says no more digging, no more tunnels. This book says, The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers, we are the fugitives.
I had the honor of asking Kevin Wilson some questions, one fugitive to another:
As a writer of both short stories and novels, what do you think is the impulse for each? What encapsulates something into a short story versus what turns it into a novel?
I don't mean this to be overly simplistic, but I tend to think of short stories as detonations, explosions, crashes, and novels as accrual, complication, or what Gary Lutz called "depthening". Short stories are stealing a car and crashing it and walking away from the wreckage. Novels are buying a car, setting off across the country, and realizing how much time and space you have to explore weird areas you didn't know existed. And oddly enough, my stories are getting longer and my novels are getting shorter, so who knows, but I still feel like that's how I figure out what form I need for the story. That might be why my stories tend to be weirder and darker and my novels tend to be funnier and slightly more hopeful.
In all your work, you deal with worlds that are very much like our own, but with something “off” or “odd.” Does this feel akin to how you as an artist truly see the world?
Well, I think some of this is not me as "an artist" and more just me as "this weird boy who has issues with mental illness and is a little scared of the world and who desperately wants to not cause harm to anyone and who worries that all unfamiliar situations might ruin him". And so I think writing (and living) is partly about embracing that perception of how the world feels to me (ie, weird) and yet also using stories as a way to make me feel less afraid, to live within that oddness and not be ruined by it and maybe even thrive in it (ie, grace). Writing makes me a little more adept at being in the real world, and being a human being in the real world has made me a little better at writing.
Your protagonists are so compelling because they are deeply flawed (I say this with love). They are individuals grappling with difficult pasts or presents, secret histories, or in some cases, magical abilities. I find that a lot of narratives today tend to showcase characters who are hyper aware of their own virtue on their quest for good. I’d love to hear your thoughts on flawed characters vs. self-righteous ones.
I think anyone should be suspicious of their own estimation of their virtue. And I love stories with self-righteous narrators, too, because I find them to be super weird. I mean, Mattie Ross in True Grit is one of my favorite characters of all time, and so much of it is her unflagging belief that she is entirely correct in virtually every single decision that she makes and that every else is incredibly dumb. She's wonderful. But part of it is how vexing she is to everyone, good and bad, in that novel, how bizarre she is to the rest of the world as she just kind of clomps through every single moment. But I tend to find myself drawn more to characters who oftentimes survive despite themselves, despite the various constraints that threaten to ruin them. I guess I just sympathize more with people who fuck up but still try to find moments of grace or who allow for pain and ruination if it means the possiblity of eases the pain of someone else, or who just accidentally do the right thing because they have no real sense of how the world works.
One of my many favorite lines in the book reads, “I wondered if that was kind of the purpose of art, maybe, to make you see things that you knew but couldn’t say out loud.” Not just as a writer, but as a human, what do you feel is the purpose of art?
Oh, wow, I'm not sure! For me, the purpose of art is the pleasure derived from making it, which is the joy of any craft, just seeing something come into existence because you made it with your own two hands. Beyond that, I don't know that you can really decide what the purpose of art is.
But moving beyond being an artist and just loving books and music and art and all this stuff, the purpose of it is just to feel less alone in the world, to see pieces of yourself represented in this works of art and yet to also realize that there are vastly different experiences represented, and trying to hold both of those things inside your heart. I feel like art should expand your idea of the world and yet assert your place within the world.
Another great line, “I lived inside of myself way more than I lived inside of this town.” Writing is often communicated as living inside one’s head. How can a writer, or how do you personally, navigate between the real world and the fictional words you create? Do they balance each other? Do they need each other? In what ways do you need both?
I don't even think this is necessarily limited to artists, but I think the balance between the world outside of you and the world inside of you is something that people are always trying to balance, and I think they make both possible. The stories I write in my head make life more pleasant for me, and sometimes they save me when life is not good at all. My obsessions beyond writing, like rap music or professional wrestling or basketball, occupy so much space in my brain, and it provides me with this kind of calm as I consider it and live within it, and make worlds inside of worlds around those obsessions. And they make me happy. But I need the larger world, the world that exists just outside of my body, in order to not sink under the surface and disappear. So I do that with writing, too. To have a family, to have friends, to have students, they force me to account for myself, to consider the larger world, and that improves my work when I go back inside of my head to make stories.
But for Frankie, a kid, when you're young, there's such an imbalance between your obsessions and your desires and your access compared to the world you occupy in reality. And so it's scary and it's seductive to just leave the world behind and make a place in your own head. But as you age, as you connect to the larger world, as you find ways to sustain yourself and share those internal obsessions, it gets easier. So much of life is just fucking staying alive long enough to throw up enough lines that connect you to other people so you don't disappear.
In all of your novels and a good chunk of your stories, you accurately and without flaw reside inside the minds of female characters. You do such a brilliant job of accessing these narrators, and I wonder why you choose to live inside the female brain for such stories?
That's really kind and means so much to me. But I also know that other people might think, "oh, a dude wrote this and it's embarrassing." I accept that. If you write outside of your own experiences, you run that risk, and I can't make it work for every single person, each with their own ideas and experiences. But I try to get it correct enough that people give me the benefit of the doubt if I get something wrong. But, yeah, it's important to me, and I want it to not be a distraction. As long as I can keep the reader inside the story, I feel like I'm doing enough.
Why do I do it? I mean, all four of my novels have a female main character, and I wish I had a better answer since I get asked this a lot. And I think part of it is that it's not totally knowable to me. I think I partly choose female main characters because it gives me a little separation from my own identity and that gives me some play in the narrative. But I also just feel comfortable inside the perspective of these very specific women. And that's slightly just personal elements of my identity that are mine and mine alone and I guess fiction is a place for me to do that work and play with those feelings and it makes me more comfortable as I leave those stories and go back into the real world.
Now Is Not the Time To Panic is about so many things, but one main theme I loved was the message of the power of art. There is so much ~content~ out there featuring characters (or real people) that simply have no higher aim and denigrate life to be meaningless. I don’t feel this to be true of your work at all. Instead, your characters make meaning where maybe there is none, or they find their own purpose, working hard to do so. How can we as writers (and real people) combat the meaninglessness— both on the page and in real life?
Oh, this is really kind and lovely. Thank you. I guess...I don't know that there is any meaning out there. I honestly don't know what our purpose is in this world, and I don't know that there's anything more than this. And I don't really care if there is, because what does it matter? So, in the absence of clarity, to find yourself in this world without any real sense of what we're supposed to do, all I can figure is that, to the best of our abilities, we're supposed to help everyone get from this world to whatever comes next. We're supposed to cause the least amount of pain as we all try to collectively make it to what's next. To my mind, that's what stories are, conveying the character from point A to point B, to get them closer to that little sliver of light. So, really, all I can figure is that, in the absence of meaning, you hold onto each other, share the stories that make us unique, and hope it sustains us.
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. 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 sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South.
About the Interviewer
Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension program, Catapult, HerStry, Write or Die Tribe, and forthcoming for Lighthouse Writers. She currently teaches writing at Vanderbilt University in the English Department. She is a 2x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Hobart, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel The Brittanys is out now with Vintage. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
