"You Make A Mess And Then You Walk Away From It": An Interview With Kevin Wilson

An excerpt from Kevin's novel The Family Fang was published in the August issue of The Collagist. He is the author of the collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and has appeared in four volumes of 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.

1. What inspired you to write “The Family Fang”?

My son was born at the same time I was coming up with an idea for a novel. He’s a wonderful boy and I love him very much but that first year of his life was very hard for us and I felt like, no matter what I was doing, I was ruining him for the rest of his life. Simple decisions about food, sleep, interaction, felt like they had the possibility for lifelong problems. And this caused me to think more seriously about what it means to be a family, what it means to have children and be responsible for them. And then it caused me to think about what it means to be a child and be connected to these people that you didn’t choose and that you have to hope they know enough to keep you alive and functioning. From these concerns, I started to assemble the novel.

2. This book deals with the difficult choice of art or family, some incarnation of which I think many writers and general creative types face at certain points in our lives. What drove you to explore this theme with performance-artist parents and their kids, instead of rockstar-parents or sculptor-parents, for example?

I love performance art, even though I have an admittedly rudimentary knowledge of it, and so I wanted to use it as a way to help drive the narrative. If all reality could be turned into art, then how could you ever disentangle the two? I felt this was necessary for the book.

3. In an interview at Talking With Tim, you spoke a bit about the difference between writing stories and novels:

“...the Family Fang started as a failed story about a brother and sister who play Romeo and Juliet in a high school play and it wasn’t until I figured out a larger, more interesting narrative that I realized it could and should be a novel.”

Can you go into more detail about how you realized that this could be a novel-length work, and how that ‘more interesting narrative’ came to your attention?

The story suggested a larger format once I realized that the story about this brother and sister would need to include the parents. The first question I asked myself when reconsidering the story of the two siblings was “What kind of parents would allow their children to play Romeo and Juliet in a production?” Once I came up with Caleb and Camille, I knew I had a more complicated story to deal with and that narrative, the struggle between parents and their children, suggested itself as a novel instead of a short story in order to account for all the various ways the parents ruined their kids.

4. Now that you’ve published both a short story collection and a novel, how do you feel your writing and your process have changed since publication, if at all?

For the short stories, I always began with a conceit. I would have some event or image or idea and then I would work to create a narrative to account for that idea (what if a baby was born with teeth; what if some people tried to dig a tunnel to the center of the earth, etc.). The characters only established themselves once I had the action in place. With the novel, I began with Annie and Buster and I thought about them a lot before I figured out what kind of narrative I would give them. It was a strange experience. In some ways, I fell in love with Annie and Buster and then, in order to win their love, I tried to create a story good enough for them that they would love me. And I’m finding, thinking about another novel, that I have an idea of this character, but no idea yet what the exact narrative is going to be. And, on the other hand, I am working on another story and the first thing that jumped out to me wasn’t a character, but an image. So maybe that’s how I know which narrative is a novel and which is a story.

5. Do you have any writing projects currently in the works?

I’m in the very, very early stages of thinking about another novel. And I’m trying to write more short stories. I’m actually, for the first time in a while, becoming comfortable with the space between writing. I’m enjoying reading for pleasure, to spend more time with my family, without worrying what will come next.

6. What are you reading right now? Are there any upcoming publications or new releases that you’re particularly excited about?

I just read Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and it was such an incredibly transformative read. It was so beautifully written, so wonderfully imaginative, so deceptively simple in its progression, that I felt, at all times, that I was in the presence of a master. I had the same feeling reading State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, this idea that each element of the book was so perfectly crafted that I couldn’t help but give my heart over to it.

I cannot wait to read Scott McClanahan’s first novel Hill William. It will be, I am sure, one of the best books I’ve ever read. The same goes for Daniel Fights a Hurricane by Shane Jones, Jac Jemc’s My Only Wife, and Arcadia by Lauren Groff.