Speaker 1: The word weird is generally traditionally used as a pejorative,
Speaker 1: an assertion of the idea that there is normalcy of behavior,
Speaker 1: of affect of ways of moving through the world, and
Speaker 1: then there is deviation from that one righteous path. But
Speaker 1: I think this is completely the wrong way of thinking
Speaker 1: about it. I love the weird. It can also be
Speaker 1: synonymous with imaginative or surprising weird zigs. When you expect
Speaker 1: a zag, weird challenges orthodoxies and does its own thing.
Speaker 1: Weird is playful and idiosyncratic, delightful. Normalis be damned. The
Speaker 1: books of Kevin Wilson are weird, and they're about weird people.
Speaker 1: In his Nothing to See Here, two children have a
Speaker 1: condition that means they spontaneously can bust in. Now is
Speaker 1: not the time to panic. Two lonely young artists wreak
Speaker 1: havoc on their small town, prompting fears of satanism or
Speaker 1: even kidnapping. And in his latest book, his heroine Madeline
Speaker 1: or mad Hill, embarks on a road trip with a
Speaker 1: newly discovered half brother, Reuben. They're in search of her
Speaker 1: long absent father, Charles Hill, because it turns out that
Speaker 1: Charles has made a habit of building, then abandoning families
Speaker 1: and children, and it'll take a journey across the country
Speaker 1: to get to the truth. Kevin Wilson, unlike his Australian
Speaker 1: comedian namesake Kevin Bloody, Wilson, is actually very funny and
Speaker 1: he writes beautiful, searching, unexpected, and yes, weird books. They're
Speaker 1: utterly suffused with love and affection for the world and
Speaker 1: for his lost characters. I'm Michael Williams, and this is
Speaker 1: read this I show about the books we love and
Speaker 1: the weird loops behind them. When a like Run for
Speaker 1: the Hill's centers around an absence or a mystery. I'm
Speaker 1: curious for you, how well did you understand Charles Hill
Speaker 1: from the moment you started the book or how much
Speaker 1: was it a process of discovery or revelation.
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I didn't know him nearly as well when I started.
Speaker 3: And you just have to hope, just like the kids,
Speaker 3: that the closer you get, the more you'll understand. But
Speaker 3: in my head as I started this book, I just thought,
Speaker 3: a terrible dad makes these families, leaves them behind, and
Speaker 3: these kids are gonna go beat him up, you know,
Speaker 3: And I was like, and they should, they should, they
Speaker 3: should totally beat him up, and it's just like anything.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: It's just like you know, in the ways in which
Speaker 3: writing has helped me live in the real world, was
Speaker 3: that that's a very viable, understandable thing. The dad is
Speaker 3: a bad dad who left them. But the moment you
Speaker 3: start to think more about it, and the more that
Speaker 3: you try to understand what the motivations of this man
Speaker 3: might be, it's not that you forgive him, and it's
Speaker 3: not that he becomes like a likable, good person, but
Speaker 3: you understand a little more.
Speaker 2: And that's all I want, That's all the kids want.
Speaker 3: It can't you can't fix anything, but maybe if you
Speaker 3: could just get a clearer sense of why someone would
Speaker 3: do the things that they've done, it can help you
Speaker 3: move on. So yeah, I started with him as this
Speaker 3: horrible dad, and each kid as they had different memories
Speaker 3: of them, and as we're getting closer and closer to
Speaker 3: finding him, I didn't have it in my heart to
Speaker 3: just let him be this standard awful dad.
Speaker 1: That thing of not having it in your heart. One
Speaker 1: of the things that characterizes your work and all your work,
Speaker 1: short stories, your novels, is this deep tenderness towards your
Speaker 1: characters and this deep sense of love that is there.
Speaker 1: You're very reticent to kill a character, for example, very
Speaker 1: reticent to kind of enact violence on the more or
Speaker 1: pain that they can't move past. Do you find it
Speaker 1: hard to write an irredeemable character? Do you think you
Speaker 1: could write an irredeemable character?
Speaker 3: I don't know if I could, only because the longer
Speaker 3: I sit with anything, the more I start to find
Speaker 3: maybe things that start to resonate with me, or ways
Speaker 3: in which I'm connecting to them. And I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, but you're right, Like my thing, really and
Speaker 3: truly is if I can find a way to safely
Speaker 3: convey these characters from point A to point B, I'm
Speaker 3: gonna exhaust the possibilities. And I think what that means
Speaker 3: for me is that if I finally come down on
Speaker 3: the fact that like this cannot end, well, I know
Speaker 3: that that wasn't my first instinct, and I did everything
Speaker 3: I could, and then it feels understandable to me.
Speaker 2: But I don't know. Again, I'm not saying like being
Speaker 2: a writer is like the best way to be a
Speaker 2: par in the real world.
Speaker 3: But again, it's that idea of like, Okay, don't just
Speaker 3: go with your first instinct, try to find all the
Speaker 3: different ways to get from here to there, and will
Speaker 3: they work? And the imaginative life lets you do that.
Speaker 3: When I was a teenager, I wanted to read things
Speaker 3: that slightly disturbed me or were difficult, because I wanted
Speaker 3: to feel like the things in my head were not
Speaker 3: just for me and me alone. And I was the
Speaker 3: weirdest person in the world. But the longer I lived,
Speaker 3: the more I thought, I can live with this, and
Speaker 3: I can figure this stuff out, and I can work
Speaker 3: with pain and unhappiness. But this is my imaginative space.
Speaker 3: So can I just try to turn it a few
Speaker 3: degrees towards something that can can help me keep going?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's just the way I work. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you came back to that idea of aloneness
Speaker 1: and loneliness and the relationship between that and your writing,
Speaker 1: because it seems to me that of old the traumas,
Speaker 1: of all the griefs that you return to in your
Speaker 1: work again and again, the fear of being alone, the
Speaker 1: fear of not having connection, is perhaps the most pervasive,
Speaker 1: maybe even the driving engine of your work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think so. I mean, I think.
Speaker 3: As much as my characters often are struggling with connecting
Speaker 3: with the rest of the world. There are times where
Speaker 3: they feel broken in ways that they're not sure how
Speaker 3: they can actually be a meaningful part of the world
Speaker 3: around them.
Speaker 2: And I don't know.
Speaker 3: I feel that too, And then what happens is, I think,
Speaker 3: what I realize is then the instinct is to burrow
Speaker 3: in and to hide, and then the longer you hide,
Speaker 3: the harder it is. And so in so many of
Speaker 3: these stories, what I'm trying to figure out is how
Speaker 3: can you turn those feelings of isolation into a way
Speaker 3: in which you can hold on to another person because
Speaker 3: you recognize that same sadness in them. And you know,
Speaker 3: I want the books to be light, and I want
Speaker 3: them to have these possible moments of redemption. But the
Speaker 3: main thing I'm looking at is how can I get
Speaker 3: these two people to hold on to each other long
Speaker 3: enough to stay in the world. And honestly, most of
Speaker 3: my stories are weird people living in isolation finding just
Speaker 3: one thing that helps them hold on to another person.
Speaker 1: The idea of weirdness is also important and something I
Speaker 1: think about a lot as a parent. I have two sons.
Speaker 1: They are fifteen and thirteen, and they're just weird conversationally,
Speaker 1: they're weird the things that they're interested in, and I'm
Speaker 1: so thrilled. Nothing horrifies me more than the idea of
Speaker 1: not having a weird kid. If I can equip my
Speaker 1: weird kid with the way to connect with other weird kids,
Speaker 1: that's great. But there's a powder feeling slightly on the
Speaker 1: outer I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's so interesting because my kids are seventeen
Speaker 3: and twelve two, and I use weird as a catch
Speaker 3: all for everything.
Speaker 2: I think my editor would say how lazy.
Speaker 3: I am, because I've mainly mean weird as like good
Speaker 3: I think a lot of times. But my boys are
Speaker 3: distinctly strange in their own diverse ways from each other,
Speaker 3: and so honestly, having kids was so helpful for me
Speaker 3: to understand that, Like maybe I was settling in on
Speaker 3: a single idea of what it means to feel outside
Speaker 3: of the world because of my own experiences, and then
Speaker 3: you have these kids who start to develop their own
Speaker 3: obsessions and they start to burrow into these other things,
Speaker 3: and I was like, oh man, it's just a multitude
Speaker 3: of ways in which you can both love something and
Speaker 3: yet feel outside of the rest of the world because
Speaker 3: of your love for this thing.
Speaker 2: And I don't know.
Speaker 3: Once I started to see that, it felt like narrative
Speaker 3: possibilities opened up for me that, oh my god, the
Speaker 3: amount of ways in which weirdness can manifest. But also
Speaker 3: how many people, no matter how normal they may seem,
Speaker 3: do feel strange and do feel weird and do harbor
Speaker 3: these nate things that they can't quite articulate or talk about.
Speaker 3: And I was like, oh, man, I can do this forever, Like,
Speaker 3: as long as I can find a person that I
Speaker 3: can allow myself to try to figure out, I'll discover
Speaker 3: something that is kind of gloriously weird.
Speaker 1: How much for that discovery for you personally ahead of
Speaker 1: having kids, but how much of that way of coping,
Speaker 1: that way of making sends or at least making connection
Speaker 1: of the weirdness scented around rating and being a raided.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was one hundred percent the way into it
Speaker 3: when I was a kid. I mean, I grew up
Speaker 3: in a very rural town in you know, the United
Speaker 3: States and the Deep South, And it wasn't that I
Speaker 3: felt like I was completely alone, but I also knew
Speaker 3: that there was this larger world that I had no
Speaker 3: access to You know, this is before the Internet.
Speaker 2: It was just I knew there were.
Speaker 3: Things that I wanted that I could not access, and
Speaker 3: one of the ways that I could was reading.
Speaker 2: And strangely, you'd think.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'd read all these books about these mystical lands
Speaker 3: or but it wasn't. Fantasy never pulled me in as
Speaker 3: much as books that were set in the world that
Speaker 3: I lived in but were slightly beyond what I could touch.
Speaker 3: Just like anything, you read, this book written by somebody
Speaker 3: so different from you and so far away, and yet
Speaker 3: there's a moment in the book where you recognize yourself
Speaker 3: in that scene, this sensation that.
Speaker 2: You didn't know how to articulate.
Speaker 3: And when I was a kid, those moments sustained me,
Speaker 3: where I said.
Speaker 2: I know that feeling.
Speaker 3: I have felt that too, and it really I think
Speaker 3: about it all the time. It was almost like a
Speaker 3: signal from an antenna had gone out into the unknown
Speaker 3: and somehow had hit me and I could hear it.
Speaker 3: It was this thing that made me feel like, oh,
Speaker 3: something found me when I needed it. And those were
Speaker 3: books over and over.
Speaker 1: Do you remember specific titles that early on introduced you
Speaker 1: to that feeling that gave you that hunger to seek
Speaker 1: it out again.
Speaker 2: That's the thing that's so lovely.
Speaker 3: I mean, I grew up like the library at my
Speaker 3: school was a trailer, unair conditioned trailer in a outside
Speaker 3: of the actual school, and my fifth and sixth grade
Speaker 3: class were taught together by the same teacher, so she
Speaker 3: would teach one grade, then turn and teach the other.
Speaker 3: And if I did my work, I could go Often
Speaker 3: I did yours, like like sweep the floors or clean
Speaker 3: the bathrooms, but I also could just go in the
Speaker 3: library and hang out by myself.
Speaker 2: And that library was not extensive.
Speaker 3: I will say, like I read lots of books from
Speaker 3: the fifties about kids with polio.
Speaker 2: It's just like so.
Speaker 3: Many and I'd never read I didn't know what the classics,
Speaker 3: Like nobody told me about Narnia or any of these books.
Speaker 3: I just found what was in the library. And the
Speaker 3: first book for me that touched me really was Marjorie
Speaker 3: canand Rawling's book The Yearly, about a boy who takes
Speaker 3: care of a deer, and it's set in the swamps
Speaker 3: of Florida, and it was the first book set in
Speaker 3: the South about a kid. And it wasn't my life,
Speaker 3: but I could feel some of the similarities in Landscape,
Speaker 3: in the way in which the people spoke, and it
Speaker 3: was one of the first moments where I was like, Oh,
Speaker 3: this is in a book. This is in a book
Speaker 3: that won the Pulitzer Prize, and it's about people that
Speaker 3: are very similar to me, and that felt incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it is shocking at the end of
Speaker 1: that book, when the dia gets polia. It's very upsetting.
Speaker 2: That I was prepared.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's always like and I tell my kids,
Speaker 3: I'm like, you don't know what it's like to like
Speaker 3: not you can access almost any book that you want.
Speaker 2: If you want it, you can find it.
Speaker 3: And I was like, you know, you don't know what
Speaker 3: it's like to try to find like a moment of
Speaker 3: connection in a book about a kid with polio who's
Speaker 3: making a soapbox derby car.
Speaker 2: You know. I was like, but it touched me so much.
Speaker 1: I think throughout your work. One of the elements I
Speaker 1: love about it. I love the absurdity. I love the
Speaker 1: role that humor plays. But there's an element that I
Speaker 1: would almost describe as folk laric in some of your
Speaker 1: stories in particular, but also some of your novels where
Speaker 1: that either overtly magical elements or just that sense of possibility,
Speaker 1: a kind of porousness at the edges of reality that
Speaker 1: kind of supercharges what you do. I want to know, then,
Speaker 1: with that description of you as a reader, what's the
Speaker 1: transition from Kevin Wilson Rata to Kevin Wilson Ryder. At
Speaker 1: some point did you decide you wanted to be a
Speaker 1: more active rada and create your own stories or were
Speaker 1: they not quite as tethered as that?
Speaker 2: No, they were tethered.
Speaker 3: I loved reading so much, and I think it's just
Speaker 3: like anything. If you love something enough, you want to
Speaker 3: see if it's possible to make something, not to be
Speaker 3: better than or as good as, but to just feel
Speaker 3: it touch up against the things that inspired you. And
Speaker 3: you know, if you're worried about it being as good,
Speaker 3: you'll never do it. But I wasn't worried about that
Speaker 3: as much as I just thought, what would it feel
Speaker 3: like if reading these works were transformative? What would it
Speaker 3: feel like to try to make it? And I felt
Speaker 3: like that was the transition too, from childhood to adulthood,
Speaker 3: was that there was a point where I was like,
Speaker 3: these things are helping me in so many ways these
Speaker 3: books and these stories, But is there a way in
Speaker 3: which I can actually take them and allow it to
Speaker 3: like that I could express myself in my own way.
Speaker 3: And again, I was just going off of what I loved,
Speaker 3: and what I loved mostly were comic books, and a
Speaker 3: lot of the earliest writers that I loved were the
Speaker 3: writers that were doing either the magical realists, guys in
Speaker 3: South America, or just any kind of absurd writer, you know,
Speaker 3: Gogle the Nose, you know. When I read it, I
Speaker 3: was like, oh, Okay, I can see where you can
Speaker 3: go with this. But all of those places that used
Speaker 3: absurdity or used magical realism, they were using it because
Speaker 3: it was so embedded in the world in which they
Speaker 3: actually lived. And so one of the things I wanted
Speaker 3: to figure out was to tell contemporary American stories. But
Speaker 3: I could use that weirdness and that absurdity and that
Speaker 3: magic to tell a story that then connected to the
Speaker 3: way that I experienced.
Speaker 1: The world when we were return Kevin Chez the fray
Speaker 1: that stayed with him for almost thirty years and reveals
Speaker 1: why publishing it in a book feels like the whole
Speaker 1: point of art. He'll be right back long time listeners
Speaker 1: to read this might recall that in the past with
Speaker 1: our some guests about a thing we call their life sentences.
Speaker 1: It's an idea that springs from my conviction that we
Speaker 1: all have these phrases, maybe advertising jingles or profound quotes
Speaker 1: or bits of advice, whatever, but we have these sentences
Speaker 1: that play on a loop in our heads anywhere between
Speaker 1: a personal mantra and an unthinking mental screensaver mode. I
Speaker 1: have a few, but for me, one from my childhood
Speaker 1: that plays on a mental loop is from an old
Speaker 1: episode of The Simpsons. Lisa needs braces. Lisa needs braces,
Speaker 1: Lisa needs brain nonsense and almost thirty year old nonsense
Speaker 1: at this point, but sitting at traffic lights looking out gormlessly,
Speaker 1: it often springs to mind unbidden. I bring it up
Speaker 1: here because repeated phrases on a loop are an affliction
Speaker 1: that plagued Kevin Wilson more than most, and not just
Speaker 1: as an idle brainworm. The more we spoke about his
Speaker 1: approach to writing, the clearer became that these loops and
Speaker 1: phrases play a significant role in his creative process. It's
Speaker 1: an undercurrent that came to the foe in his previous novel,
Speaker 1: Now is not the Time to Panic, where one particular
Speaker 1: sentence of Kevin's own inner life became a key plot
Speaker 1: point for his characters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean as an adult, I was diagnosed with
Speaker 3: Tourettees and Grolman.
Speaker 2: I have tics, and I have.
Speaker 3: But it's more that I have repetitive imagery and phrases
Speaker 3: that just run like a carousel in my head, oftentimes
Speaker 3: not happily. You know, I don't want it, but it's
Speaker 3: gonna come, and you have to learn how to eventually
Speaker 3: just accept that.
Speaker 2: But phrases are big for me, and they have no
Speaker 2: real rhyme or reason.
Speaker 3: But one is no tie leather jacket cool, which was
Speaker 3: just in this movie Primary Colors, not a good movie,
Speaker 3: but one character says no tie leather jacket cool. And
Speaker 3: for whatever reason, when I was like twenty one years
Speaker 3: old and I heard it, I just kept saying it
Speaker 3: over and over and over again with no real regard
Speaker 3: for why. But the main one was this line from
Speaker 3: when I was in college, and it was the edge
Speaker 3: is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives,
Speaker 3: and the law is skinny with hunger for us. And
Speaker 3: it was a line that my friend wrote, my friend Eric,
Speaker 3: and it meant nothing. We just were kind of messing around,
Speaker 3: trying to say odd phrases. And I don't think a
Speaker 3: day goes by where I don't say it at least
Speaker 3: once or twice. It's just and a lot of times
Speaker 3: the way phrases the loveliness is the edge is a
Speaker 3: shanty town filled with gold seekers, and there's this sense
Speaker 3: of like.
Speaker 2: Where are we. We're all the way out on the edge, and.
Speaker 3: I feel a little scared, and I know that there's
Speaker 3: something ominous about that. And then I say, we are fugitives,
Speaker 3: and the law is skinny with hunger for us, and
Speaker 3: I feel calm again because I know that they're not
Speaker 3: going to catch me. They're skinny with hunger for me,
Speaker 3: and I'll always be able to get away. And there's
Speaker 3: just something that my brain hardwired a kind of code
Speaker 3: that if I could just say that, it would work.
Speaker 2: So I just say it.
Speaker 1: It seems to me there's a connection between your relationship
Speaker 1: with those phrases and the looping and your writing, and
Speaker 1: a connection that you made explicit in Now is Not
Speaker 1: the Time to Panic, where you took that phrase that
Speaker 1: you and your friend Eric had embedded in your life
Speaker 1: and your brain, and you decided to share it with
Speaker 1: your raiders in a really comprehensive way. Even though that
Speaker 1: appeared in Family Fang earlier, you kind of made it
Speaker 1: the scent of this lighter novel. And I'm curious about
Speaker 1: that act of taking something that's so internal and so
Speaker 1: personal and relinquishing it, handing it over to your raiders,
Speaker 1: who now a legion in the world.
Speaker 3: For me, there's something transformative when something that has been
Speaker 3: so deeply held inside of you for so long touches
Speaker 3: the open air. And that's like the whole point for
Speaker 3: me of art is what happens when I take the
Speaker 3: thing that I have held onto so tightly, sometimes unknowingly,
Speaker 3: and just what happens when it actually touches the air?
Speaker 3: What happens when somebody else sees it? And it can
Speaker 3: be scary and it could be like terrible. You know,
Speaker 3: you always run the risk of people saying this is
Speaker 3: freakish or weird or disturbing or more likely boring. But
Speaker 3: I've lived with that line for so long and I
Speaker 3: just thought, what a wild thing if just one other
Speaker 3: person in the world said it once. And people have
Speaker 3: sent me photos of posters hanging in random places with
Speaker 3: that phrase, And I think this thing that happened in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety seven, a phrase that I've said for however
Speaker 3: many years, somebody made a poster of it or someone
Speaker 3: said it. It's like, I don't know what else I
Speaker 3: want to achieve in life except for that.
Speaker 1: Run for the Hills is your first book since you
Speaker 1: gave The Gold Seeking Shandytown to the world, and I'm
Speaker 1: curious about whether it landed differently, or it felt differently,
Speaker 1: whether something had shifted or changed because you'd shared your
Speaker 1: phrase with the world, or whether it's more the same,
Speaker 1: whether that sentence is still in your head several times
Speaker 1: a day.
Speaker 3: It's still in my head, but when I say it now,
Speaker 3: it's always for me. But there's and I don't want
Speaker 3: to get too artistic about it, but when I say
Speaker 3: it now, it actually feel like it is echoing out
Speaker 3: into the world that every other time when I did it,
Speaker 3: it was just for me, and now it is for me.
Speaker 3: But I know that it's not just located.
Speaker 2: In my own brain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there is something kind of different and lovely
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: Understand, when you write a book a story, you don't
Speaker 1: share your writing with anyone until it's done. Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I just writing always.
Speaker 3: Making stuff is for me first, and it's for me
Speaker 3: to do and to live in my head and to
Speaker 3: make sense of it. And it's only when I kind
Speaker 3: of reach the limits of what I can do with
Speaker 3: it that I'm ready to let go of it and
Speaker 3: let somebody else see it. But I just don't. I
Speaker 3: don't want to wreck it. And it's not that someone
Speaker 3: else would mess it up. It's that I might not
Speaker 3: figure it out on my own if I let go
Speaker 3: of it too soon. The longer I live in it,
Speaker 3: the happier I am.
Speaker 1: Part of you holding that and it being your and
Speaker 1: your process that I wanted to ask you about, is
Speaker 1: you tell the story to yourself, loop the story internally
Speaker 1: for some time before you sit and write. By the
Speaker 1: time you sit to write, you've written the story internally.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean I have to.
Speaker 3: I just write so infrequently, like what people think of
Speaker 3: as writing, where I sit down at a computer and
Speaker 3: type that barely ever happens. The way that my life
Speaker 3: is arranged, I just don't have time to do it.
Speaker 3: But I'm always writing in my head, and so I
Speaker 3: just repeated over and over again, and even like with
Speaker 3: Run for the Hills, I had these distinct kids and
Speaker 3: I knew I had to get them to meet up,
Speaker 3: and they had to go west. And you know, I
Speaker 3: knew that the engine was going to move in one
Speaker 3: direction for you know, it's gonna just keep moving, but
Speaker 3: my brain was gonna be able to do it over
Speaker 3: and over and over so that I can make sure
Speaker 3: that that car would never stop, that I could get
Speaker 3: where I needed to get. So yeah, in my head,
Speaker 3: I just keep replaying how these characters talk to each other,
Speaker 3: what's going to happen to them, And then you know,
Speaker 3: there's always that wonderful moment on the page where you
Speaker 3: realize you've worked it out so often in your head,
Speaker 3: but it actually doesn't make sense or work. And that's where,
Speaker 3: like your craft, your ability as a writer means you've
Speaker 3: got to fix it, and that can really only happen
Speaker 3: on the page, but you adjust and you make those changes.
Speaker 3: But I always know I'm going to keep it going
Speaker 3: in my head and get it the way that I
Speaker 3: want it. So yeah, I need that loop.
Speaker 1: I do love you head there that the car had
Speaker 1: to be heading west, like you knew Archive's can be
Speaker 1: a road trip, but it has to be east to west.
Speaker 1: It can't be the other direction. These are the ways
Speaker 1: in which this story makes sense, and there's a kind
Speaker 1: of deliberateness to that.
Speaker 3: Well, part of it was just and again, like you
Speaker 3: know where I live. I live in Tennessee. Every book
Speaker 3: I've ever written has been set in this fictional town
Speaker 3: that I've made up in Tennessee. And there's real comfort
Speaker 3: in that. I never want my characters to go anywhere
Speaker 3: or leave the house if possible, you know, I just
Speaker 3: want to keep them. And so I knew this was
Speaker 3: a road trip story. You can't have a road trip
Speaker 3: story where they drive five miles down the road and
Speaker 3: the story's over. I knew I had to keep it going.
Speaker 3: But that was scary, And so I knew I got
Speaker 3: to start in Tennessee. I have to start in the
Speaker 3: place that's known to me, and with that kind of certainty,
Speaker 3: once that car gets going, I know that I can
Speaker 3: do it because I've started from a place that's mine.
Speaker 1: It seems to me that women's voices are the ones
Speaker 1: that you are perhaps most comfortable writing in, or perhaps
Speaker 1: most adept at bringing to life. And I wonder whether
Speaker 1: that's something that you're conscious of or deliberate about, or
Speaker 1: whether that's just how your rightly voice has evolved.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm definitely conscious of it, because you don't want
Speaker 3: to mess it up. I mean, you don't want to
Speaker 3: be someone that's just utilizing this voice that's not yours
Speaker 3: and it you know, not resonating with anyone or not
Speaker 3: feeling believable. And I'll say it's like a couple of things,
Speaker 3: Like one was just like a lot of the characters
Speaker 3: that I loved from books were so like really the
Speaker 3: three were merracat Blackwood and we have always lived in
Speaker 3: the castle, and then Mattie Ross and True Grit, which
Speaker 3: you know, so much of this book is just True Grit.
Speaker 3: It's just a book I love, and that voice I love.
Speaker 3: And then Frankie in A Member of the Wedding by
Speaker 3: Carson mccullors. Those were all female characters that just resonated
Speaker 3: so much with me, and early on in my career,
Speaker 3: I think I gravitated towards women's voices because it gave
Speaker 3: me this slight bit of distance that you couldn't immediately
Speaker 3: construct autobiography from what I was doing. It gave me
Speaker 3: plausible deniability, and I like that. I wanted to write
Speaker 3: from a place that it wasn't exactly me, and then
Speaker 3: as I did that, I think what I found was
Speaker 3: just the way that the world is for me. There
Speaker 3: is a deep comfort in writing in the voice of
Speaker 3: female characters, like it is a lovely thing in my
Speaker 3: imaginary world to be able to inhabit that space and
Speaker 3: feel like safe and comfortable and try to get it right.
Speaker 1: I wondered about it and run for the hills because
Speaker 1: part of Mad's voice and worldview, she's got a very
Speaker 1: kind of earthy impatience with a particular kind of nonsense
Speaker 1: that she doesn't personally have time. And part of that
Speaker 1: is the nonsense of one's parents and the relationship you
Speaker 1: have to particularly a failed or absent parent. But it
Speaker 1: struck me that much of Charles's behavior comes back to
Speaker 1: patterns and loops and intrusive thoughts and in a bility
Speaker 1: to break the cycle. And he's being held to account
Speaker 1: in this book for that stuff, all of which are
Speaker 1: qualities not to protect the autobiographic along to you, but
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm interested. This is a rebuttal of a
Speaker 1: particular kind of looped thinking. That you perhaps possess I'm
Speaker 1: curious about that.
Speaker 2: Oh man, I love that.
Speaker 3: That's just such an adept and lovely reading of it,
Speaker 3: and I think there's something to that. I think what
Speaker 3: I'm also trying to figure out is like, Okay, you
Speaker 3: have these obsessions, you have these loops, and those exist
Speaker 3: in this thing that's inside of you. It's not the
Speaker 3: real world, right, And I think one of the things
Speaker 3: I'm trying to figure out is how do you take
Speaker 3: those things and not let them ruin you? And one
Speaker 3: of the ways you don't let it ruin you, And
Speaker 3: what Charles just can't figure out is the way that
Speaker 3: you don't let it ruin you is that you anchor
Speaker 3: it to the ground. You anchor it to what is
Speaker 3: underneath you and the people around you. And for me,
Speaker 3: what I'm trying to figure out is I have a
Speaker 3: life that I love. I have these kids that are incredible,
Speaker 3: I have a wife who means the world to me,
Speaker 3: and yet I also have all of this strangeness constantly
Speaker 3: swirling around my head.
Speaker 2: And one of the.
Speaker 3: Impulses is just let that spin and go wherever you
Speaker 3: need to go. And what I'm trying to teach myself
Speaker 3: in these stories. Is that's one way. But the other
Speaker 3: way is to loop it back into the space that
Speaker 3: you already live in and then find all these magic
Speaker 3: and mystical and weird ways. If you just stay planted,
Speaker 3: it will resonate over and over and it will change.
Speaker 1: I think it does, and I think it's an act
Speaker 1: of such supreme generosity and an extraordinary set of creative gifts.
Speaker 1: And I'm so grateful that you anchor it in these
Speaker 1: books and share it with us the way you do.
Speaker 1: Thank you joining us, Kevin Wilson.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Kevin Wilson's latest novel, Run for the Hills, is available everywhere. Now.
Speaker 1: Before we go, just a heads up, if you're in
Speaker 1: the Sydney area next week, look out for Sydney Writers Festival.
Speaker 1: It is a wonderful event. They have a cavalcade of
Speaker 1: terrific writers and they also have me there. If you
Speaker 1: want to see a little bit of read this live
Speaker 1: and in person, get onto the Sydney Writers' Festival website
Speaker 1: and book your tickets and head along. It's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. You can find all the books we mentioned
Speaker 1: in today's episode at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it
Speaker 1: for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
Speaker 1: your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
Speaker 1: Next week I read this, I'm chatting with Tory Peters.
Speaker 1: Her latest work is either a novel in three stories
Speaker 1: or a quartet or I think the Germans have called
Speaker 1: it a figure in four. Whatever it is, it's absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's kind of condescending to reader it
Speaker 4: so basically be like, let me slow down for you
Speaker 4: and essentially ruin the momentum of a story because I
Speaker 4: actually think you're like too stupid to understand it. In
Speaker 4: this new book, you know, the biggest piece in it
Speaker 4: is written in lumberjack slang, which I don't explain at all.
Speaker 1: Read This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
Speaker 1: the generous support of ar A Group. The show is
Speaker 1: produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans,
Speaker 1: original compositions by Zalton Fetcher and transcription by Posy mcacky.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next week.