Speaker 1: Hello again, es Daniel James, and I'm back to share
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This. Schwartzpeedy is weekly books podcast
Speaker 1: hosted by editor of The Monthly Michael Williams. It features
Speaker 1: conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
Speaker 1: and around the world. In this episode, Michael is chaining
Speaker 1: with the American author Kevin Wilson. As always, Michael is
Speaker 1: here to tell me a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hello Michael, Daniel, Hello again.
Speaker 1: Okay, So first things first, the Kevin Wilson you are
Speaker 1: speaking to in today's episode is not the Australian comedian
Speaker 1: quote unquote Kevin Bloody Wilson, is it.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right. In start contrast, for the Australian comedian
Speaker 2: Kevin Bloody Wilson, the Kevin Wilson I'm talking to is
Speaker 2: actually funny. This Kevin Wilson is from Tennessee and he
Speaker 2: is a New York Times bestselling author and genuinely amusing
Speaker 2: at every possible level.
Speaker 1: Michael. The title of this episode of Read This, Kevin
Speaker 1: Wilson is Wonderfully Weird, suggests that weirdness can actually be
Speaker 1: a bit of a superpower when it comes to writing
Speaker 1: great stories.
Speaker 2: Would you agree, Daniel, I would agree wholeheartedly, Like we
Speaker 2: were weary calling the episode Kevin Wilson is wonderfully weird
Speaker 2: because we were, Like weird is normally used as a pejorative.
Speaker 2: There's this idea that we achieved some kind of normalcy
Speaker 2: in life, and weird people to be shunned or to
Speaker 2: be mocked, or to be taken differently. Certainly, in the
Speaker 2: recent US election campaign we saw an example of the
Speaker 2: Democrats repeating the mantra that the Republicans were weird.
Speaker 1: JD.
Speaker 2: Evans was weird. But for me, weird is a good thing.
Speaker 2: It suggests kind of intellectually imaginatively independent, someone who zigs
Speaker 2: when you expect a zag, someone who challenges orthodoxies and
Speaker 2: does their own thing. Weirdness is only a good thing,
Speaker 2: and particularly only a good thing when it comes to
Speaker 2: kind of creative energy. You know, who's got time for
Speaker 2: normalis frankly and Kevin Wilson's weird in just the right way.
Speaker 2: Like he wrote this book called Nothing to See Here
Speaker 2: that sent it around these two kids who would spawn
Speaker 2: taneously combust weird. He had another novel that was about
Speaker 2: these kids who are kind of experimenting with finding their
Speaker 2: artistic voice and printed these posters that led to their
Speaker 2: small town believing that there was a kind of spate
Speaker 2: of kidnapping or maybe even Satanism going on. And his
Speaker 2: latest books called Rum for the Hills, and it follows
Speaker 2: a heroine whose name is Madeline. She's known as mad Hill.
Speaker 2: And one day a guy shows up. His name is Reuben,
Speaker 2: and he says, I'm your long lost brother. You're missing
Speaker 2: dad who ran off on you and your mum years ago,
Speaker 2: had another family, And as they take a road trip
Speaker 2: to go and find him, they find another family, and
Speaker 2: another family, and another family, and have to contend with
Speaker 2: their many discovered siblings. It's a cross country journey looking
Speaker 2: for the truth, and it is true to film, wonderfully
Speaker 2: weird and all the better for it. It was great
Speaker 2: to chat to him.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment, Kevin Wilson is wonderfully weird.
Speaker 2: When book like Run for the Hill's centers around an
Speaker 2: absence or a mystery. I'm curious for you, how well
Speaker 2: did you understand Charles Hill from the moment you started
Speaker 2: the book or how much was it a process of
Speaker 2: discovery or revelation?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I didn't know him nearly as well when I started,
Speaker 4: and you just have to hope, just like the kids,
Speaker 4: that the closer you get, the more you'll understand. But
Speaker 4: in my head as I started this book, I just thought,
Speaker 4: a terrible dad makes these families, leaves them behind, and
Speaker 4: these kids are gonna go beat him up, you know,
Speaker 4: And I was like, and they should, they should totally
Speaker 4: beat him up.
Speaker 3: And it's just like anything I think.
Speaker 4: It's just like you know, in the ways in which
Speaker 4: writing has helped me live in the real world, was
Speaker 4: that that's a very viable, understandable thing. The dad is
Speaker 4: a bad dad who left them. But the moment you
Speaker 4: start to think more about it, and the more that
Speaker 4: you try to understand what the motivations of this man
Speaker 4: might be, it's not that you forgive him, and it's
Speaker 4: not that he becomes like a likable, good person, but
Speaker 4: you understand a little more. And that's all I want,
Speaker 4: that's all the kids want. It can't you can't fix anything,
Speaker 4: but maybe if you could just get a clearer sense
Speaker 4: of why someone would do the things that they've done,
Speaker 4: it can help you move on. So, yeah, I started
Speaker 4: with him as this horrible dad and each kid as
Speaker 4: they had different memories of them, and as we're getting
Speaker 4: closer and closer to finding him, I didn't have it
Speaker 4: in my heart to just let him be this standard
Speaker 4: awful dad.
Speaker 2: That thing of not having it in your heart. One
Speaker 2: of the things that characterizes your work and all your work,
Speaker 2: short stories, your novels is this deep tenderness towards your
Speaker 2: characters and this deep sense of love that is there.
Speaker 2: You're very reticent to kill a character, for example, You're
Speaker 2: very reticent to kind of enact violence on the more
Speaker 2: or pain that they can't move past. Do you find
Speaker 2: it hard to write an irredeemable character? Do you think
Speaker 2: you could write an irredeemable character?
Speaker 4: I don't know if I could, only because the longer
Speaker 4: I sit with anything, the more I start to find
Speaker 4: maybe things that start to resonate with me, or ways
Speaker 4: in which I'm connecting to them. And I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, but you're right, like, my thing, really and
Speaker 4: truly is if I can find a way to safely
Speaker 4: convey these characters from point A to point B, I'm
Speaker 4: gonna exhaust the possibilities. And I think what that means
Speaker 4: for me is that if I finally come down on
Speaker 4: the fact that like this cannot end. Well, I know
Speaker 4: that that wasn't my first instinct, and I did everything
Speaker 4: I could, and then it feels understandable to me.
Speaker 3: But I don't know. Again, I'm not saying like being.
Speaker 4: A writer is like the best way to be a
Speaker 4: person in the real world. But again, it's that idea
Speaker 4: of like, Okay, don't just go with your first instinct.
Speaker 4: Try to find all the different ways to get from
Speaker 4: here to there and will they work? And the imaginative
Speaker 4: life lets you do that. When I was a teenager,
Speaker 4: I wanted to read things that slightly disturbed me or
Speaker 4: were difficult, because I wanted to feel like the things
Speaker 4: in my head were not just for me and me alone,
Speaker 4: and I was the weirdest person in the world. But
Speaker 4: the longer I live, the more I thought, I can
Speaker 4: live with this, and I can figure this stuff out,
Speaker 4: and I can work with pain and unhappiness. But this
Speaker 4: is my imaginative space, So can I just try to
Speaker 4: turn it a few degrees towards something that can can
Speaker 4: help me keep going? Yeah, And it's just the way
Speaker 4: I work Now.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you came back to that idea of aloneness
Speaker 2: and loneliness and the relationship between that and your writing,
Speaker 2: because it seems to me, of all the traumas, of
Speaker 2: all the griefs that you return to in your work
Speaker 2: again and again, the fear of being alone, the fear
Speaker 2: of not having connection, is perhaps the most pervasive, maybe
Speaker 2: even the driving engine of your work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think.
Speaker 4: As much as my characters often are struggling with connecting
Speaker 4: with the rest of the world, there are times where
Speaker 4: they feel broken in ways that they're not sure how
Speaker 4: they can actually be a meaningful part.
Speaker 3: Of the world around them.
Speaker 4: And I don't know, I feel that too, And then
Speaker 4: what happens is, I think, what I realize is then
Speaker 4: the instinct is to burrow in and to hide, and
Speaker 4: then the longer you hide, the harder it is. And
Speaker 4: so in so many of these stories, what I'm trying
Speaker 4: to figure out is how can you turn those feelings
Speaker 4: of isolation into a way in which you can hold
Speaker 4: on to another person because you recognize that same set
Speaker 4: in them. And you know, I want the books to
Speaker 4: be light, and I want them to have these possible
Speaker 4: moments of redemption. But the main thing I'm looking at
Speaker 4: is how can I get these two people to hold
Speaker 4: on to each other long enough to stay in the world.
Speaker 4: And honestly, most of my stories are weird people living
Speaker 4: in isolation finding just one thing that helps them hold
Speaker 4: on to another person.
Speaker 2: The idea of weirdness is also important and something I
Speaker 2: think about a lot as a parent. I have two sons.
Speaker 2: They are fifteen and thirteen, and they're just weird Conversationally,
Speaker 2: they're weird the things that they're interested in, and I'm
Speaker 2: so thrilled. Nothing horrifies me more than the idea of
Speaker 2: not having a weird kid. If I can equip my
Speaker 2: weird kid with the way to connect with other weird kids,
Speaker 2: that's great. But there's a powder feeling slightly on the
Speaker 2: outer I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, it's so interesting because my kids are seventeen
Speaker 4: and twelve. Well, my two boys and I use weird
Speaker 4: as a catch off for everything. I think my editor
Speaker 4: would say how lazy I am, because I've mainly mean
Speaker 4: weird as like good I think a lot of times.
Speaker 4: But my boys are distinctly strange in their own diverse
Speaker 4: ways from each other, and so honestly, having kids was
Speaker 4: so helpful for me to understand that like maybe I
Speaker 4: was settling in on a single idea of what it
Speaker 4: means to feel outside of the world because of my
Speaker 4: own experiences, And then you have these kids who start
Speaker 4: to develop their own obsessions and they start to burrow
Speaker 4: into these other things, and I was like, oh, man,
Speaker 4: it's just a multitude of ways in which you can
Speaker 4: both love something and yet feel outside of the rest
Speaker 4: of the world because of your love for this thing.
Speaker 3: And I don't know.
Speaker 4: Once I started to see that, it felt like narrative
Speaker 4: possibilities opened up for me that oh my god, the
Speaker 4: amount of ways in which weirdness can manifest. But also
Speaker 4: how many people, no matter how normal they may seem,
Speaker 4: do feel strange and do feel weird, and do harbor
Speaker 4: these innate things that they can't quite articulate or talk about.
Speaker 4: And I was like, oh, man, I can do this forever, Like,
Speaker 4: as long as I can find a person that I
Speaker 4: can allow myself to try to figure out, I'll discover
Speaker 4: something that is kind of gloriously weird.
Speaker 2: How much for that discovery for you personally ahead of
Speaker 2: having kids, but how much of that way of coping,
Speaker 2: that way of making sends, or at least making connection
Speaker 2: of the weirdness scented around reading and being a raider.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was one hundred percent the way into it
Speaker 4: when I was a kid. I mean, I grew up
Speaker 4: in a very rural town in you know, the United
Speaker 4: States and the Deep South, and it wasn't that I
Speaker 4: felt like I was completely alone, but I also knew
Speaker 4: that there was this larger world that I had no
Speaker 4: access to.
Speaker 3: You know, this is before the Internet.
Speaker 4: It was just I knew there were things that I
Speaker 4: wanted that I could not access, and one of the
Speaker 4: ways that I could was reading. And strangely, you'd think, oh,
Speaker 4: I'd read all these books about these mystical lands, but
Speaker 4: it wasn't. Fantasy never pulled me in as much as
Speaker 4: books that were set in the world that I lived
Speaker 4: in but were slightly beyond what I could touch. Just
Speaker 4: like anything, you read, this book written by somebody so
Speaker 4: different from you and so far away, and yet there's
Speaker 4: a moment in the book where you recognize yourself in
Speaker 4: that scene, this sensation that you didn't know how to articulate.
Speaker 4: And when I was a kid, those moments sustained me,
Speaker 4: where I said, I know that feeling. I have felt
Speaker 4: that too, and it really I think about it all
Speaker 4: the time. It was almost like a signal from an
Speaker 4: antenna had gone out into the unknown and somehow had
Speaker 4: hit me and I could hear it. It was this
Speaker 4: thing that made me feel like, oh, something found me
Speaker 4: when I needed it. And those were books over and over.
Speaker 2: Do you remember specific titles that early on introduced you
Speaker 2: to that feeling that gave you that hunger to seek
Speaker 2: it out again.
Speaker 3: That's the thing that's so lovely.
Speaker 4: I mean, I grew up like the library at my
Speaker 4: school was a trailer, unair conditioned trailer in a outside
Speaker 4: of the actual school, and my fifth and sixth grade
Speaker 4: class were taught together by the same teacher, so she
Speaker 4: would teach one grade, then turn and teach the other.
Speaker 4: And if I did my work, I could go Often
Speaker 4: I did yours, like sweep the floors or clean the bathrooms,
Speaker 4: but I also could just go in the library and
Speaker 4: hang out by myself. And that library was not extensive.
Speaker 4: I will say I read lots of books from the
Speaker 4: fifties about kids with polio.
Speaker 3: It's just like so.
Speaker 4: Many and I'd never read I didn't know what the classics, like,
Speaker 4: nobody told me about Narnia or any of these books.
Speaker 4: I just found what was in the library. And the
Speaker 4: first book for me that touched me really was Marjorie
Speaker 4: canand Rawling's book The Yearly, about a boy who takes
Speaker 4: care of a deer and it's set in the swamps
Speaker 4: of Florida, and it was the first book set in
Speaker 4: the South about a kid. And it wasn't my life,
Speaker 4: but I could feel some of the similarities in Landscape,
Speaker 4: in the way in which the people spoke, and it
Speaker 4: was one of the first moments where I.
Speaker 3: Was like, oh, this is in a book. This is
Speaker 3: in a book that.
Speaker 4: Won the Pulitzer Prize, and it's about people that are
Speaker 4: very similar to me, and that felt incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it is shocking at the end of
Speaker 2: that book when the dia gets that's very upsetting.
Speaker 3: That I was prepared.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's always like and I tell my kids,
Speaker 4: I'm like, you don't know what it's like to like
Speaker 4: not you can access almost any book that you want,
Speaker 4: if you want it, you can find it. And I
Speaker 4: was like, you know, you don't know what it's like
Speaker 4: to try to find like a moment of connection in
Speaker 4: a book about a kid with polio who's making a
Speaker 4: Soapbox derby Car.
Speaker 3: You know, I was like, but it touched me so much.
Speaker 2: I think throughout your work one of the elements I
Speaker 2: love about it. I love the absurdity. I love the
Speaker 2: role that humor plays. But there's an element that I
Speaker 2: would almost describe as folk laric in some of your
Speaker 2: stories in particular, but also some of your novels, where
Speaker 2: that either overtly magical elements or just that sense of possibility,
Speaker 2: a kind of porousness at the edges of reality that
Speaker 2: kind of supercharges what you do. I want to know, then,
Speaker 2: with that description of you as a reader, what's the
Speaker 2: transition from Kevin Wilson Rata to Kevin Wilson Ryder. At
Speaker 2: some point did you decide you wanted to be a
Speaker 2: more active rita and create your own stories or were
Speaker 2: they not quite as tethered as that.
Speaker 3: No, they were tethered.
Speaker 4: I loved reading so much, and I think it's just
Speaker 4: like anything. If you love something enough, you want to
Speaker 4: see if it's possible to make something not to be
Speaker 4: better than or as good as, but to just feel
Speaker 4: it touch up against the things that inspired you, and
Speaker 4: you know, if you're worried about it being as good,
Speaker 4: you'll never do it. But I wasn't worried about that
Speaker 4: as much as I just thought, what would it feel
Speaker 4: like if reading these works were transformative? What would it
Speaker 4: feel like to try to make it? And I felt
Speaker 4: like that was the transition too, from childhood to adulthood,
Speaker 4: was that there was a point where I was like,
Speaker 4: these things are helping me in so many ways, these
Speaker 4: books and these stories, but is there a way in
Speaker 4: which I can actually take them and allow it to
Speaker 4: like that I could express myself in my own way.
Speaker 4: And again, I was just going off of what I loved,
Speaker 4: and what I loved mostly were comic books, and a
Speaker 4: lot of the earliest writers that I loved were the
Speaker 4: writers that were doing either the magical realists, guys in
Speaker 4: South America, or just any kind of absurd writer, you know,
Speaker 4: Gogle the Nose, you know.
Speaker 3: When I read it, I.
Speaker 4: Was like, oh, okay, I can see where you can
Speaker 4: go with this. But all of those places that used
Speaker 4: absurdity or used magical realism, they were using it because
Speaker 4: it was so embedded in the world in which they
Speaker 4: actually lived. And so one of the things I wanted
Speaker 4: to figure out was to tell contemporary American stories. But
Speaker 4: I could use that weirdness and that absurdity and that
Speaker 4: magic to tell a story that then connected to the
Speaker 4: way that I experienced the world.
Speaker 1: When we were a ton.
Speaker 2: Kevin, here's the phrase that stayed with him for almost
Speaker 2: thirty years and reveals by publishing it in a book,
Speaker 2: feels like the whole point of our He'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Long time listeners to read this might recall that in
Speaker 2: the past with our some guests about a thing we
Speaker 2: call their life sentences. It's an idea that springs from
Speaker 2: my conviction that we all have these phrases, maybe advertising
Speaker 2: jingles or profound quotes or bits of advice, whatever, but
Speaker 2: we have these sentences that play on a loop in
Speaker 2: our heads anywhere between a personal mantra and an unthinking
Speaker 2: mental screensaver mode. I have a few, but for me,
Speaker 2: one from my childhood that plays on a mental loop
Speaker 2: is from an old episode of The Simpsons de Lisia
Speaker 2: needs braces.
Speaker 1: Lisia needs braces.
Speaker 2: It needs nonsense, and almost thirty year old nonsense at
Speaker 2: this point, but sitting at traffic lights looking out gormlessly,
Speaker 2: it often springs to mind unbidden. I bring it up
Speaker 2: here because repeated Phrases on a loop are an affliction
Speaker 2: that plagued Kevin Wilson more than most, and not just
Speaker 2: as an idle brainworm. The more we spoke about his
Speaker 2: approach to writing, the clearer became that these loops and
Speaker 2: phrases play a significant role in his creative process. It's
Speaker 2: an undercurrent that came to the Foe in his previous
Speaker 2: novel Now is Not the Time to Panic, where one
Speaker 2: particular sentence of Kevin's own inner life became a key
Speaker 2: plot point for his characters.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean as an adult, I was diagnosed with Tourette's
Speaker 4: and Grolman. I have tics, and I have, but it's
Speaker 4: more that I have repetitive imagery and phrases that just
Speaker 4: run like a carousel in my head, oftentimes not happily.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't want it, but it's going to come,
Speaker 4: and you have to learn how to eventually just accept that.
Speaker 4: But phrases are big for me, and they have no
Speaker 4: real rhyme or reason. But one is no tie leather
Speaker 4: jacket cool, which was just in this movie Primary Colors,
Speaker 4: not a good movie, but one character says, no tie
Speaker 4: leather jacket cool, And for whatever reason, when I was
Speaker 4: like twenty one years old and I heard it.
Speaker 3: I just kept saying it over and over and over again, with.
Speaker 4: No real regard for why. But the main one was
Speaker 4: this line from when I was in college, and it
Speaker 4: was the edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers.
Speaker 4: We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger
Speaker 4: for us. And it was a line that my friend wrote,
Speaker 4: my friend Eric, and it meant nothing. We just were
Speaker 4: kind of messing around trying to say odd phrases, and
Speaker 4: I don't think a day goes by where I don't
Speaker 4: say it at least once or twice. It's just and
Speaker 4: a lot of times the way phrases the loveliness is
Speaker 4: the edge is a shanty town filled with gold seekers,
Speaker 4: And there's this sense of like.
Speaker 3: Where are we?
Speaker 4: We're all the way out on the edge, and I
Speaker 4: feel a little scared, and I know that there's something
Speaker 4: ominous about that. And then I say we are fugitives
Speaker 4: and the law is skinny with hunger for us, and
Speaker 4: I feel calm again because I know that they're not
Speaker 4: going to catch me. They're skinny with hunger for me,
Speaker 4: and I'll always be able to get away. And there's
Speaker 4: just something that my brain hardwired a kind of code
Speaker 4: that if I could just say that, it would work,
Speaker 4: So I just say it.
Speaker 2: It seems to me there's a connection between your relationship
Speaker 2: with those phrases and the looping and your writing, and
Speaker 2: a connection that you made explicit in Now is not
Speaker 2: the Time to Panic. Where you took that phrase that
Speaker 2: you and your friend Eric had embedded in your life
Speaker 2: and your brain, and you decided to share it with
Speaker 2: your raiders in a really comprehensive way, even though that
Speaker 2: the pidin Family Fang earlier. You kind of at the
Speaker 2: center of this lighter novel, And I'm curious about that
Speaker 2: act of taking something that's so internal and so personal
Speaker 2: and relinquishing it, handing it over to your raiders, who
Speaker 2: now a legion in the world.
Speaker 4: For me, there's something transformative when something that has been
Speaker 4: so deeply held inside of you for so long touches
Speaker 4: the open air. And that's like the whole point for
Speaker 4: me of art is what happens when I take the
Speaker 4: thing that I have held onto so tightly, sometimes unknowingly,
Speaker 4: and just what happens when it actually touches the air.
Speaker 4: What happens when somebody else sees it and it can
Speaker 4: be scary, and it could be like terrible. You know,
Speaker 4: you always run the risk of people saying this is
Speaker 4: freakish or weird or disturbing or more likely boring. But
Speaker 4: I've lived with that line for so long, and I
Speaker 4: just thought, what a wild thing if just one other
Speaker 4: person in the world said it once. And people have
Speaker 4: sent me photos of posters hanging in random places with
Speaker 4: that phrase.
Speaker 3: And I think, this.
Speaker 4: Thing that happened in nineteen ninety seven, a phrase that
Speaker 4: I've said for however many years, somebody made a poster
Speaker 4: of it or someone said it. It's like, I don't
Speaker 4: know what else I want to achieve in life except
Speaker 4: for that.
Speaker 2: Run for the Hills is your first book since you
Speaker 2: gave The Gold Seeking Shandytown to the world, and I'm
Speaker 2: curious about whether it landed differently, or it felt differently,
Speaker 2: whether something had shifted or changed because you shared your
Speaker 2: phrase with the world, or whether it's more the same,
Speaker 2: whether that sentence is still in your head several times
Speaker 2: a day.
Speaker 4: It's still in my head, but when I say it now,
Speaker 4: it's always for me. But there's and I don't want
Speaker 4: to get too artistic about it, but when I say it.
Speaker 4: Now it actually feels like it is echoing out into
Speaker 4: the world that every other time when I did it,
Speaker 4: it was just for me, and now it is for me.
Speaker 3: But I know that it's not just located in my
Speaker 3: own brain. Yeah, so there.
Speaker 4: Is something kind of different and lovely about it.
Speaker 2: Understand, when you write a book a story, you don't
Speaker 2: share your writing with anyone until it's done. Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I just writing always making stuff is for me first,
Speaker 4: and it's for me to do and to live in
Speaker 4: my head and to make sense of it. And it's
Speaker 4: only when I kind of reach the limits of what
Speaker 4: I can do with it that I'm ready to let
Speaker 4: go of it and let somebody else see it.
Speaker 3: But I just don't.
Speaker 4: I don't want to wreck it. And it's not that
Speaker 4: someone else would mess it up. It's that I might
Speaker 4: not figure it out on my own if I let
Speaker 4: go of it too soon. The longer I live in it,
Speaker 4: the happier I am.
Speaker 2: Part of you holding that being yours and your process
Speaker 2: that I wanted to ask you about is you tell
Speaker 2: the story to yourself, loop the story internally for some
Speaker 2: time before you sit and write. By the time you
Speaker 2: sit to write, you you've written the story internally, Is
Speaker 2: that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I have to.
Speaker 4: I just write so infrequently, like what people think of
Speaker 4: as writing, where I sit down at a computer and
Speaker 4: type that barely ever happens the way that my life
Speaker 4: is arranged.
Speaker 3: I just don't have time to do it.
Speaker 4: But I'm always writing in my head, and so I
Speaker 4: just repeat it over and over again. And even like
Speaker 4: with Run for the Hills, I had these distinct kids
Speaker 4: and I knew I had to get them to meet up,
Speaker 4: and they had to go west, and you know, I
Speaker 4: knew that the engine was gonna move in one direction
Speaker 4: for you know, it's gonna just keep moving.
Speaker 3: But my brain was gonna.
Speaker 4: Be able to do it over and over and over
Speaker 4: so that I can make sure that that car would
Speaker 4: never stop, that I could get where I needed to get.
Speaker 4: So yeah, in my head, I just keep replaying how
Speaker 4: these characters talk to each other, what's going to happen
Speaker 4: to them, And then you know, there's always that wonderful
Speaker 4: moment on the page where you realize you've worked it
Speaker 4: out so often in your head, but it actually doesn't
Speaker 4: make sense or work. And that's where like your craft,
Speaker 4: your ability as a writer means you've got to fix it,
Speaker 4: and that can really only happen on the page, but
Speaker 4: you adjust and you make those changes. But I always
Speaker 4: know I'm going to keep it going in my head
Speaker 4: and get it the way that I want it. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I need that loop.
Speaker 2: I do love thing his head there that the car
Speaker 2: had to be heading west, Like you knew, Chaves can
Speaker 2: be a road trip, but it has to be east
Speaker 2: to west. It can't be the other direction. These are
Speaker 2: the ways in which this story makes sense, and there's
Speaker 2: a kind of deliberateness to that.
Speaker 4: Well, part of it was just and again, like you
Speaker 4: know where I live. I live in Tennessee. Every book
Speaker 4: I've ever written has been set in this fictional town
Speaker 4: that I've made up in Tennessee. And there's real comfort
Speaker 4: in that. I never want my characters to go anywhere
Speaker 4: or leave the house if possible, you know, I just
Speaker 4: want to keep them. And so I knew this was
Speaker 4: a road trip story. You can't have a road trip
Speaker 4: story where they drive five miles down the road and
Speaker 4: the story's over. I knew I had to keep it going,
Speaker 4: but that was scary, and so I knew I got
Speaker 4: to start in Tennessee. I have to start in the
Speaker 4: place that's known to me, and with that kind of certainty.
Speaker 4: Once that car gets going, I know that I can
Speaker 4: do it because I've started from a place that's mine.
Speaker 2: It seems to me that women's voices are the ones
Speaker 2: that you are perhaps most comfortable writing in or perhaps
Speaker 2: most adept at bringing to life. And I wonder whether
Speaker 2: that's something that you're conscious of or deliberate about, or
Speaker 2: whether that's just how your rightly voice has evolved.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm definitely kind of it, because you don't want
Speaker 4: to mess it up. I mean, you don't want to
Speaker 4: be someone that's just utilizing this voice that's not yours
Speaker 4: and it you know, not resonating with anyone or not
Speaker 4: feeling believable.
Speaker 3: And I'll say it's like a couple of things.
Speaker 4: Like one was just like a lot of the characters
Speaker 4: that I loved from books were so like really the
Speaker 4: three were merracat Blackwood and we have always lived in
Speaker 4: the Castle, and then Mattie Ross and True Grit, which
Speaker 4: you know, so much of this book is just True Grit.
Speaker 4: It's just a book I love, and that voice I love.
Speaker 4: And then Frankie in a member of the Wedding by
Speaker 4: Carson mccullors. Those were all female characters that just resonated
Speaker 4: so much with me, and early on in my career,
Speaker 4: I think I gravitated towards women's voices because it gave
Speaker 4: me this slight bit of distance that you couldn't immediately
Speaker 4: construct autobiography from what I was doing. It gave me
Speaker 4: plausible tony ability, and I like that. I wanted to
Speaker 4: write from a place that it wasn't exactly me, and
Speaker 4: then as I did that, I think what I found
Speaker 4: was just the way that the world is for me.
Speaker 4: There is a deep comfort in writing in the voice
Speaker 4: of female characters, like it is a lovely thing in
Speaker 4: my imaginary world to be able to inhabit that space
Speaker 4: and feel like safe and comfortable and try to get
Speaker 4: it right.
Speaker 2: I wondered about it and run for the hills because
Speaker 2: part of Mad's voice and worldview, she's got a very
Speaker 2: kind of earthy impatience with a particular kind of nonsense
Speaker 2: that she doesn't personally have time. And part of that
Speaker 2: is the nonsense of one's parents and the relationship you
Speaker 2: have to, particularly a failed or absent parent. But it
Speaker 2: struck me that much of Charles's behavior comes back to
Speaker 2: patterns and loops and intrusive thoughts and inability to break
Speaker 2: the cycle. And he's being held to account in this
Speaker 2: book for that stuff, all of which are qualities. Not
Speaker 2: to project the autobiographic along to you, but I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm interested. This is a rebuttal of a particular kind
Speaker 2: of looped thinking that you perhaps possess. I'm curious about that.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I love that.
Speaker 4: That's just such an adept and lovely reading of it,
Speaker 4: and I think there's something to that. I think what
Speaker 4: I'm also trying to figure out is like, Okay, you
Speaker 4: have these obsessions, you have these loops, and those exist
Speaker 4: in this thing that's inside of you. It's not the
Speaker 4: real world, right, And I think one of the things
Speaker 4: I'm trying to figure out is how do you take
Speaker 4: those things and not let them ruin you? And one
Speaker 4: of the ways you don't let it ruin you? And
Speaker 4: what Charles just can't figure out is the way that
Speaker 4: you don't let it ruin you is that you anchor
Speaker 4: it to the ground. You anchor it to what is
Speaker 4: underneath you and the people around you. And for me,
Speaker 4: what I'm trying to figure out is I have a
Speaker 4: life that I love. I have these kids that are incredible,
Speaker 4: I have a wife who means the world to me,
Speaker 4: and yet I also have all of this strangeness constantly
Speaker 4: swirling around my head. And one of the impulses is
Speaker 4: just let that spin and go wherever you need to go.
Speaker 4: And what I'm trying to teach myself in these stories
Speaker 4: is that's one way. But the other way is to
Speaker 4: loop it back into the space that you already live
Speaker 4: in and then find all these magic and mystical and
Speaker 4: weird ways. If you just stay planted, it will resonate
Speaker 4: over and over and it will change.
Speaker 2: I think it does, and I think it's an act
Speaker 2: of such supreme generosity and an extraordinary set of creative gifts.
Speaker 2: And I'm so grateful that you anchor it in these
Speaker 2: books and share it with us the way you. Thank
Speaker 2: you for joining us, Kevin Wilson.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Kevin Wilson's latest novel, Run for the Hills, is available
Speaker 2: everywhere now.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another special episode. I've
Speaker 1: read this as always, if you want to dive further
Speaker 1: into the show, you can search for it wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. There are more than eighty episodes in
Speaker 1: the Read this archive for you to enjoy. See you
Speaker 1: next week.