Interviewed by David Rodriguez
Wells Tower is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, his first collection of short stories, which was published in 2009. He is also the author of many nonfiction articles. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Washington Post, Outside, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from Columbia University and is the recipient of The Paris Review Discovery Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Henfield Foundation award. He lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and owns a house in North Carolina. An animated short of the title story of his collection can be seen on YouTube.
Q: The structure of the book works really well, but I read that after you signed the book deal, you radically revised many of the stories. Is the story order something that stayed constant through that process? Or was that in flux for a while?
A: That was very much in flux. But my editor and I decided that “The Brown Coast” was an easy way to get in, and we also felt the closing paragraph of the title story would make a nice exit ramp for the book. It seemed to resonate with some of the themes in the stories. I think most of the stories are really about people looking for some safety and comfort and home. But that wish is always contested and in trouble. And another concern was breaking up the stories in the woods. We didn’t want too much woodland stuff going on.
Q: Regarding the stories in particular, one thing I enjoyed was how the characters' jobs seem to be further expressions of what they desire. We've got an inventor whose father suffers from memory loss, a real estate developer who's looking for some common ground with his brother. How have your own jobs influenced your fiction?
A: I guess the most obvious example is the carnival story, and that came from the first significant magazine article I wrote. I actually got a job as a carnival worker. And with that I had a surfeit of detail and stuff that couldn’t make it into the nonfiction piece, so I saved that for fiction. I also often return to carpentry, which is Bob’s job in “The Brown Coast.” I think I have a sentimental attitude about carpentry and working with your hands. I mean, I’m a pretty crappy carpenter. But I love doing that because it’s so different from writing. If you’re building bad furniture, every hour where you’re working brings you closer to completion, which cannot be said of writing. With writing, you can spend months and months writing drafts, then wind up throwing away a lot of it, and it’s very rare to have a moment as a writer where you can push back from your desk and let out a satisfied sigh. It never really feels like enough. And so for me carpentry is a satisfying counterpoint to the meandering progress that we make as writers.
Q: In another interview you said that you thought "Leopard" would have been tarred and feathered in graduate workshops for being too sentimental. What do you think are the pros and cons of going through workshops in graduate school as a young writer?
A: I got quite a bit out of Columbia where I did my MFA. I had a great mentor in Ben Marcus, who was a fantastic teacher, and I think it really smartened up my writing. Before I got to Columbia, I was doing some fancy tricks and easy humor, and I hadn’t been doing a lot of fiction writing. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a fiction writer or nonfiction writer. So one of the big things graduate school taught me was what the life of a fiction writer was going to be like. It’s a pretty rocky transition to go from thinking about writing as a career to actually doing it, where you’re having to hand in pieces of writing on a regular basis, and spending a big chunk of every single day at a computer, tearing your hair out and worrying about how terrible your fiction is. I think graduate school taught me to get comfortable with the solitude of the life and the doggedness that it requires. And also there’s a psychological transformation when you become a writer, where you start looking at the rest of humanity in a strange way.
I remember when I first started I got in a funny psychosis where I believed I was no longer capable of having an emotion, because every time I had one, I took out my mental notepad and was writing down what it was like to be hurt or happy. And on the craft side, I learned a few things. But it has its downside, too. After a couple years in an MFA program, you get good at armor-plating your stories and figuring out how to write stories that no one can poke a hole in. And your writing can become really disingenuous. I think there was a big-heartedness and sincerity in my early stories that got away from me, and once I got into graduate school I tried to write more clever things, and I think cleverness is something we’ve all got to be on-guard against. I think if you ask yourself what you want a reader to take away from your story, and your answer is that you want the reader to believe you’re a good writer and a smart person, then that probably means that you’re not engaged on the level of the story, that you’re showing off. And most of us probably lapse into showing off periods. Once you realize you’ve got a few chops, it’s tempting to only do that. But it’s difficult to write good fiction when you’re just trying to show people how smart you are.
Q: You've talked about the internet before in interviews, and I know you try to avoid it when you're writing fiction. But do you feel like it gives the writer any advantages? Or could you pinpoint what you think the disadvantages are?
A: I view it as the most seductive time vampire. I would really like to design a living space for myself where I can get away from the internet for days at a time. But, certainly, there are advantages, too. It’s a great research tool and can add vitality to your stories. With “Retreat,” I had a friend asking me if I had any photographs from the moose hunt I had been on. But those scenes were detailed from internet research. I just googled how to field-dress a moose and cribbed details from there. So it’s great for that. But I think you really have to keep it at bay.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a novel. Doing a little bit of magazine work, but really spending time with the novel. And I’m teaching this fall at Columbia in the undergraduate program, which has been a lot of fun.
And now for the short answer questions. To change things up, the following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence:
Q: What’s inspiring you now? Do you have any fiction recommendations? Or music recommendations? Movies?
A: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte – One of the most hilarious and perfectly executed books that I’ve read in recent years.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
Where the Wild Things Are – a resoundingly smart and beautiful film.
Let the Right One In – An amazing movie about a teenage vampire.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: I think that’s why I thought Where the Wild Things Are was such a moving film. I identified with Max. I was a pretty intense kid. I threw a lot of tantrums. I told a lot of stories. I was a pretty imaginative kid, easily given to attacks of outsized emotion.
Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: I didn’t really have that long period that a lot of writers have, where you’re getting back stacks of rejections. The first two stories I wrote I sent to The Paris Review slush pile and they picked them up. The odds of that are pretty long, so that was great. But I really don’t let rejection get to me. I tend to be so aware of the flaws in my work that when an editor says, “We don’t want to publish this,” I respond, “Well, of course. It’s got all of these problems.” But rejection can be a good thing, pushing you to work harder. If you got to a point where people were hurrying everything you wrote to print, you could quickly lose touch of the rigor and hard work that this job requires.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: It may be too early to talk about that because I’m still in the brush-clearing stage. But maybe it was how much I could let myself meander, as opposed to short fiction. With the short story you have try hard to shrink everything into the space you’re writing into. To make sure not too much happens. So it’s been liberating in the novel to be able to ping-pong around in time and to write scenes that may not be germane to the central emotional scope of the novel. It’s been fun just letting myself go for it.
Q: What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A: It’s much more of an unwriterly habit—spending too much time looking at blogs and nonsense, compulsively checking email. I think ten minutes online every day would be perfect. But of course it’s much more than that.
Q: And lastly, what did you have for lunch today?
A: Oh, I haven’t had lunch today. But I think I’ll have red beans and rice.
