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