I did not know that Coalfield was a real place until I was in 2D. For me, Coalfield is this constantly shifting magical world that can expand and retract, and sometimes there's a mountain, sometimes there's not.
And every single character in my novels, at least one character lives or is from Coalfield. And yeah, I think there's overlap, but sometimes there isn't. This drives my... publisher a little crazy like my copy editor always for every book is like now coalfield is a real place and i'm like yes and he says but it's not where you say it is it's in east tennessee and you have it in middle tennessee and i'm like yes
It's different. And he's like, this is killing me. What are we doing? Why are we doing this? And I was like, don't worry about it. Like, let's just Coalfield, Tennessee is not Coalfield, Tennessee. It's mine. Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogle, and this is What Should I Read Next? Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next?
We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next week. Readers, sometimes saying no is a good thing. When I know a book isn't for me, I'm not afraid to say no to finishing it. And when it comes to overpriced wireless bills, I also love saying no.
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Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gig on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Over the past... almost 500 episodes. We've talked all things books and reading and done lots of literary matchmaking. And today we are bringing you a different type of book talk from a favorite author and joining me for that book talk about book talk.
is a special guest, our Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club Community Manager, Ginger Horton. Hi, Ginger. Welcome to the show. Hello. Oh, I am so glad to be here for any reason, but especially for this reason. Well, we are entering what's going to be a very long anniversary birthday commemoration season for What Should I Read Next and Modern Mrs. Darcy and really everything in our ecosystem. Next week is our 500th episode of
What Should I Read Next?, which premiered January 12th, 2016 as a weekly show. We're about to celebrate our 10-year mark in the book club. Our 15th summer reading guide is coming out next summer. I mean, we have got, I'm Googling the traditional gifts. for all kinds of things in all kinds of years. That is our mindset at our team meetings these days. So something we wanted to do as we look to commemorate our 500th is...
kind of highlight some of the things in our world. You know, I'm saying that like we're going to be doing a lot. This week, we're talking book club. We're focusing more on Patreon next week and just what we've been doing here for 10 years. Regular listeners and our regular readers know that every so often we love to pull back the curtain and share a peek at what happens around here.
how we make the show, what happens in Patreon. And today we're sharing such a peek at our Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club community with everybody. What we do in that space is celebrate. the love of reading. And we really equip readers to become really great readers and to have so much fun doing it.
I think about book club as starting and ending with authors because authors are the people who enable us to do what we do. And it started with authors. You know, we chose a book and would talk about it all month long. And then when we can make it happen, chat with an author. I still think of that as the core of what we do in book club. And we know from surveys, especially our very recent member survey.
Oh, this is y'all's favorite thing. You love to hear from authors. You love to talk with authors. We've had some good ones this year. I think about Nikki May just last month and Paige Harbison earlier this summer. The one you're going to hear today. This is the core of what we do. And we've got... other fun ones coming. When this airs, we are going to be talking in just a couple of days after with Virginia Evans, the correspondent author. And that is my favorite book still to this day.
that I have read so far this year. And I've heard from a lot of you all that you love that one too. So when I think book club, I think authors and writers. Talking with authors isn't the only thing we do. We have ongoing classes like Greek mythology for readers. We are doing a How to Set Your Reading Intentions class in November, so really helping people explore how to plan that reading year for 2026.
but we're going to do that before the year begins. So you've got about six weeks to plan. What is it you want to intend for your reading life? These are the important questions we ask. I'm doing something nerdy in collaboration with you on Burnham Wood and Shakespeare and what that means for your best reading experience.
Team Best Books of the Year is coming up. Oh gosh, it feels right around the corner now. That's one of our favorite things. And of course, book club readers get our summer reading guide and our fall book preview and all that good stuff. Hosting authors and reading great books is a regular thing we do, and we pick them with discoverability and discussability in mind.
So back in June of this year, we read a summer reading guide pick Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson as our monthly selection. And Ginger, you and I have wanted to host Kevin Wilson for...
years. So long. And today what we're going to do is let y'all listen in on that conversation. Some of you all have already heard it if you are book club members, but most of you have not. And we thought there's no better way to give you an idea of what happens in book club, even though you won't be participating in the chat. but then to listen to one of our authors and the kinds of conversations we have in that community.
with our authors. So we were so excited to talk about his new book and we knew he was going to be wonderful. That's one of the reasons we wanted to host him. There was so much to talk about in... Run for the Hills, but our conversation, as it always does, hit the topics we knew we wanted to talk about, but also topics we didn't know.
we might be hitting, like what it means to fit in and weirdness and storytelling and Flannery O'Connor and that PT cruiser. So we always tell our readers, you can read the book in advance if you want to. You certainly don't have to. You may get it.
more out of the book if you read it after. And we know some people don't read the book at all. This is what they can do. And that's great. But come as you can. Come as you are. You're not on video. You get to participate however you want, whenever you want, because we record everything.
They're always, yeah, I can't think of a single exception in 10 years, always wonderful conversations. And today we're sharing it with all of you. But Ginger and I wanted to give you some idea of what you are going to be listening to. And as you listen, whether you've read Kevin Wilson or not, I think you'll enjoy this opportunity to hear an author talk about their work and their process in a really interesting way. We had so many people say, oh my gosh, like, could he not stop?
Can we just like hang out for another hour or two? I'd love to hear more. Okay. So Ginger, you and I have been talking Kevin Wilson for years. Would you say more about your readerly relationship with this author? One of my friends years and years ago, pre-modern Mrs. Darcy Day, so I was a reader of the blog, but I wasn't on the team yet, had texted me and said, you've got to read this author.
He is a professor at the college she went to, University of the South. And I just feel like you're going to love him. I will always take my friend Nicole's book recommendations. But you know, this was back in the day where my TBR list was a lot shorter. And so I immediately picked it up, which is not always the case these days. But I immediately picked up this great book called The Family Fang.
And that has been, sometimes the first book you pick up from an author is your favorite for years and years and years. That has been the paragon of Kevin Wilson to me ever since. This is this delightful. quirky novel. I love a novel about family and there's art involved. It is so much fun. And so I always think about that intertwined with that summer, my friend Nicole. But since then, I had read some of his as the years had gone by.
but I had not read everything that he had written. And so I picked up Run for the Hills, loved it so much and thought, wait, why am I not a completist? And so to kind of complete that summer. I decided I would declare Kevin Wilson Hour this summer. And I would often sit with the audio book and like my computer game of solitaire or just nothing. And I would just listen to Kevin Wilson. I think, listen, these are big words because Run for the Hills was also delightful, but I think.
One that I hadn't read, Now Is Not The Time To Panic, sort of jumped up in my favorite Kevin Wilson of all time. But The Family Fang is delightful. Now is not the time to panic is delightful. Run for the Hills is delightful. And I think that's because he writes so well about family. And he talks about this in this chat. And you guys are going to get to hear about that. Found family, yes. But what happens if found family are really related?
He told this story that I found so charming about how Flannery O'Connor had said, you've either got two topics, you can write about money, you can write about family. And these are his words. If I remember correctly, I don't have any money, but I have a family. And so that's how he chose to write about that.
This is one of those authors that not only just really speaks to who I am as a reader, I know I've heard from a few of you that are book twins, but also even if you've never read a word of his, hearing him talk about how he writes and how he decides what to write about will inform whatever it is that you read. Because I don't give that a lot of attention in my reading life. I think about what I'm reading, but I don't always think about, like we mentioned, the authors are the core of this.
How are they writing what we're reading? What's making them decide to go there? What goes into that? And so I just really enjoyed that part of the conversation. And I really enjoyed his responses to the questions we asked him about reading short stories and teaching undergraduates and Pop-Tarts and barbecue and travel and Coalfield. Yeah, I really enjoyed it all. So Kevin Wilson is coming up in a moment, but first we have to tell you. So we always tell our book club authors.
We need you to know a little bit about our community before you show up. Some authors will say, oh, nobody wants to hear about my process. Like, that's not very flashy. Nobody wants to see my storyboard. Nobody wants to hear about my pens. So we tell them in advance, our readers are really nerdy.
We say that with great affection, but we would love to hear all the details. So we told Kevin Wilson, look, we describe our book club as delightfully nerdy. We're here for whatever. He wrote us back with... such fun, delightful nerdiness and said, oh, that's perfect because I'm awkwardly weird. And again, his words, I would never have called him that because he was...
Charming and delightful. But we say delightfully nerdy as a compliment around here. And I think that you all will hear his awkwardly weird in the exact same way. Delightfully nerdy plus awkwardly weird. And then in our chat, he talked about how weirdness was his way. into a story. It's fascinating. Oh, I love it. Kevin Wilson, thanks again for coming. We enjoyed this so much. Okay, let's tell everybody what's happening in book club, past, present, and future.
Yes, exactly. That's too much to choose from. What do you want to cherry pick real quick? We can hit it quickly. Just a few of the highlights. So like I mentioned, we have had a banner summer with Alison King, Paige Harbison. I mentioned Nikki May joined us in September to talk about her.
Mansfield Park retelling we have had a great year lineup of authors we've also had some classes this year we just had a close look at great books and that we were exploring the classics and what makes a book great what makes it go into the canon of great literature.
So those are kind of some of our most recently passed classes. We've also got fun stuff coming up. Like we are getting delightfully nerdy this fall. We are having study hall all fall long and that has been so much fun. We're also doing something by...
By the time this airs, you all in book club will have heard about this, although we're not announcing it till tonight in real time. So we're going to have a join us for journaling winter. And that means we're going to have gentle guidance and ideas for a practice of book journaling, but also just an excuse to come and do some appointments.
reading or appointment journaling, executive functioning, just some space to do that. We have also got those upcoming authors like Virginia Evans, others in the works and how to plan your reading year class that Anne mentioned. And then our new tradition, though this still feels new and fresh, although this is our third year doing a book club yearbook.
This is always a really fun look back at the books that we've read. We include worksheets from classes that we've had and other topics we've explored. We'll have journaling prompts for you. We usually toss in a fun list or a game in there for you. So I cannot wait for our look.
back at 2025. And yeah, as we look ahead to our 10 year anniversary, I can't believe it. I want to say a little more about that yearbook. So the first year was digital. Last year, we did a print version and we gave members the option to sign up, opt in for shipping. And we mailed that to them to their home snail mail as a gift. And this printed booklet is 20 pages between fall book preview and summer reading guide lengthwise. And it's just a fun look back in one place.
where you can visually see all our memories and tons of reading ideas, ideas of books that you hopefully read and loved, but also could read in the future, and all kinds of topics we explored together. So that is a member perk. If you would like to sign up to become a book club member, that is one of the many perks you will receive. And it's really pretty. It just looks so nice on my desk. It is so pretty. It is so pretty. You and Bren did a great job putting that together.
All right, without further ado, I think it's time to hand it over metaphorically to Kevin Wilson. I mean, you're going to hear Ginger and I in just a moment because it's often the two of us moderating live events. Sometimes you'll hear Shannon and Bridget as well, but we love to host our authors and have a good time together. All right. Happy listening, everybody. Let's get to it.
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We're really excited to jump in to run for the hills. We've been talking about it. I was telling Kevin all month long and y'all have questions. We're going to start with your questions and comments and then we will. transition over to the live Q&A. Oh my gosh, that reminds me. Kevin, what did our email thread say? I think...
We told you, as we often do, that our book clubbers are delightfully nerdy. If you think, oh, people don't want to hear the granularities about what writing software I use and what kind of pens I prefer, do they? We always say, yes, please, please.
to hear the nerdy details. And then you said something about your characters being described as what endearingly awkward or something. So we've been joking about like delightfully nerdy meets endearingly awkward, which just basically sounds like my literary dream come true. Yeah, I think I'm trying to remember what the second one was. It was delightfully nerdy and like wonderfully weird or awkwardly weird. Yeah. Ginger, Ginger, can you look that? Oh, awkwardly weird.
That is apparently our happy place. So I'm going to start by putting you on the spot. I'm so sorry. But what would you say you'd like to write? Like if we met in an airport. And you weren't hiding from strangers and I wasn't hiding from strangers, which would definitely be my MO. And I said, oh, you're right. What do you write? What would you say? Usually I just say I teach and then I don't have to talk about anything with writing. And that gets me off.
But if I say what I write, I usually just say I write fiction about families. And then I can kind of feel out the person for just how weird those families are and how I can reveal that. A lot of times I just write family fiction, you know, of what it is to be made by somebody and what it means to make somebody. And generally that gets me through the 10 minutes I need and then they move on.
Okay. I want to talk about what draws you to family fiction in a moment and what kind of family fiction you love, because that is my jam. It's my favorite thing. But would you tell us what you are focused on teaching right now? I teach at a... really small school on this mountain in Tennessee called the University of the South. It's like 1600 students. And I teach through creative writing classes. And I've been doing that since 2005.
And I love it. And I love it partly because I just like being around. Students, I like being able to share the work. I mean, you surround yourself with people who love books and love to read. And it's just such a kind of wonderful world to be in.
But there are times in the real world where I'm like, is anybody reading? You can feel a little despondent about the state of things. And so teaching and being with these young kids who are all coming with all of these books that I possibly haven't read.
that make them so excited. And then figuring out how to help them develop their own voice and tell the stories that they want to tell is kind of lovely. It doesn't keep me young. It may actually be aging me a little bit because of the stress of teaching. But it does make me feel like I'm connected to the world in a way that for someone who's shy like me, it's nice to still feel like I'm a part of it.
Yes. Great advice I received from one introvert to another a long time ago is you just got to find the thing you're both into that you'll, yeah. And so I think around here, that's often books and reading. I trust you to be able to answer this question in a way that like isn't breaking any privacy laws, but I'd love to hear like an insightful moment from the classroom this year or a book you found and read together or something you learned.
a student or not from a student I don't know a colleague would you give us a little window into your teaching world yeah so for the first time ever I taught a class a forms course just on the novel because Oftentimes I'll teach short stories like that's our beginning workshop because, you know, six to 15 pages, that's a good way to figure out what you're doing. But so many of my students read novels and they wanted to write novels. And I said, well, that's.
we can't write a 350-page novel in the class, or I don't want to read all of those novels necessarily in a semester. But what was really lovely was we read five very different books. And we only read the first 80 pages. And they had to finish the books later. But we only talked about the first 80. And it was really fun to say, like, what's happening in these first 80 pages? What's getting set up?
How many characters? How long are the chapters? And it was really fun to see stuff that maybe I wouldn't have thought about otherwise. And we read like Hunger Games. We read Ann Patchett's new book, Tom Lake. And so we got to read all these different genres and to see the way the students could then start to see, oh, this is what this book is doing. This is what it's telling me was really fun. And it got them really interested in how they're going to write their own novel.
Oh, okay. I don't want to reveal myself as a good girl who follows all the rules all the time, but I don't know what would have occurred to me to just like read the first 80 pages, but that's such a cool idea. Well, yeah, we talked about the first 80 in the most specific way. You did say talk about, yeah. And then when we finished, when I made them finish it, then they had to talk about, well, what happened in the 80 pages that then allowed the rest of the book to kind of...
finish in the way that it did. And I think the students also liked it because they're so overwhelmed with classwork. They were like 80 pages, I can do that. And so it was a nice way in. Okay, now I'm picturing everybody's table of contents in my head and thinking about what you learn from a... I'm thinking about how you set up a story and how readers don't necessarily...
Think about that in the same way. Okay. I'm going to let my brain do some processing on that while we talk about family fiction. I love a good juicy family saga. I am so fascinated with how either parents can mold us or give us something to push back against. And it's not just parents, it's other formative people, the whole complex web of relationships.
the absence of some people that are louder than, you know, in some families. I mean, I love relationships in fiction. I don't write family fiction. I would love to hear. One, what you love about family fiction. If there are things you hate about it, please tell us that too. And how you knew. that this was the, you know, feel free to riff on this however you want, but how you knew that this is where like your style, your interests, where they belong in the literary sphere.
When I say family fiction, a lot of times just, you know, I'm really talking about like the relationships that we hold on to in order to survive, but also the relationships that made us the person that we are. How can you not, you know. How can you not like find something to say in that world? And Flannery O'Connor said, you know, all stories are either about money or family. And I was like, well, I don't really know what it's like to have money, but I know what it's like to have a family.
I'm going to go with family. And I just can't stop thinking about all the different ways in which the people that made us and shaped us, that weird moment where you realize, okay, now I've got all this stuff. I've got to break it apart and reassemble it to become the person that I want to be. And then you find these other people in the world, and then you figure out how to fit your life into theirs.
And that was always really interesting to me. And then we had kids and I was like, oh, God, I've made people. And now what does it mean to make somebody? And now, oh, God, they're going to break up everything that I did. And reassert it in their own way. And I was like, oh, this will never stop. Then my kids will have kids and I'll be thinking about that. So I was like, it's hard not to want to write about that. Okay, so to bring that specifically to Run for the Hills.
What was the origin of this story? I mean, maybe this is a broader question, but I'm wondering how your stories take shape. A reader asked, I think in, was it chat here? Oh, okay. I'm going to try to paraphrase you that you've written quite a few books that are very. high concept. Okay. Not in like the space invader sense, but high concept, very specific that feel like, Oh, I'm reading a Kevin Wilson novel and yet are so unique.
So I'm curious about Run for the Hill specifically and or where your story ideas come from in general. One of the things I knew was, oh, I'm always writing about either found family or biological family. And eventually I just thought, what if those were the same thing? What if...
This family suddenly appeared to you and you never knew for all these years that there were these threads that had connected you. You just never knew that they were there. You never felt the vibrations along those lines. And I thought, oh, that would be fun. I can write about. these two things that I love, but together. And I think the inspiration in some ways was that my mom grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, but her dad, my grandmother's from Japan and married a sailor from America.
They had three kids and they moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and he left her. And my grandmother didn't speak English. My mom lived in pretty bad poverty. And he went on and had another family in Texas. And then left that family and started another family. And one of the things my mom had said was how that difficulty of being kind of angry at these children who now had her dad. But once he left them.
It was like, well, now we're kind of connected in this way. And then the last thing was my wife is adopted and has never really been interested in finding her biological parents. She's just not curious in that way. likes what she has and but she did want to know like what her ancestry was and so she did like a DNA test and she was hoping she was like some exotic like Swedish or something she was she was 99.9 percent
British and she was pretty bummed. But she then got, she was like, I'm getting all these emails now, like notifying me of matches and I don't really care. And I said, well, I'll get on and I'll just look for you and answer stuff. I got all these emails that said like, hey, it says we're cousins. How? And I'd say, I don't know. I was adopted. Do you have any sense of how we're connected? And every single person that ever inquired never wrote back.
And I think it's because they were in real time realizing that someone that they loved. Had had a kid and gave it up for adoption and never told anyone. And so all of these kind of stories started to percolate in my mind. And I just thought, oh, I'm going to write about this kind of weird notion of being a family, but not.
quite a family and then how do you make those pieces fit that could have gone so many different directions tonally tonally it could have gone so many different directions and yet being in your hands I just noticed how so many of these issues are so fraught and so tender. I feel such love and warmth for your characters who are discovering just gutting and heartwarming things about themselves and about their family and about the world.
But also I'm giggling all the way through. Would you talk to us about, I doubt you think of it as a balance, but maybe I'm wrong, about the coexistence of the heavy and the light here. I think when I first started, I mean, I was just like... dirtbag kid from the middle of nowhere and I just was like I don't know how it felt so weird to even think about writing for a career and I always felt like oh I just don't have the ability or the worldliness to write like
big, serious novels, you know? And I just knew my way into stories is weirdness, silliness, slightness. And I just thought, if I can start light... then I can get the audience with me and they'll trust me and we can build up this kind of relationship so that when I turn it down and get darker or the subject matter gets heavier, we've built up a kind of trust with each other that...
They know that I can get it back to silliness or lightness if I need it. And hopefully then we can go together through that story. But I can't start heavy. For whatever reason, I need that weirdness at the beginning to convince myself I can do it. But also to convince the reader, hey, I'll get us there if you come with me and it will get heavy, but I can get us back where we need to go. Yeah.
We have a process question almost from a Zoom member who's not logged in, but I see you. Okay. She says, especially after the conversation we just had about reading the first 80 pages of five books with your students. She's curious about when you wrote the prologue. She says,
I read the prologue again after reading the full novel. I felt like it was an overview of the entire story. It had so many layers and the themes of the full story in it. Kevin, did you write it first or did you come back after the full story was done and add in such a simple yet all.
encompassing prologue i love when an author does this like when i when i didn't realize like oh that's everything right there because it doesn't make sense when you haven't met anybody yet that's such a perceptive question i'm really impressed with that person and one of the things i'll say is like
I just I started the book with the PT Cruiser showing up at the farm. We're going to talk about the PT Cruiser next week. How can you not? But I started it there. But as I got going, my editor at the time was like. This dad is just a ghost through the novel, you know what I mean? And we'll get these little moments, but what do you think it would be like if we started on the farm with Mad?
And her dad is a tangible, real human being before he disappears from the story until the end. And I said, oh, yeah, that would be great. And I was interested in like, I'm interested in farming. And I was like, I think I have a scene where we can see them have to do this process that like, takes a lot of time.
may not be rewarding, which is all farming, may not be rewarding, but if it is, it's really sweet. And I wrote it in as I was moving. So yeah, it was kind of figuring out the story and going back. So that's awesome. I love that. Sweet and bitter is best. Tell us about the PT Cruiser. Oh man, like so many of my stories. I have such a fact. I'm going to think differently about them on the road now. I thought I might buy one as a goof, but they're still too expensive.
Uh, I can't, I'm not going to buy a PT cruiser at the goof. Maybe we can send you a poster, but I, I, I always write almost every book I've written is set in Tennessee. It's just where I know I'm anchored to. It's where I grew up and where I still live. And I knew this book because it was a road trip. I was like, oh man, unless they all live like just a little further down the street from each other, my characters are going to have to go on a trip.
And I was really worried. I was like, I don't know how to make my character. I like to keep my characters in the same place, like to never leave the house even. And I thought they're going to have to. And I got worried and I was like. Oh, but if I have the car, it'll be the fixed place. And every time they get in, it'll be a new person. So there's less space and I can do what I want.
And I was like, what's the ugliest, weirdest car I can think of? And it's a PT Cruiser. No offense to anyone that has one. I drove one as a rental once back in like 2002. And I was like, this is the weirdest car I've ever been in. And I just thought.
Oh, man, it would be so lovely to write a novel where the PT Cruiser is the focal point of the story. That's so interesting that the PT Cruiser, to a large extent, was the setting. I didn't clock that. Can we talk about some other... places in detailed settings.
Well, first of all, Tennessee. So we had some commentary about the Wilson Cinematic Universe. Tetra said, when I noticed that Mad came from Coalfield, Tennessee, I instantly wondered if her or her mom experienced the Coalfield Manic Panic of 1996. by Frankie and Zeke, also in Caulfield. From now is not the time to panic if y'all haven't read that one yet.
Mad could have been from anywhere, is what Tetra wrote. Is there some special significance to Kevin Wilson about Coalfield, Tennessee, or was it just a funny coincidence? Just like, and... Like y'all have the best readers, like just so lovely and insightful. And I will say this, just that when I was in college, I read Ann Patchett's book Taft.
And there is one character in Taft who is from a town called Coalfield, Tennessee. I love the sound of it. And I love Ann's work. And I thought I was in college. I was just writing short stories in a workshop. like the classes i teach now and i just started setting all my stories in a place called coalfield and you don't think it's not like you ever like you know 20 years from now people will read these books and wonder about coalfield i was just
using it. And it was really just a stand-in for where I grew up, Winchester, Tennessee. I did not know that Coalfield was a real place until I was in 2D. And for me, Caulfield is this constantly shifting magical world that can expand and retract. And sometimes there's a mountain, sometimes there's not.
And every single character in my novels, at least one character lives or is from Coalfield. And yeah, I think there's overlap, but sometimes there isn't. This drives my... publisher a little crazy like my copy editor always for every book is like now coalfield is a real place and i'm like yes and he says but it's not where you say it is it's in east tennessee and you have it in middle tennessee and i'm like yes
It's different. And he's like, this is killing me. What are we doing? Why are we doing this? And I was like, don't worry about it. Like, let's just Coalfield, Tennessee is not Coalfield, Tennessee. It's mine. And I just part of it is just I've lived almost my entire life in the same county. I feel anchored to this place. I am made by this place. And when I write stories, I'm so focused on character, on weird conceits, on getting my characters safely to where they need to go.
It's often just I feel like I know this place well enough that if I can render that on the page, it gives me more time to worry about. the stuff I'm less sure of, which is character motivation, where they're going to go, all that stuff. And so just by accident, Cullfield is just the world I've made. Someday there'll be a, you know... I'm imagining, obviously, that I'll have a Kevin Wilson theme park and it'll be Caulfield for each little book. You can see the version of it. I mean.
I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. It's not super common, but there's like 12 Louisvilles in the U.S. There can be a lot of coalfields. Becky said, speaking of now is not the time to panic. There was a mention of a book about, I think she means in now is not the time of panic. You have somebody hop in, I think a silver Porsche and go kidnap a half sister. She's curious if you already had.
run for the hills in mind, or is that just the kind of caper that you might encounter that runs through your brain that you pop into your books? It's just the main character, and now's not the time to panic, because she writes YA novels about an evil Nancy Drew character. And in the book, it's just a very small plot point, but it says I wrote one book for adults, and it's about a woman who goes and picks up all of her half-sisters. We all have the same name, and we're going to our dad's funeral.
And in the novel, it's critically hated and doesn't sell any copies. And it's just the way my brain works. I was like. Oh, I kind of like that. I think maybe I want it back. And I do this a lot. Family Fang has children bursting into flames in a movie. And I thought, oh, I'd like to have that back. The line from now is not the time to panic had appeared in another book. It's just I have a kind of repetitious brain. Like I loop all the time and I'm just often like it's kind of fun to go back.
pull it out, see what you can do with it. So yeah, it was writing the last novel that started to get me to think about that car and the road trip, yeah. Perhaps along those lines, Elise asked... She wants to know if you've written the alternate version of Run for the Hills in your head, where Rube does in fact, like he said, he thought about doing, gathering up all his siblings on a journey to find and then murder their dad, as was his original semi-serious question mark.
Elise says it would be fun to see this book as a thriller. Maybe just fun for me, lol. It's so, you know, every character, all the siblings in this book are kind of doing things that I kind of... fantasize like in a in a different world maybe i could have been this and i know i'm a writer but um i love mysteries and i
It's often fantasized that like my dream would be to write a detective novel every year with the same detective. And I just can't. I'm not good. So, yeah, maybe I should try to write the rude. version of this novel as a mystery. Lots of questions from readers who connected to...
Things you dropped into the book, wondering about your experience, why it was important to have in the story. Rachel says, I attended Southeast Missouri State University and was thrilled to see that Pep was playing them in the postseason tournament. Why Southeast Missouri State? We also have a lot of people wanting to know.
you a women's college basketball fan? Because they really enjoyed the presence in this book. I don't know that there's ever been a more advantageous time to have women's basketball in your book, you know, at the right time. But yeah, I love, I love. I love basketball and I really love women's basketball. And I, I don't think this is like, this goes back to when I was a kid and it wasn't like I was a nine-year-old kid.
wanting to be virtuous and be like, hey, I should watch women's sports. That's important. I just lived in Tennessee and the UT Lady Vols were just the greatest team I'd ever seen. And I love them. And I love those players and Pat Summitt. And I just grew up in love with all of those teams. And because of the luckiness of where I grew up in that team, it made me really love and appreciate women's basketball.
And I just kept following it. And when the lady vols got kind of bad, I was like, well, maybe I should go watch the WNBA so I can at least see like Candace Parker, you know, and I got into the WNBA. It's just. In some ways, it's another one of those things where it's like I was shaped by the place I lived, you know, and who knows what would have happened otherwise. And I just really wanted basketball in this book.
And I knew that the characters had to move west. So I just started thinking about good basketball schools in that time period. It's Oklahoma. And I just started doing research. and saw who they played in the first round of the 2007 NCAA tournament. And I was like, let's just go with it. Sent me down this weird rabbit hole of looking at South East Missouri State or whatever and like reading about all the players. It was lovely. Very little of it went into the book, but it was fun to think about.
Okay, Stephanie says, same question, but about Austin and University of Texas. The setting was so detailed, even down to the order at Dan's Hamburgers, which I didn't know was real. Like, until I read Stephanie's comment, she'd love to know more.
I've lived almost my entire life in Tennessee. And the only time I've lived somewhere not in the South, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for two years. I worked in the gender studies program at Harvard right after college. And this just speaks to my laziness. I was like... Mad's from Tennessee. And I was like, they have to, Rube has to come from somewhere. And I was like, what's the one place I know that's not, you know, the South? And I was like, Boston.
And then I just started moving west and I was like, I just got to think of places I've been to before. And Austin, I have a really one of our best friends teaches at Texas State. We go to Austin a lot. And I was like, OK, I'll use that. And yeah, that is a real place. And someone was actually asking me about this recently. They're like, you have real places, but then also not real places and not real things. And I was like...
Well, it's all not real. It's all fiction. Just sometimes I've got stuff that's close to the world that we live in. And I love those little moments. Like sometimes a reader from Austin will see that. or someone who's from Arkansas who's gone to that weird little memorial of the hanging judge, you can kind of recognize and see yourself in it. just in a tiny way can help you feel connected to the story. So yeah, I try to do that stuff. Okay. You talked about how.
You wanted the settings to be authentic, but easy so that you could focus on the character development and motivation because that's what really matters. What did you want us to understand about this family? Oh, man. I'm picturing the four kids. Yeah, I can't. You know, that's the thing is I wrote the book partly because I just wanted to figure out what would it be like to hold on to these people that you didn't know and never knew existed.
But you can see elements of yourself in them, and you have a shared kind of story. And always what I'm just trying to figure out in every story I write, and a lot of times... Maybe this is also why my stories aren't super dark or why I need lightness and weirdness is for a novel, my short stories are sad. They can be very dark. But with novels, by the time I've written that much.
One of the things I'm just trying to figure out is can I get this person safely from point A to point B? And one of the things in all of my stories is how can we hold on to other people? and survive and be stronger because we have each other. And if I can figure out a way to do that, I will. I know this is a slight tangent, but I had a professor, he was in his 90s, Walter Sullivan at Vanderbilt.
It was his last workshop. He was so tired of us, of 20-year-old students. And so many students had stories that ended with... people killing themselves or people dying like it's a big serious ending and he just kind of sighed and he was like you know if you ask your characters what they want more often than not they'll say i want to live and he was like can you find a way to let them live
And I was 20 years old and I just, it resonated with me. I was like, sometimes the answer is no. You know, sometimes the story you tell has to end the way that it ends. But in my head, I'm always like, can I get these people? safely to a place where it's not that their life's going to be happy or perfect always, but can I find a way to get them through this moment? And that's what I'm trying to do. So yeah, like the takeaway from this is...
How in the world, in an uncertain world that we live in, how can we protect the people that we love and take care of each other, even when we meet up with these seemingly impossible problems? I don't know. I don't have answers. I'm just trying to figure it out. And it's interesting to hear you say that because where my mind goes is to mad musing through these questions in the book, but not in a way that sounds like, watch out.
Here comes the whole theme. But like, it just feels like, yeah, I'm with you, Matt. I'm tracking. Like thinking about, I think they're about to go like. crack Tom's life into. And she's thinking about, is there a good way to do this? Like this is always hard, but point A to point B without it, just in a straight line sounds lovely, but maybe kind of boring. Okay. So about mad, we had one reader ask.
She was gauging that we spent the majority of the book in Mads from her point of view. Yeah. Did that just happen? Why? I'm curious to hear you say, why did it need to be Mad? Because I feel like, of course, it needed to be Mad. Like, Mad was perfect. I don't know why. She just was, Kevin. Thank you. I appreciate it. One thing was just like, Mad was the character from Tennessee. And Mad is just rooted in a way that I felt rooted to the story. But it also was just like, some of it was...
I didn't want the perspective to be rude because he's the oldest of them. He's the first one left. Do you know what I mean? And he's the one that actually knows the answer of who they all are. So that kind of certainty I didn't want as the guiding POV. And Pep and Tom, Theron, I just worried were younger in a way that it would be harder. And also they don't show up until later in the book.
So just by structural things, I was like, Mad's going to be my main character to lead me through it. And I like her perspective, which is that she's kind of emotionally muted and sensible. And I was like, I need a sensible person on this weird. road trip and i i mean again not there's not an easter egg but one of my favorite novels of all time is charles portis's true grit and maddie ross in that book is i think just an iconic
American character. More than Huck Finn, I think Maddie Ross is one of the greatest American literary characters of all time. And I just was like, mad will be Maddie. And they're going to head off into uncertain Western territory to get vengeance and revenge. And so I just thought, well, Mad's going to be my main character because I kind of love that no-nonsense voice of Maddie Ross. When did making plans get this complicated?
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We had a robust conversation about quest stories in all kinds of facets. What constitutes a quest? How important is it to suspend disbelief and to what extent? What makes you want to trust an author and what makes you like really put up your critical walls? But Melinda said she would argue that many elements of an epic are present in Run for the Hills, like Mad crosses the threshold by leaving the farm.
They gather their friends along the way. There's this sweeping storyline across a large geographical region, divine intervention like the car accident, and actually maybe also the slot. Was it slots? The $4,000 win?
the challenges they faced. I don't know. What's your, what's your read on that? You're saying, yeah, you're like, yeah, you knew, you knew this. All the, I mean, yeah, all this tracks. I just think that's the kind of, it's like a kind of primal instinctual way to tell stories, which is just. You know, it fits into some of these archetypes and, you know, the epic, the quest. Yes. I mean, mostly what I'm trying, the hero's journey. I'm trying to figure out, though.
I mean, I don't want to go back to Wizard of Oz, but one of the reasons that I wrote this book was I was like, I want Mad to go out into the world on this quest, find what she's looking for, but I also needed her to come back home. And I wanted to figure out how you could write a quest where the end result is that you end up back in the place where you started, but you're different.
I just knew that I was going to have to follow some of those models to tell that story and not to get weird, but like. So many of my books line up with the time period of what I'm going through. Like when we had a baby, I wrote a book about babies. And when we had young kids, I wrote Nothing to See Here about weird fire children. And with this one, a lot of it is.
I'm starting to realize that my son is 17, my other son is 12. There's going to be a moment where they are going to go on their quest, and they're going to go figure out who they are, and they're going to track down these people that they can hold on to.
It made me a little sad. And I wanted to write a book where I was like, you can do all that stuff and you can go out in search of who you are. But here is the model for how you can come back whenever you need to. You can find your way back to me and your mom. whenever you want. And I kind of wrote the book with that in mind. I have a 17 year old about to leave the house. I can't handle it.
Oh, I hear that. Okay. Stephanie wants to know, how did you decide the characters of the siblings? What did they each had to the story? Also, she echoes what many people say when she says, I wish I had a Rube in my life. As a reader, I know I want to hear from Rube. I know I want to hear from Matt. And I didn't know I wanted to hear from Pep and Tom until I met them on the page. And I was like, oh, I'm so glad you, Kevin, knew what this story needed. But what were you, have I said enough?
I just like I knew I knew they needed to be different, but I knew also they were bound by genetics in some way and were shaped by a guy who. was so present for 10 years and then left, I was like, what would it be like to have this presence for 10 years and leave? Would it change you but hold on to some things? And I knew Rube as the oldest and the writer was going to be manic.
and emotionally more all over the place because I wanted that. Who else would want to go on this weird journey but someone who's prone to fits of mania like me? And I thought, okay, I'll have him. And then Mad can be the settled agrarian person that's calm. And then Pep is the teenager. Pep is the one who's like...
still a little too close to the actual being left and thinks of these two older people as old people. And they're not. And then Theron is... I'm just giggling thinking of the way she eats, like my teenage boys. Yeah. Oh, well, she eats like me. All I do is I live on Pop-Tarts. And so that's also an Easter egg. People have said is that Pop-Tarts are in all of my books. People are just constantly eating Pop-Tarts.
But yeah, so and then Theron is that weird little like strange ethereal child who, you know, is kind of unknowable to them. He's the baby. And I just thought, oh, I'll get all these variations, but. They all instantly recognize that they need to take care of each other. They want so badly to make sure that nobody gets hurt as they go where they're going.
I want to talk about the dad for a minute. We had some readers like Patty said, did I miss it or did he not do any growing as a human or receive any consequences? And some readers said, it was so interesting to me how he was the static character. And everyone else had these massive changes. You know, everyone else seemed more open to being shaped by the experience than the father's bad. Yeah, you're nodding. You're nodding. Would you talk to us about that?
Just at the beginning of the story, I was like, let's all get in this PT Cruiser and beat the hell out of our dad. What an awful person. And I was on board with that. But the closer we got and the more I was with the kids, I just thought. I just don't have the heart to beat this guy up. I don't know what I'm going to do with him. When I get there, I started to feel, not tenderness, but I was like, the punishment for him is that he wasn't present.
for the lives of these kids who were so clearly wanted him in their lives. He wasn't a bad dad. While he was there, he was good, right? It's just in the leaving that he's bad. And I also just I wanted so much for the kids to realize that they are who they are because they were anchored to place and they were raised by moms who cared about them. And they really.
allowed themselves to dig into the thing that they wanted to do. And Charles, his punishment is to never linger long enough to truly know what it means. to be a part of something. And his punishment is that he doesn't change or grow because he just becomes a new person. And I felt really sad for him.
And I just knew, what can you do to an old man who's left all of you? How much can you get from him? And one of the things at the end of the story, I was just like, all of them are going to decide how they're going to treat him by the end. But I wanted all of them to know that they are who they are partly because of him, but not really. They made themselves into the person they're going to be, and he didn't get to witness it. As a parent...
it's terrifying to me that that could be your legacy is that you weren't present in the moments where your child became who they were going to be. And watching especially Matt reflect on... what the leaving did to, oh, it hurt. Even if she would have those wry observations that made me giggle. I'm just realizing, listening to you speak, that there's something so hopeful about the dad's behavior, like not being redeemed.
What he did was terrible, but the kids can still be great. I suppose there could be a different kind of novel where he gets his like justice rendered. I don't know, man. It's a quiet justice. I do not know if I would want to live on some weird, sprawling artist colony with three heiresses, you know, basically on the Pacific Ocean because you can't go any further. And also...
because he meets all four of those kids, and they're all extraordinary, exemplary. And how painful it would be to know that you're at the end of your life, and it's only now that you're seeing it. I don't know. I felt bad for him. I don't even know how to ask this. Run for the Hills had a sense of movement to it that was just, like, I don't know how else to describe it, but it was just so fun.
Did that just happen? And what I am appreciating there is just like the result of a whole lot of freaking hard work that like lent the book that just like forward quality. I just, I loved it. I haven't read a lot of books like that. Road trip books themselves, like they don't necessarily have. Actually, like one of the books that inspired me was Ann Patchett's Magician's Assistant, where Sabine realizes that the husband...
Her fake husband that she was married to had this secret family in the Midwest, and she goes out in search of them to figure out who her mysterious husband was, but also who are these people. And so I was like, oh, I like that, but I wanted it to move more quickly. I almost wanted it to feel like it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world where you're just in a car and you just are constantly trying to get to the next thing.
I don't know. The way that I write is I'm constantly testing my publisher on how you can define a novel, like how short a book can be and still be a novel. I just like that movement. You know, I like to kind of if you look at my books, they rarely take place over a long period of time. It's like a couple of weeks, a summer.
You know, I just love that movement. It's for me because I have weirdness in my stories. The longer you stretch out weirdness, the harder it is for the reader to really like hold on to that and stay on board with it. So I need these compressed little time periods. So I'm like, this is weird. Jump in the PT Cruiser. We'll be done in a week. And I'll get you where you need to go.
I think you would have a harder time if I was like, get in the PT Cruiser. It's going to take a year to get where we're going. I think people would be like, I'm good. I'm okay. I don't think I want to get in that car. How did you learn that? Is that instinctive or is that a result of experimentation, knowing that the weird has to be compressed? My second novel is called Perfect Little World.
It's not a bad book, but it was the hardest book for me to write. Partly it was a 500-page book about babies at one point, and that's just too long. That's too many pages to write about babies, I think, or for me. And I just started to realize, like, Kevin, you are killing yourself trying to tell these huge, expansive stories. And I love huge, expansive stories. But that might not be your wheelhouse. Like, maybe what you are is weird, a little bit of silly, a lot of heart.
in a short time span. And I just started to say, I don't want a ton of characters. I just want a few. I want a little bit of time. I love other kinds of books, but for me and what I can do, these are the stories I like to tell. Maybe it'll change. But for now, I just figured out what do I do best and what is.
Like easiest, not easiest, but like, lets me tell the story I want to tell. And this is how it works for now. Does that come from within? Or is that something that you saw reflected back to you? I mean, you knew how hard it was to write 500 pages about babies. But as for how it lands with readers... I'm always grateful that anyone takes the time to read something that I've read and...
I also know that once you put it out into the world, you have no control over the response to it. And there is no wrong or right response to art. I can't control it. And everyone's response to it is valid. So what that tells me as an artist, what I need to do is if I can't control how the reader responds to it, then I better make sure that I got happiness and pleasure out of the making of it for myself.
So it's never really worrying about what the reader wants or needs because I don't know. They all want different things. All I know is, will this make me happy? Will this make me a better person when I go back into the real world? will this sustain me for the rest of my life? And if I can answer yes to that. So a 500-page book about babies almost killed me. And I just thought, I want to make something that the making of it makes me happy.
And that's how you figure it out. I love that. You want the making of your works to make you happy. When you turn that around, how do you think about being a reader? I was a reader before I was a writer. And if I had to give up one, I'd give up writing because one of the things that growing up in a little rural place and the before the Internet and feeling so. I had a great family and friends, but I just felt lonely and weird inside my body and in my brain. And books were...
The safest way for me to realize that maybe the world is not as scary as I think that it is, that I can enter into these books in the care of an author that I trust. And as a kid, just knowing that that author. Even if it's scary or sad or even if the book ends in a terrible way that makes me feel like maybe the world is not a good place, that I am in the hands of this person that I trust.
And it was this transformative thing for me. And it's why I wanted to write was I wanted to see if I could be on the other side of that and make something. There were so many times reading a book when I was a kid and it felt like I... This radio signal would beam out from somewhere I didn't know, and it hit me. It touched this receiver, and I could then send that happiness back out. There's just so many ways that art...
And stories transformed my life in ways that nothing else did. And so I still love that feeling of giving myself over to an author. of following the story wherever it goes and knowing that at the end, I am going to be a different person. What have you been enjoying lately as a reader? Oh, man. So I've been on book tour, and that means I was driving a lot. So it's audiobooks. And I was doing an event. The very first event was at Books Are Magic with Ann Napolitano, a writer that I really love.
And because she and I were going to talk, I went back and read her last novel, Hello Beautiful. And I love that. I talk about a sweeping, long, decades-long family saga. It also has basketball in it, which I loved. But it was just such a beautiful book to me. And I was just so taken with it. And that idea of siblings and family and how do you hold on to people was really great.
And then I just read, I don't even know if it's mentioned, but I'll just say really quickly, like I read Emma Straub's new book. It hasn't come out yet, but it's about boy bands and cruises. And I was like. I love New Kids on the Block. It was like the transformative, formative thing for me as a kid. And I was like, I don't know. This book is right up my alley. And Emma's just such a great writer. And then the last book I'll mention that I really kind of loved was...
There's this guy named Will Leach, and he lives in Athens, Georgia, but he started this sports website called Deadspin a long time ago, and he writes for the Sporting News and ESPN. But he writes novels, too, and his newest one that just came out is called Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride, and it's about a police officer in Atlanta who has a terminal disease and knows he's about to die but doesn't tell anyone.
And just starts taking the most dangerous possible cases because he doesn't care. And he has a son who's 12. And I will just say, it is just such a... beautiful book about masculinity and the tenderness that you can feel for your own child and the desire to protect them from the things that you start to realize are impossible because that's life. And I just think he's such a good...
kind of a lovely human being in the way that he sees the world. And that book was a lot of fun to read. Yeah. Thanks for those. Okay. I suspect the answer might be book tour, but what are you working on now or next as much or as little as you want to share? Yeah, I'm working on another book. The way that I write is I only write like two or three months out of the year. And all the other times I'm just in my head thinking about it. And that's like the happiest when...
I just walk the dog, fold laundry, go on walks with my son. And you're just in your head telling this little story to yourself. And it's really fun. And it's a story about a... teenage boy and a woman who teaches uh literature and their kind of connection with each other and i just thought let's just be where i go with this and i'm in that
lovely stage where it's for nobody but me. And I'm just trying to figure out where it'll go. All right. Well, I'm excited to see if we'll get to read it before too long. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a pleasure. And you were the best. And Ginger, thank you. And to all of the readers, I can't thank you enough. This means the world to me. Oh, the pleasures are. All right. Put up your hearts for heaven, Wilson. Thank you so much.
Hey readers, I hope you enjoyed listening in to our book club event with Kevin Wilson. You can, as always, check out the full list of titles we talked about at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com. And if you'd like more conversations like you heard today, if you want...
that yearbook if you want to get in on team best books of the year if you want to enjoy what we're doing this year with the correspondent and reading burnham wood and talking shakespeare and all the other good stuff ginger and i talked about come join us We would love that. ModernMrsDarcy.com slash club. Make sure you're following in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Thank you today to Kevin Wilson and our Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club community manager, Ginger Horton. What Should I Read Next is created each week by executive producer, Will Bogle, media production specialist, Holly Wilkachevsky, social media manager and editor, Lee Kramer.
Community Coordinator Bridget Misselhorn, Community Manager Shannon Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ, plus the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production. Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rocha said, ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. Happy reading, everyone.