Talking with Tim

The Family Fang

So last week, I ran across an NPR review of Kevin Wilson‘s debut novel, The Family Fang. The premise of the book (adult children returning to the scene of an absurd childhood where they were unwilling stars in their performance artist parents’ pieces) fascinated me. So I contacted Wilson to see if he was game for an email interview, fortunately he was. As longtime readers know, I really enjoy interviewing novelists-to get a better understanding of their craft. In this instance, when I started researching Wilson, there was an added bonus fun factor. I discovered Wilson’s wife is respected poet, Leigh Anne Couch. Couch and I went to high school together-and in fact she was one of the kind classmates who supported me in our senior year, when my father died. In fact, a few years back, Couch and I almost did an interview about her work for this blog, but family commitments (aka the birth of their child) delayed the interview. Hopefully one of these days, we’ll get back to that interview. In the meantime, I am pleased as hell to discuss The Family Fang with Wilson-I get the feeling this is the first of many creative successes for Wilson.

Tim O’Shea: Frequently I talk to authors that speak highly of the cover design for their book, but you are the first author I know to get the cover tattooed on your arm. When did you realize you wanted to commit the piece to flesh?

Kevin Wilson: I knew pretty much the minute that I saw Julie Morstad’s artwork for the cover that I wanted to get the tattoo. I thought it would be cool to get a tattoo that was connected to the novel. Before Allison Saltzman, Ecco’s book designer, showed me the cover design, I thought I might get four sets of fangs on my forearm, but when I saw Annie and Buster, I knew I wanted that on my arm.

O’Shea: With a spouse as a poet, do the two of you ever spitball ideas off of each other when working creatively? Also, as people who use their personal lives (on some level) for fodder for your creative projects, is there ever a time either of you says: “OK, this? I don’t want to see this pop up in any poems or stories.”

Wilson: We will talk to each other about what we’re working on and she’s the first person I ask for help when I’m stuck but we’re both pretty solitary artists and we like to be inside our own heads, so we use our time together mostly to talk about TV shows we are watching or about food that we want to eat, the important stuff. As far as using our own lives as material, honestly, our lives are pretty boring. Most of the time, something happens and then we both try to decide how to make it more interesting for our fiction and poetry.

O’Shea: By setting the book partially in Tennessee and at least partially in the mid-1980s, what aspects of this era and location appealed to you in terms of exploring them in your story?

Wilson: Mostly it was a time period and location that I was familiar with, having grown up pretty much in the same place and same time. So it helped keep me from worrying too much if I had the details right. Also, the Fang family is so bizarre that they seemed to transcend time and place, so even when they’re in San Francisco in the 70’s or TN in the 80’s, it still feels like a fantasy world.

O’Shea: The Fangs are performance artists. Two fold question: Did you research performance art much before starting the novel? How challenging was it to map out these performance pieces and the logistics of them, without stemming the flow of your narrative?

Wilson: I didn’t research much beyond what I already knew and loved about performance art, which despite the ridiculous nature of the Fangs, is a form of art that I think is unbelievably interesting. For the performance pieces, I tried to think of them less as works of art and more as snapshots of the familial dynamics of the Fang family. So while I wanted the piece to be successful or interesting, I mostly wanted it to reveal something essential about how these four people interact with each other. So I worked from the kernel of how it mattered to the family and then tried to build a piece that would support that idea.

O’Shea: As mentioned in this recent Memphis Commercial Appeal piece, you regard Nashville-based novelist Ann Patchett as your mentor. How has your writing benefited from knowing Patchett?

Wilson: My writing has benefited simply by having access to a writer that I consider to be as close to perfection as you can get. I was a fan of her work before we ever met, so to be able to show your work to someone like Ann (and she read an early draft of this novel and gave me really valuable advice) is such a huge gift. But, more important than the writing, being around Ann has benefited me as a person. She’s shown me how to live a kind and good life while also making space for creating art.

O’Shea: Clearly you have found success with this new novel, going forward do you intend to focus mostly on novels, or do you still have ideas you wish to explore through short stories? Also, creatively when considering ideas you want to explore, how early in the process do you realize this is an idea best suited for a novel or a short story?

Wilson: I want to do both. I like what each form allows you to do in terms of telling an interesting story to the reader. Sometimes it takes a long time before you figure out whether the idea is a story or a novel. I wrote a novel before this book that failed, until I realized it was a story and then I wrote it as a story and it turned out so much better. And the Family Fang started as a failed story about a brother and sister who play Romeo and Juliet in a high school play and it wasn’t until I figured out a larger, more interesting narrative that I realized it could and should be a novel.

O’Shea: Not many novels get such resounding praise (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, NPR, NYT, Washington Post), every novelist hopes for some praise for the work, but has it blindsided you just how much praise the book has garnered?

Wilson: I think people have expectations, realistic ideas of what will happen, and then they have hopes, fantasies of what could happen in the best of circumstances. So I had those two ideas and was prepared for either of them to happen. And then the reviews came in and people seemed to like it and I felt like perhaps I had not created a good enough fantasy for what would happen, that the reality of the situation outstripped my fantasy of what could happen. It was amazing.

O’Shea: Maureen Corrigan’s NPR review enjoyed a number of the book’s aspects, including the “loony summaries for Buster’s novels”. When concocting the summaries, were there any in particular you were more proud or most enjoyed developing?

Wilson: Those are basically books I wish I could write. They are the books I am not equipped to write, stylistically, so I gave them to Buster instead. I was a little disconcerted when Buster newest novel seemed to be the plot of The Hunger Games. I was very sick about that, but then I read the trilogy and felt like they were different enough to proceed.

O’Shea: As a comic book journalist I would be remiss if I did not ask (given your affinity for comics), if Marvel or DC came calling, would you ever consider writing for them-is there a dream character you would love to tackle?

Wilson: Everyone wants Spider-Man or Batman, but I’d like to try Aquaman for DC, a character that doesn’t really have much to do most of the time, despite being an inconic character, and I’d like to try Sub-Mariner for Marvel (I have a thing for handsome water-dwelling superheroes, I guess), who is so complicated and fun and just kind of a supreme jerk. Ms. Marvel is another Marvel character that I think is really wonderful but she doesn’t get enough to do.

O’Shea: Question in the borderline fanboy realm, how much of a blast was it to do a reading with musician Aimee Mann?

Wilson: It was very much like dying for a few seconds, seeing what heaven is like, and then coming back to the land of the living. It is so disconnected from my regular life, that it just didn’t seem all that real.