Recently, writer K. C. Wilson, whose novella Doing the Dead – 1983 is being published this month by Faraway, took some time to answer some questions about his work, his writing process, and his experience in publishing. Part 1 of the interview is below. (Click here to read a review of Wilson’s novel The Route, and here to read about the upcoming publication of Doing the Dead – 1983.) Doing the Dead – 1983 is now on sale! Click below to buy it now.
Part 1
About the Author
K. C. Wilson is fifty-five, and has been married six years. He has a five year old daughter and lives in North Florida in the beach town where he grew up. He lived at various times as an adult in California, Hawaii, Louisiana and Georgia, but eventually settled with his family in Florida. He graduated from FIU in Miami in 1976, and studied poetry under James W. Hall, before he became a famous novelist.
Wilson’s publication history is varied. He wrote an article on hydrogen energy in 1978 for a local business journal. He was very forward thinking then and more idealistic than now. He also wrote a magazine article about historic preservation, some book and entertainment reviews in another local magazine, then in 1989, his first fiction story appeared in Cavalier under a pseudonym. According to Wilson, it was trash. “Funny, but nothing I could show my mom. It’s not like I wasn’t also sending out what I considered my ‘good stuff.’ I had a couple of novels and some better stories going around, but nothing else hit. At that point, though, I was convinced I’d turned the corner.”
Wilson has a story due to appear this year in the December issue of Delivered. He also is an editor for the journal Conclave.
The Route and Doing the Dead
Describe for our readers what The Route is about, and your process for writing that novel.
The Route is about a man who is a failure in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of his family but in the eyes of his friends he is heroic. I wrote that novel because I knew a man who was immensely gifted and tragically flawed. He was a great friend to me and I admired his determination, especially when he knew it was futile. I loved him. And I knew his story would never be told unless I told it.
A man passes among us through the neighborhood, wearing old clothes with a dignified, oddly aristocratic bearing. Who is he? Why is he homeless? Why is he sleeping on my floor? To answer these questions, I started writing from his point of view. He supplied the anecdotes, the string of eccentric characters, the theme. I was just a scribe.
In the rewriting process I used a cassette recorder. I’d read a chapter out loud and play it back and edit it until it sounded mellifluous to me. That process really helped me smooth out the flow.
Describe Doing the Dead, and your process for writing it.
Doing the Dead came out in one sitting, in a flood, actually, the rough draft did, on a long car ride to a Grateful Dead show in Virginia. My intent was to write about the Dead concerts in Hampton and Morgantown, but I had to get all this preliminary stuff off my chest before I could even begin to think about the shows. It started out as a journal entry and just kept going and going. Eventually, I did write about the Dead shows, but that was all Part 2, and had very little to do with Part 1.
Over the years it’s been edited and polished but essentially, the story’s the same as it was. I call it fiction because I changed the names. It’s a slice of my life that turned kind of golden brown around the edges over time.
I’ve noticed that many of the same names, if not necessarily the same characters, appear in both The Route and Doing the Dead. Can you explain how the two works are connected?
Doing the Dead – 1983 is part of a collection of related stories called Best Man Complex. I grouped these stories together because there is a running theme throughout that links them. Certain characters in some of the stories also appear in The Route. Certain characters also appear in my other novels, Goat Island and A Decent Marker. By linking these stories and novels through certain characters I’ve drawn a larger picture on a larger canvas than I could have if they were all unrelated. A lot of it is William Faulkner’s influence that caused me to model my fictional little North Florida town of Shadville Beach after Yoknapatawpha County. I peopled it with some familiar characters who show different sides of themselves in different stories. I like to think they all fit into the big picture without conflict.
The Route and Doing the Dead both take place in Florida, quite different from typical modern settings like Los Angeles or New York City. Can you describe Florida as a setting, how it differs from other places, and why it has been important for you to make that the setting of your work?
John D. McDonald provided all Floridians with the definitive fading memory of Florida as it was in forties, fifties and sixties. Every Florida writer wants to pick up a piece of his legacy and carry it a step or two onward. In the eighties and nineties, South Florida was the hottest new literary landscape in the world. It seemed like every other crime novel was set in the Keys or Miami. Charles Willeford, James W. Hall, Carl Hiassen, Elmore Leonard and later, lots of others, were all over the lower half of the state, redefining the Florida crime novel. It was rich territory. But North Florida remained the hinterland. Nobody had a clue what went on up there and if they did, they didn’t care. I figured the region was mine for the taking.
Pete Dexter and Clifford Irving both wrote novels set in North Florida but neither of them were locals. Harry Crews, a Florida writer from Gainesville, wrote a novel set in Jacksonville, but surely, he wasn’t going to be the last one.
I had a story that defined North Florida in the early eighties, a tale of counterculture misfits running hard and fast toward epic tragedy. It was a story, again, based on real events, a story that fell in my lap that I couldn’t ignore if I wanted to, a story no one would write if I didn’t. I may have overestimated my ability to make the story work. At the time I blamed it on the publishing world’s lack of interest in North Florida. Goat Island turned out to not be my breakthrough novel, but I wasn’t about to relinquish my claim on North Florida. It was only a matter of time and rewrites.
The Route came along between rewrites. I had a unique friend, Bruce Kerr, a character who was the king of procrastination. Bruce was like Scheherazade, telling stories to stay alive one more day, only in his case, it was to keep living in my house. Through him I came to see into the microcosm of the neighborhood. Behind every door was another world, complete unto itself. He would enter those worlds and pass through them in a slow walk and bring their stories back to me. I had attempted to write about him before, but when I started trying to see through his eyes and to write from his perspective, I knew I was onto something. It freed me from my own voice, which was a victim of too many other voices. In the ethereal egoic realms of my “voice,” stentorian echoes of Faulkner and Nabokov wrestled for supremacy with the jocular flourishes of Henry Miller, the clipped cadences of James M. Cain and the lurid Southern nastiness of Erskine Caldwell. I was all over the place, voice-wise. My voice changed with every book I read. And I didn’t really feel particularly obligated to be consistent. I wanted to keep my options open. And so, I made about every mistake there was to make, some of them chronically. But then I found a different voice, the voice of a narrator who was definitely not me, and I was able to settle into it. From the very beginning, the tone of voice in The Route felt right to me.
Be sure to come back December 19 and 26 for parts 2 and 3 of the interview. And visit tomorrow for the first chapter of Wilson’s Doing the Dead – 1983.
