Western Writers

An Interview with Steven Wingate

By Jenny Shank, 7-25-08

	Steven Wingate, photo by Jennifer Wingate.

Steven Wingate‘s debut book, Wifeshopping, is a collection of witty, insightful stories centered on men’s quest for love and marriage.  Wingate has been teaching composition and creative writing at the University of Colorado since 2001, and last year he won the Bakeless Prize for fiction sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which included the prize of his collection’s publication by Houghton Mifflin.  Amy Hempel, who judged the contest, wrote in her introduction that his stories’ success “comes from Wingate’s surpassing skill as a writer, and his vision of what can happen when we are made to forfeit a fantasy.” I recently interviewed Wingate via email about his knack for evoking varied settings in his stories, the writing advice he gives to his students, and how the Bakeless Prize changed his life.  Wingate will appear at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 30 (7:30 p.m.), Poor Richard’s Bookstore in Colorado Springs on August 7 (5 p.m.), and the Boulder Book Store on September 9 (7:30 p.m.).

New West: When did you move to Colorado and what brought you here?

Steven Wingate: I was born in New Jersey and moved to Colorado Springs at age thirteen. My father had always wanted to move out to Colorado—drawn no doubt by the mythology of personal renewal that has been drawing people to the West forever—and after he died when I was just shy of eleven, my mom decided to move us here. That was 1977, and I’ve tried to leave Colorado many times since then. But I couldn’t seem to live anywhere else for long, and kept coming back to the Front Range—Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder. Finally I gave up; it’s home and always will be.

New West: The stories in Wifeshopping are set all over the country, and they all include very specific details about the settings.  Are these places you’ve visited or lived in?  What makes a setting a good one for a short story?

SW: I’ve lived in eight different states, so I’ve picked up a lot of “geographical impressions” along the way—how it feels to be in a place, the vibe of being a denizen or a stranger. Any place in the world could be a good setting for a short story, but what’s crucial to me is the relationship between character and space. We’re a deeply territorial species, though we pretend to be beyond that, and we behave quite differently on our “home ground” than we do when we’re strangers somewhere. A lot of the characters in Wifeshopping are strangers (or near-strangers) in the places where their stories unfold, and that gives the collection a certain kind of synergy. The characters are trying to find themselves, and most of them are also trying to find their way around in an alien place.

New West: The stories in Wifeshopping share the thematic territory of men looking for love (or at least sex), with eventual marriage as a possible byproduct.  Did you write the stories with the intent of having them work together well in a collection?

SW: The characters definitely want more than sex. I couldn’t spend years with these guys if that’s all they wanted, since it would bore me to death as a writer. In some ways, I think that formula is reversed: they want marriage and a true emotional union with someone, and sex is simultaneously a byproduct of that desire and a means to achieve it. This accounts for why so many of these characters are all messed up about sex. Typically in American culture we see men as simply “out for sex” all the time, and we see women as being conflicted about it because they feel they have to “give it up to get love.” But honestly I think both halves of the species are equally confused about this primordial thing we do with our bodies. Men are socialized to pretend that this confusion doesn’t exist, but in Wifeshopping I hope to get underneath that socialization and into the pure confusion. Men are much more interesting when you strip away their veneer, which can sometimes be extremely thick.

In terms of the development of the collection, I didn’t know I had a one until all of these stories had been written and rewritten several times. I simply had a bunch of short stories I couldn’t keep myself from going back to, and they seemed to be about the same thing. Richard Ford’s Women with Men and Richard Bausch’s Wives and Lovers, both novella collections, convinced me that I had a collection of my own.

New West: Sometimes to be funny, you have to be mean, or at least brutally honest.  Most of your stories have a humor that’s built from this type of not-so-kind honesty in the narrator.  Do you find that some readers don’t get what you intended as humor and just see your characters as being morally reprehensible?

SW: There’s bound to be some of that, but there’s also plenty of it in real life. I have to rely on readers and respect what they bring to the table, because they are inextricably a part of the process of literature. If they don’t see the humor in something, I can’t complain. Humor is only one aspect of my characters’ emotional experience, and if one reader sees outrage or sexism where another sees humor—well fine, they’re probably all part of the equation. My first commitment as a writer, and I’d even say my only commitment, is to the emotional truth of my characters. And human characters are so incredibly multi-dimensional that we can’t possibly reduce them and still leave them whole. So as a writer, I try to put my characters’ experiences out there in the most pure and whole way that I’m able. Then I trust the reader to make sense of it in his or her own way. Otherwise I’m forcing the reader’s hand, and since I don’t like it when other writers do that, I don’t want to do it myself. Every human action is complex beyond our imagination, and it’s not my place to judge. My place is to give some sense of how it feels to experience the complexity that my characters feel.

New West: I noticed that in several of the stories (especially “Bill” and “Our Last Garage Sale"), the characters question buying second-hand things at flea markets or garage sales.  Do you like to shop in these places?  Why do they make a good subject for short fiction?

SW: I honestly had no idea about that tendency until Arsen Kashkashian of the Boulder Book Store asked me about it in a video interview that we did. I’m a strong believer in the sacredness of objects, since we invest so much in them. Grandma’s spoon and grandpa’s pipe may be worthless, but we keep them on the mantelpiece. Why? They’re our connection point to those who have gone before us in this life, those we love, those we’ve lost. For me in reality, I’ve probably developed a strong sense of the sacredness of objects because my father died when I was young, and I don’t have much of his stuff. And that sensibility is so old, so gut-level for me because it involves the loss of a parent, that it has probably been in my fiction since the very beginning.

I do love flea markets, by the way, though I’m not as into garage sales. There’s something different about taking all of your stuff somewhere to sell it vs. simply putting it on blankets on your driveway. It’s wonderful to go to big flea markets, especially in cities like New York or Paris. I like to pick up objects and wonder where they’ve been, wonder about the different things they’ve meant to one person or another along the line. By the way, now that this obsession with objects has been “exposed” by readers, I’m a little scared for its survival. Am I going to get self-conscious about it? Am going to slip it into everything because it’s “Wingatian?” This is one of the terrifying things about putting a book out: suddenly people see things as clear as day that you’ve never seen about yourself.

New West: What sparks a story in your imagination?  Are there any similarities in the creation of your stories?

SW: After the “objects” questions, I’m desperately afraid to answer this one. In the same way that some cultures feared photographs might steal the soul, I’m worried that even the slightest understanding of how stories come about in my imagination will destroy my source of stories forever. It’s like Orpheus coming out of the land of the dead—turn around to look back at what you’ve experienced, and that which you love will be lost forever. So I don’t want to know the secret.

Having said that, every piece of fiction I’ve written has started from an image of a person in a place. On some level, my imagination recognizes who those people are and what their situation is, and it latches on. It wants to know more, so it follows those people around and does what they do, meets who they meet. There’s definitely an “Aha! I know you!” kind of moment when I first encounter the characters I’m going to write about. But beyond that, I don’t want to know what my process is. Someday a neuroscientist will be able to pinpoint exactly how the imagination produces such things and turns them into literary narrative, but I hope I’m long dead by then. I’d prefer it to be a sacred mystery, because it’s more fun that way.

New West: What advice do you give your students about writing that you’ve derived from your own experience?

SW: Be patient and hone your craft before you think about publishing, getting produced, or making a career. Writing is a lifelong pursuit, an endless conversation, and there really is no finish line. If you’re lucky and have served the Muse honestly, people will keep reading you or watching your movies even after you’re dead. So many new writers seem to go into the endeavor without knowing what it really is; they think it’s about the result, but like any art, it’s about the journey. The product you create is simply a record of your journey toward creating it. As much sincerity and humility is required to write as is required to meditate or pray, and you have to enjoy the process of writing and re-writing if you’re ever going to develop a good practice. The goal itself will not sustain you; only the process will.

New West: None of your protagonists is married or has kids (yet).  As a married father of two, you seem to have a very different life than your protagonists.  Is it easier for you to write about stages of life that you have already passed?

SW: I think it’s easier for every fiction writer to write about what has passed, because our memories of those things become soggy and imprecise, and it’s only then that you can enter into experience with the imagination instead of the mind. My old teacher Robert Olen Butler used to borrow a phrase from Graham Greene that described this process beautifully: “the compost heap of the imagination.” All these things that happened to you—many of them mis-remembered in the first place, or re-remembered so many ways that you can’t tell what’s true anymore—combine with things you’ve glanced at, things you wish you’d said, things you read in other books or saw in movies. They all lose their properties and become part of this soup, this cauldron that occasionally bubbles up at you. Only when you can’t tell the difference between what you know and what you think you know can you really work in an imaginative, fictional mode.

New West: Have you continued to write stories that would fit into this collection, or have you moved on to different themes and subject matter?

SW: Once I started dating my future wife Jennifer—a Boulder native and daughter of the beloved late CU Professor Virgil Grillo—I knew my “wifeshopping” days were over, and I stopped writing stories along those lines. That well simply dried up, for new stories at least, because I couldn’t enter into the psyches of those kinds of protagonists anymore. I tried a few and found I was thinking my way through them, which kills the spark of contradiction and confusion that makes fictional characters work. On the other hand, settling down made it vastly easier for me to revise the stories in Wifeshopping. I could look at the characters with good separation between what they were on the page and the original aspect of myself that “budded off” into them, in the way that Chekov says that all characters we write are fundamentally aspects of ourselves. I could look at them with a colder eye and axe things more easily. If I hadn’t settled down and gotten married, I doubt I would have had the perspective to finish the book.

New West: Did you try to get your collection published through other avenues before you won the Bakeless Prize?

SW: Yes. A few years ago a friend of mine, a fellow CU writer named Sigman Byrd, won a prize for his poetry book Under the Wanderer’s Star. I’d never won a single prize for anything in my life, but I said “If he can do it, why can’t I?” So I took our tax return one year and, instead of going on vacation, put it in a fund for fiction competitions. I tried individual short story prizes at literary magazines and won a couple of those—Gulf Coast and The Journal—and also sent out the collection to competitions until the money ran out. I tried three or four small press publishers, too. All told I sent it out eighteen times before it won the Bakeless, which sounds like plenty but really isn’t. Many writers have to suffer through rejection a lot longer, so I’m actually pretty lucky.

New West: What was it like to win the Bakeless Prize?  Has it brought you a lot of new opportunities?

SW: People in the writing and publishing community have definitely responded to me differently after the Bakeless. It’s associated with the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which has been around since 1926, so it has some cachet and name recognition within that orbit. At the AWP Conference in New York last year, a few people who had previously given me the cold shoulder shook my hand and said “Oh, how nice to meet you! Send me stories!” Which is kind of funny, but understandable; America bets on winners, and winning a prize like the Bakeless definitely helps with introductions. But most important is the change in how I feel about myself as a writer, especially now that the book is out and being read.  I don’t have to make excuses for the time I spend at the keyboard, and I used to feel like I had to. I come from a very proletarian background, and to part of my psyche, writing is something very luxurious and self-indulgent; for a long time, I didn’t feel like I truly deserved to be doing it. So getting the “first book monkey” off my back has been enormous, because now I get to tell that voice to shut up. And it has to listen.

Thankfully I have a lot of friends who’ve gone through that “first book” melodrama before, and I’ve learned from their experience. So I don’t expect opportunities to pop up instantly, because things take time to unfold. A new book will happen when the time is right, overseas rights and translations will happen when the time is right. Most of the new opportunities I’ve had so far have been to work for free—doing nonfiction pieces, writing guest blogs, reviewing books, etc. But that’s okay, because I spent decades writing fiction for free before there was any kind of payoff to it; I’m prepared to spend time honing my nonfiction until there’s a payoff for that, too. Ultimately, the creative aspects of having a book out trump the professional aspects. My friend and mentor Steve Katz, who taught fiction at CU-Boulder for decades and now lives in Denver, once told me something that ought to be on every author’s wall: “Each book I publish gives me the opportunity to re-invent myself as a writer.” That’s the biggest and most fundamental opportunity that the Bakeless Prize and Wifeshopping have given me: the chance to start fresh and see who I can be.

New West: What are you working on now?

SW: This summer I started a brand-new novel that I’m not talking about, because the only way for me to stay sane right now is to have some fiercely protected emotional space in which I’m just writing. Once you put a book out, your life takes on a more public aspect by default; you’ve sent your work out to the world, and it changes your relationship to that world. I’ve found myself thinking about new things: my blog, how the book is selling, who my readers are, what opportunities I have to make new connections and find new venues to publish in, when the time is right to talk to person X about work Y, etc. It’s definitely harder to focus on just writing than it was before Wifeshopping happened, because the day-to-day business of “being a writer” has gotten much more complex and time-consuming for me. Not that I don’t enjoy it; I completely love the chance to interface with the world and talk about the writing life exactly as we’re doing here. But because of this addition to my workload, I need something that requires my highest degree of focus to protect my “sacred space” for writing. So the brand-new novel is a big, juicy secret between me and my keyboard; my wife barely even knows about it.

I will say, though, that I have a novel finished and about to circulate that’s set in Colorado. Steve Almond’s LA Times review of Wifeshopping said “it makes me hope we’ll see more books from him—ones in which he will turn his sharp eye toward more enduring forms of love.” It’s as if he read my mind, because this novel—a tale of love, grief, and prescription pharmaceuticals—is exactly about the kind of love you fight to keep regardless of the cost to yourself. And it’s very, very concerned with the sacredness of objects. I can’t say when it will come out, because it’s one of those opportunities I want to be patient with. Books take so long to write, and they sit on shelves so beautifully, that there’s no reason at all to rush them if you want them to last.

Wingate will appear at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 30 (7:30 p.m.), Poor Richard’s Bookstore in Colorado Springs on August 7 (5 p.m.), and the Boulder Book Store on September 9 (7:30 p.m.).

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