Wells Tower’s début story collection, “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, came out last month. In the title story, Viking marauders plunder a Norwegian town, but sound more like characters in a Raymond Carver story. In another, a man joins the carnival after running away from home. “Leopard,” which explores a young boy’s animosity toward his stepfather, ran in the magazine last fall. Tower kindly took the time to answer some of my questions.
Is the title of the story “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” taken from anywhere in particular?
I did do some haphazard research for that story. The really gross stuff in there—like the blood eagle—is, I think, for the most part true. I found these books about Viking life, and used the most ugly bits. Someone had written an account of a Viking siege of a British town, and wrote something like, “When the Vikings showed up, everything ravaged, everything burned.” It was a bleak little parallelism I couldn’t resist using.
_A review of your collection in New York magazine states: “Anyone who’s taken even a lazy stroll through the well-worn territory of destructive fictional masculinity—Hemingway, Carver, Faulkner, Roth, Cheever, Yates, Bolaño, et al.—will recognize the basic flora and fauna of Wells Tower’s stories.” What’s your response?
Oh, my. I suppose the early stories are guy stories. They were stories that I started writing when I was reading a fair amount of southern Gothic, like Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. And somehow the shape of their stories—where you’ve got something kind of comic going on, punctuated by horrific violence—impressed itself on me one way or another. I wouldn’t really put Yates and Cheever into the same camp—they’re doing something different—but my later stories aspire to a more complicated and textured material, rather than straight-guy stuff.
There’s also a review that just came out and the photograph that ran with it was a huge bicep. One of the things I thought was nice about the Edmund White review in the Times was that he made comparisons to female writers I really like and admire, such as Lorrie Moore and Flannery O’Connor. He also talked about my female characters, whom I like to think of as a strong bunch.
And which writers do you like?
There’s a huge range. There’s David Berman’s poetry collection, “Actual Air.” Everything Ian Frazier has ever written, and antecedents, of course—E. B. White, A. J. Leibling. Richard Yates’s short stories above all else. I think they’re these really beautiful smoke locks of despair; his characters are richly imagined, his prose is really beautiful. I don’t think you can beat him for structure. Walker Percy is someone I really like a lot. I don’t think there’s a novel out there as great as “The Moviegoer,” other than “Middlemarch.”
I think Charles Portis is a writer who is really overlooked. He wrote “True Grit,” and that John Wayne film was based on it. He’s one of these masters of voice and vernacular—Twain-calibre stuff. It’s a shame that people don’t read more of him. Nabokov. I find his short stories amazing. He’s somebody that seems like such a structure master, but a lot of the short stories are just these beautiful little portraits.
Let’s talk about your story “Leopard,” which ran in this magazine. Why did you use the second person?
For me, it was really a process of trial and error. I was trying to get into the head of a troubled kid. First, I tried to write in this eleven-year-old kid’s voice, and it got a little nauseating and cutesy. Then I tried to write it in the third person, and there was an absence of sympathy in that approach. I arrived at the second person because that was the most guileless approach; I could get to the emotional marrow of the kid’s experience and outwit my own hand in fiction. In the collection, there are some stories that use pretty language, some with humor, some going for more narrative, but with “Leopard,” I thought I would get away from my usual tricks and try to write something earnest. I’m sure that story would have been tarred and feathered in graduate workshops for being too sentimental.
What’s your revision process like?
I tend to be a flash-and-burn reviser. After the collection was bought, I threw out two of the stories that were in the original manuscript, and then I completely tore down and rewrote over half the stories with different characters or different points of view. There is very little shared DNA between the draft that Farrar, Straus & Giroux bought and what we ended up publishing. I went a little bit crazy, but I think the stories are stronger for all the wrecking balls I brought. Even after my editor signed off on my radical decisions, I was still doing them, not from any editorial perspective, but more out of an anxiety and yearning to be better. And not wanting to commit.
Sometimes you’re not making something better, just different.
There’s this metaphor I settled on for revisions. I was in Alaska on a kayaking trip, and I was warned by this park ranger to be really careful in the arctic lakes when the moose are around. A male moose will jump into the lake with the idea that a female moose is on the other side, and then he’ll get to the other side and think that the female is on the other side, and often the moose will continue to go back and forth until he drowns from his own indecision. To me, it’s a sitting metaphor for revision. You can’t keep mindlessly pacing from one impulse to another or you’ll drive yourself insane.
So who do you trust to read your drafts?
My most trusted reader is my younger brother Joe. He is eight years younger and a great reader. He was a creative-writing major at Oberlin, so he is really well read and has really a good instinct. He is also not a fiction writer—he’s in a Ph.D. program in Iowa for media studies. He responds to what he likes: he likes to laugh, likes to be moved for all the traditional reasons. He gives me really straightforward, non-snarky feedback, and he’s my brother, so he won’t like me any less if I write something talentless and feel-good. He’s been hugely patient with me over the last few years.
From one oddly named person to another. I grew up hating my name, then came to embrace it. What about you?
My mom came up with it. When I was five or six, I petitioned my parents to change my name to Mike. It seemed much more credible-sounding. Wells seemed absurd and laughable. I don’t know when I started liking it—in high school, I thought it sounded effete and dumb. It’s such a grandiose name that I have hard time saying it with a straight face. People always think I crimped it off a soap opera or a brokerage firm.
Bonus: Read about Wells Tower’s writing process.
(Photograph: Suzanne Bennett)
