A Word with Kate Wisel

A Word with Kate Wisel

L.A. Hawbaker | Interview

I wrote a story about getting my ears pierced.

Kate Wisel recounts an early writing experience, a vignette-style piece of fiction published by her school newspaper in fourth grade. “There was also a gun, diamonds, a character about to get shot... and then she got her ears pierced. ”

Wisel pauses for a moment. “I think I was trying to talk about something that frightened me. Trying to translate my experience. I continue to do that. ”

Since that fourth grade story, Wisel has gone on to become an award-winning author. Originally from Boston, she's now in Chicago. She’s been published in Gulf Coast, Tin House, and New Ohio Review and served as the Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her linked story collection, Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, won the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Wisel is now adapting the collection for a miniseries pilot with Bad Wolf and Pearl Street Productions.

Here, Wisel shares her thoughts about writing, developing a craft, finding a literary voice, and the importance of creating a writing community.

How did you start your writing career?

I dropped out of [Emerson College]. Then I took a creative writing night class. The teacher was an angel, Jenn De Leon. An actual angel. She saw me, really looked at me.

She recognized that I wanted to write stories and encouraged me to come to Guatemala with her for a writing workshop. She encouraged me to go back to school, which I did [to UMass Boston]. She told me about all these literary magazines that I should submit to... she’s been in my life ever since. My trajectory would not be the same without her.

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men captures the grit of Boston and the unique perspectives of your characters so beautifully. What was your process in creating that voice?

A character’s voice is just the way they’re observing the world. Their observations are unique to their own set of experiences, so just like rose-colored glasses, there are a lot of different-colored glasses, and everyone owns a pair of glasses. One character sees a car and sees freedom. Another sees danger. It all depends on where [the character is] in their life and what’s happening in their interiority. Interiority is where the real ideas are. “Seeing in the mind” anchors you in the concrete.

People enter an experience through details. A narrative universe is located in the specific. For example, it’s hard to think about “love” as an idea, but when you see people grasping hands, it feels more meaningful for whatever specific kind of love you ’re writing about. For what love is for those specific characters.

As someone who wrote a full story collection in your twenties, do you have advice for other young writers?

Being in the world in a curious, open way is just as important as sitting down to write. You may think you know what you want to write about... but your observations about the world itself will tell you what you ’re interested in. You are the only one who can notice what and how you notice it... Your imagination will lead you to a place of truth, which is the only thing I want to discover when I read and write.

I like the idea of relinquishing control when it comes to material and then letting your mind work at and play with the material in the revision phase. Keeping a journal is interesting because you can track observations, and patterns often emerge. Wallace Stevens said, “God and the imagination are one. ” The word "present" feels like a buzzword right now, but especially at a time where capitalism and social media externalizes our experiences, it’s important to protect our inner life. Reading and writing, it’s not always comfortable, it’s often demanding. But it’s the place we can locate truth, and if you can locate truth you can transform.

When it comes to craft, how do you develop your writing?

My sister-in-law, as a reader, was talking about why characters in books are so often described as physically beautiful, when ugliness feels more realistic and compelling. She read a book—I think it was [Wally Lamb’s] I Know This Much is True—and the mother character had a scar on her lip. She had been in an accident, and she always put her fist up to her mouth when she spoke. Something traumatic had happened, and her fist was shaking by her mouth. That kind of specificity helps intuit so much about the character. Describing the gesture and the habit [is much better] than if you just said, “This is a woman who’s insecure” or “she’s in pain” or “she has sadness. ”

You earned your MFA at Columbia College Chicago. Could you talk a bit about your MFA experience?

I do have some cold, hard advice about that. This is just from my experience—I would say to anyone who’s applying to an MFA, think about scholarships and being fully funded. There are programs where you can get fully funded, so unless you ’re a trust fund baby or have some kind of idea of how you ’re going to make money and pay back the loans while still being a writer, I recommend getting into a program where you ’re at least partially or fully funded.

Obviously, an MFA program is really ideal... if you can swing it. In grad school, you produce, produce, produce as much as you can, and [you ’re] afforded the time and ability to just explore. The most useful thing about an MFA program is the time and community. The community provides ideas and exposure to stories, or writers, or workshops. But you can also forge that on your own. It’s just a matter of effort.

Any final words of advice?

Writers need to create luck. Keep pushing yourself in the direction of luck.

Driving in Cars with Homeless Men (2019) is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Learn more about Kate Wisel and her work at www.katewisel.com. Read the full Kate Wisel interview in our online issue. www.maskslitmag.com

art credit: "Photo of Kate Wisel" by Sara Cutaia