A Literate Passion
On the Eve of Craig Wallwork’s Book Release Day
Actual photo of Amanda & Craig
Don’t adjust your sets. This is not Amanda Gowin speaking.
For all of you that, for a long time, assumed I was a figment of Amanda’s imagination (to be honest, there was a point I thought similarly), or a fictional friend she invented to direct her thoughts to, I can reassure you, Craig Wallwork is very much real. Amanda thought it would be “cute” if I wrote this introduction. The jury is still out on what she meant by this, but expect two things: firstly, a drop in the quality of writing. And secondly, a lot of references to a lesser known dramedy biopic. If this is what constitutes being cute, then I’m guilty as charged.
Don’t click unsubscribe.
Amanda has made James Franco and Seth Rogan comparisons to our relationship in the past, but I see us more like Augusten Burroughs and Natalie Finch in Running With Scissors (see earlier reference to the comedy biopic); two messy, broken, quirky characters who somehow found each other when they needed to know they weren’t the weirdest one in the room. Because Amanda and I share similar viewpoints, frustrations, and of course, issues of self-doubt (talent and doubt are forever intwined), we have, over the years, taken broom handles and punched holes in the literary ceiling. She has attached the electroconvulsive therapy machine, figurately speaking of course, to my temples and told me to bite down on the rubber mouthguard whenever I’ve veered too far off the sanity path. She has taught me how to dance to Pick Up the Pieces (never before has there been a more apt title), and to be “more sexy”. A lot of these references don’t land if you’ve not seen the movie adaptation of Augusten’s life featuring Joseph Cross and Evan Rachel Wood in the aforesaid roles, but just like Augusten, who saw Natalie like a surrogate sister, I look to Amanda as the person I needed to make me realise being weird is pretty damn cool. So, when asked to write the introduction to this blog, I accept it because I figured Amanda was pushing me into those places where I feel most uncomfortable, which is to say, in the writer’s skin I’ve grew into over the years. And, to be part of her online legacy.
Don’t change your settings.
Yes, this is not your typical Gowin blog. If it were, there’d already be talk of flowers, cotton-tail rabbits, Lana Del Rey, Tammy Wynette, Armie Hammer, stage shows, twins, and Appalachian tomfoolery. There would be lines of effortless and beautiful observations that only people who have suffered a little can articulate. You know this already, but Amanda writes like a person much older than her years, and from a time beyond her years. She is Zelda Fitzgerald writing to her husband from the psychiatric institution in Asheville, North Carolina. And lest that last comparison get lost in translation, I don’t mean Amanda is losing her mind. Just that her words are timeless, enduring, and shaped by a poetic soul.
Of course, Amanda will hate all this. Right now, she will be wondering why on earth I’m not following her guidance.
I said cute, Craig. Stop deflecting!
Sorry, Amanda. I was always destined to talk less about me, and more about you. Why? Simple. I don’t have anything interesting to say. For an author that is a dangerous thing to admit. It’s like Charlie Brown declaring he’s happy and well adjusted. Or Dreadlock Holiday confessing that they seriously don’t like reggae. It’s just not the done thing. Anything worthy of note is hidden within my stories. That’s where the real me is hiding, in lines of prose, or hanging by one arm from a question mark, maybe even banging on the walls of parenthesis. But here, in a blog, I’m vulnerable. And when I feel like that, I deflect. So much so, I searched the Gowin/Wallwork archives to find the very first email we sent to each other, a futile endeavour restricted to the year 2015 (damn you Microsoft!). I came across this opening line, written by Amanda in May of that year…
“I just saw an article about a woman with two vaginas. The first thing that popped into my head was that movie where Tom Hardy plays twins...”
This may undo most of what I’ve said about her poetic soul and timeless epistolary hand. Too, that one sentence may lead you to conclude that most of our correspondence revolved around Tom Hardy, and genitals (maybe even Tom Hardy’s genitals). But when you have accrued over a decade of conversation, sometime slipping into the puerile is par the course. In addition, we have addressed every insecurity, crazy thought, and bared our souls to each other in candid exchanges. As Amanda has already alluded to, maybe one day the world will read the abridged version of these “honesty sessions” in a leatherbound hardback titled: Where Did It All Go Wrong? Or, I told You No Woman Can Have Two Vaginas. But for now, you’ll have to take my word for it. Until then, I’m honoured and humbled to cross the threshold into Amanda’s world, and to have this chance to smash the ceiling once more with the end of the broom handle.
Normal blogging will resume shortly.
Please, sit back, and for the next few minutes, enjoy Amanda Gowin in the role of interviewer. This is Craig Wallwork signing off.
Actual photo of Amanda & Craig
The Interview
I was skimming back through the collection as I wrote these up and saw the acknowledgements for the first time. Way to make a girl feel special. I needed that lead-in to wedge in a thank you, and say we’re both sentimental in a lot of ways, about people, books, music, but what I want to ask is, what are you listening to in the car? In your alone time to think? And when you write? How do songs shape your thoughts? Is that one question?
It’s one question with lots of signposting, which I like. I’m of an age now where any guidance is beneficial. I listen to lots of audiobooks in the car. I’ve just come back from two weeks at a treatment centre for a bad back, and I spent the journey there and back listening to Vonnegut’s, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. Weirdly, it reminds me a lot of Michael Chabon, the literary style. Reverse that. Michael Chabon reminds me a lot of Vonnegut. Because I love Chabon, I’m now starting to reassess my indifference toward Vonnegut. Saying that is like the literary equivalent of, I don’t know, revealing a trick and getting kicked out of the Magical Circle. But after you sent me that audio recording of Vonnegut, and now Mr Rosewater, I’m warming to the guy. It just took me forty years. In contrast, sometimes I need a break from all that and listen to music in he car, to turn off, sing like Catherine Martin in The Silence of the Lambs. I’ve also gone down a rabbit hole with funky bongo music too. Bongolia, and Okey Dokey by the Incredible Bongo Band. Kashmere Stage Band’s Kashmere. Throw in some Calibro 35, and it’s like falling into a 1970 Giallo movie. Does this shape my writing? Sometimes. But mostly I get inspiration from many things. I forage from dreams, conversations, anecdotes. Sometimes I’ll watch a movie and completely zone out because in my head is another movie playing, one that eventually I render to the pages. Is that one answer? Probably not.
Your summer is shaped a little differently this year- that’s a sentiment that probably resonates with everyone. Are you finding moments to capitalize on That Summer Feeling? Absorbing Vitamin C & D like a lizard, allergy attacks, animal encounters- any notable warm weather moments as summer really becomes itself? Or, what’s your favorite recent summer memory? Like between Covid and now (the New Times lol)?
I have vampire skin so I tend to stay out of the sun. But I love dusk in summer. Everyone looks more beautiful at dusk. Apricot and honey. And it has its own scent. You can smell night approaching, hustling and pushing into the day. That coolness, the impending dark, it’s fresh. It reminds me of the seaside. When you get that battle between the embers of the day, and that ghost-like breath, it’s calming. Almost like you’re in this empty space where it’s neither day nor night, a limbo moment. I like that. I like being on the divide of two things. So walking with my family at dusk, across the local dam and through farmland - sheep and cotton grass, the fatigued worker bees, and the murmuration of starlings - that’s where I’m most happy in summer.
Seriously for a moment. We disagree sometimes, very amicably, about content, but never have we argued about *intent,* which is why I think it’s cool and we stay in that pocket of understanding. In an age when social media has made a platformed critic of all audiences, I love that you still do female characters and female voices and haven’t backed into a middle-aged white dude corner. I think it’s just as essential to be gender-fluid in our fiction as in ‘real’ life. What’s your favorite story by you from the female POV?
In the Gowin/Wallwork archives there’s plenty of conversation where I’ve articulated self-doubt, especially around writing from a different gender’s perspective. Not because I lack confidence in doing it, more that I hate offending anyone. I never go out to do that. But I’m also aware that stories can become siloed concerning gender, even race. It’s “safe” to just write from your own background and ethnicity. Less chance of criticism. I’d like to say I’m trying my best to be inclusive, but in all honestly, I allow the story to dictate the perspective. So if the story requires a female lead, I’ll do it and not feel awkward. Maybe it helped that growing up I gravitated more to women. Three generations of the Wallwork/Watson clan sitting around kitchen tables, drinking tea and having far more interesting conversations than the men in the living room watching wrestling and football results. By osmosis, a lot of those conversations bled into me. I was beguiled by their candidness about personal issues, their bodies, their moods. They griped about how stupid their partners were, and how all men in power were just children in need of a good hiding. They knew stuff about the neighbourhood, what was going on, who was bonking who, and who had cancer long before most of their family knew. They shared stories of pain. Of labour. But remained grounded in a way I couldn’t understand back then. They just got on with shit. And I think that’s partly because they were free to talk openly. Damn, I admired that. Still do. Whereas, in contrast, the men in our family were goldfish swimming leisurely in a very small bowl of masculinity pretence - mouth agape and saying very little.
I’m veering off track. Okay. Back to your signposting. My favourite female POV: I wrote a vampire novel, that isn’t really a vampire novel, but it also is. Anyway, that’s first person female. I really like her. I’m hoping others will too, and, I think you (the world) will get to read it one day. But I can’t talk anymore about that.
And your least favorite (same parameters) while we’re at it?
I wrote a short called The Many Ghosts of the Deep. It was told from the POV of a mother travelling on a plane with her daughter. No surprisethat it doesn’t end well. The plane crashes into the ocean and is subsequently attacked by a sea monster. It’s my least favourite only because I struggle to read it. The mother is wonderful, and I like the writing, but the scenario is dredged (no pun intended) from a deep-rooted fear that led me to undergo hypnotherapy. I used to have a terrible fear of flying, something that was stopping me from booking holidays aboard. To overcome this, I had a few sessions with a registered hypnotherapist. In my first session she asked me to articulate the fear so she could better tailor the treatment. I did. About halfway through, she told me to stop. This was at the point where I explained how the plane had crashed into the ocean, but instead of the fuselage breaking up, the whole plane remains intact and slowly begins to sink. Through the small windows, I see the water levels rising, offering me and my family a glimpse into the dark abyss resting beneath us. There was something in the way I articulated those moments, of looking into my children’s eyes as the walls creaked to the crushing pressure of water that resonated. Apparently hypnotherapists can inherit their patients’ fears. She told me to shut up. So I did. I still struggle to read that story lest it triggers something in me again, and for that reason, it’s my least favourite female POV, even though it’s still a very good story.
Actual photo of the storygraph for Pineapple Express
Is there any particular story shape you’d like to try next? You’ve had success with more traditional literary stories as well as magic realism shorts, police procedurals, epistolary vampire chronicles, is there a framework that interests you? You have a fairytale in a trunk, but do you have plans to work on a shape? Do you think at all of your stories as a shape before you start out? Are you familiar with Vonnegut drawing the graph (don’t I ask you this once a year?)
I used to write a lot of bad to worse. The Sound of Loneliness for example (debut novel) - starts at misfortune and never really lifts its arse off that point in the graph. If anything, it dips. The Nolan trilogy was more interesting. Not really the “man in the hole” waveform, not really bad to worse (he gets his man in the end), but there’s still tragedy awaiting poor Tom. Only until you’ve mentioned it now, I don’t think there is a story shape I have desire to pursue. I’m currently writing an absurdist horror novel (is that a thing?). All I had when going into it was a beginning. No middle. No end. It’s a very organic process driven by the characters. What shape that takes is beyond my control. I sometimes think writers are just conduits to spirits guiding our hand. What was that artist? The spiritualist. She painted abstract shapes, things not from her time. None of it was seen until after her death, but she was a visionary. Damn. Now I have to look it up. Hilma af Klint! She communicated with spiritual beings through séances and believed they guided her in creating her abstract paintings. This was in 1906, but her work was all but unseen until 1986. Anyway, there’s something in that, this whole being controlled, influenced, guided by others. I’m convinced of this because whenever I sit at the laptop this voice takes over. It’s not my real voice. It’s not got my brogue or accent. It’s something/someone else. I know, it’s weird, but I don’t question it. I just let it do its thing. But yeah, once completed, I’ll map this absurdist horror against Vonnegut’s eight shapes theory and see if it transposes over, or indeed I may even find a ninth.
I’m a summer romanticizer. Do you have a favorite season to use as a setting?
I think most are set in autumn. Perhaps again, it’s that transitional period where something is coming, something colder and more threatening. It mirrors a lot of the stories I write. Plus, nature is undressing the trees, which has its own beauty in all those colours, the blood-stained leaves, the pumpkin flesh. There’s something sinister but wonderful about it all. I used to tell the children that there was a tall spindly man who awoke in autumn from a deep slumber. He lived underground and hated that he always missed out on summer and seeing the tree’s green leaves. From late September to early November, he goes out each night and turns every tree upside down. What we see in autumn isn’t a tree stripped of leaves. We see the roots of upturned trees. And he, the spindly man, returns to the ground, immersed in all that greenery while we endure the cold snap of winter. Maybe I was reaching for some kind of allegory, like how one person’s misfortune is another’s gain. But it was lost on the kids. They sometimes remind me of that story though, so something stuck.
I think about Kelly Boyker a lot, like a Lot. She was a force in my life, and yours, and some of the best most creative times for the three of us at Menacing Hedge, a trifecta of editors with points in Washington state, Ohio, and the UK. A team and relationships only possible because of the internet, and the value of the art we brought into the world because of that is immeasurable. I think in spite of the noise, The Internet is a good thing, because it’s about connection, but a lot of new tech seems to be about destruction. Where are you, with the state of this dystopian world? Do you think about AI writers and floating in chairs like in Wall-E, or do you do what I *try to do every fucking day* and keep your head down to your own work, not let it loosen your possibilities? How do you feel about any of this stuff ?
I recall someone using ChatGPT to generate a Nick Cave song. The computer analysed his lyrics, calculating, or whatever the fuck it does, a back catalogue that stretches some forty years or more. The result was published on the Red Right Hand Files, a website where Cave answers questions posed by his fans. He responded with this: “The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks.” More eloquently, he went on to add: “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.”
This is the fundamental problem I have with AI. It cannot feel, and while some may counter that feelings can be learnt, I do not believe for one moment a computer will understand depression, that feral, morbid black dog that sinks its teeth so deep into your heart it takes an inordinate amount of energy just to keep it beating. A computer will not know what a parent feels when they lower their child’s coffin into the ground, and that hollow space within carved out by misery. It will never know pain, searing pain that burns away faces and atrophies muscle, and the trauma when reliving those memories. It will never truly understand love, not one that forces us to do crazy things, to starve, to cry, to laugh, and feel like no one else exists.
I did write a long piece about social media, and my reticence to be involved in all that too, but the grumpy old man rhetoric that one should not be measured on how many followers you have, but on the work you produce, felt too self-absorbed. Therefore, I deleted it. I’m sure your readers are secretly thanking me for that. Maybe for another day. As for Kelly, I too think about her. But I’m not ready to write about her yet, but when I do, I won’t delete it.
I don’t think I can overstate how happy it makes me that you’re warming to Vonnegut. He was haunted, like in writing and visibly haunted. You would enjoy Breakfast of Champions, and Sirens of Titan, too, I think. Kurt said you should tell your audience everything right up front, no secrets no surprises no slyness. How do you feel about that?
Tonally, yes. I can see how that works. And that circular narrative device works too, in that you start at the end and work forward to the same place. It’s probably about being concise, right? Not holding back stuff. Offer as much of the narrative as you can so they can buy into it quicker. He’s not for the slow burns. More, burn your words quick. And so it goes. I understand that more these days. Going back to Menacing Hedge, sifting through the slush for great stories was like trying to see a contact lens in a barrel of jellyfish. What I always loved were the stories that didn’t waste any time getting started. I loved those that jumped in mid-scene. A unique, strong voice was key too. I may have missed a lot of great stories because they were more of a slow burn, but when you’ve got fifty plus stories waiting to be read, you haven’t the time to invest taxiing down a long runway. You want the story to take off, fast. This methodology has shaped my stories too, so I get what Vonnegut is encouraging. It’s a worthy lesson to us all.
Actual photo of this movie poster
What are the last best few movies you’ve seen, new or old, no review or order? Just 5 great movies you’ve watched recently? Maybe gimme a little detail about why you like one or two.
Damn. Don’t do this to me. Okay.
Close: My LetterBoxd review began with “Can someone fetch a dustpan and brush to sweep up the pieces of my heart.” This movie crushed me.
The Substance: Everything has been said that needs to be said about this movie.
Perfect Days/Paterson: I’m lumping these together because thematically they are similar, in that nothing really happens, but you are drawn in by its modest beauty anyway.
Companion/Your Monster: Like above, these two are similar in that both surprised me. Two great feminist stories that are both fun and horrific.
Humanist Vampire Seeking a Consenting Suicidal Person: There’s a great scene featuring the song Emotions by Brenda Lee. It’s worth watching for that alone.
Let’s end on a more traditional question. What’s the best writing advice you’ve been given?
A while back, maybe around 2016, I nervously approached an established author I admired for a short story I wanted to publish in Menacing Hedge. Over a few weeks, we exchanged emails. Somewhere in all that correspondence I opened up about my struggles as a writer. He wrote back this wonderful, inspiring letter that I keep on my phone. I’ve tried looking back to find the original email he sent, but it’s lost. All I have now is this copy/paste version. Nevertheless, whenever I feel down, disgruntled, jaded, disheartened, lost, insecure etc, I read that letter and it makes this thing I love bearable again. The letter is too long to post here, but I’ve extracted the final paragraph. Maybe it’ll resonate with other writers too, just like it did, and continues to, with me.
“As cliche as it sounds, hang in there. Your book will be published or it won't. The world will spin, and you'll still feel the gravitational pull toward its molten iron core. That's because your blood is mostly iron, which we know succumbs to rust, and this thing we call a body, we call a life, is ephemeral and we are terrified of decay. But that's not who you are. You are formless and unbound by time, as is the story. That's what a book is. It's a minor liberation. You've let a small part of your soul free. Nothing can truly harm that. No person can injure that. It's impervious to the opinions of others. You should ignore both criticism and accolades both. Only your feelings matter in this regard. I think that's the struggle, that reconciliation.”
- Vincent Louis Corrella
Harvey, the author photo
The Review
(What happened is I -Amanda- wrote a review of the book overall, then also made notes on all 13 individual stories, which I’m not sure was necessary but I’ve got opinions. Below I’ll include my overall thoughts, shut this beautiful June mess down, and in the P.S.es, for Craig and anyone else that might want to go that extra mile, will be my spoiler-free individual thoughts on each story.)
Do we ever get over wanting to fit in?
I wrote this in caps between two lines of the review notes I was writing, and it’s as good a place to start as any. The universal and the very specific.
This collection is sweet and sad, dark and light, it’s the book an Edward Gorey vampire would pass you in the library, or sneak into the Little Free Library. It reads like the babadook was down there the whole time, writing and listening to The Cure and working on his shit, reading about internal family systems and PTSD. The George McFly version of your favorite monster, just plugging away at the most beautiful, terrible things, shaping his own density.
And at some point starts joining you for dinner, and sharing these stories and projects from the basement, and by the end of the book, or when you’ve read all the stories, even the word monster doesn’t look the same. Or the word love. Or family.
Craig’s worlds are similar to ours but infinitely more beautiful and interesting, because impossibility simply does not exist. There are no walls for any of the stories to bump against, they’re all out in the open air and fully unfolded, like morning glories or moon flowers or bat wings or new leaves. There are ghosts, tapeworms, and ladders that climb into the sky.
If you’re not sure you want to take this dark trip, I would hit the title story and The Visitor. If you like the feel of those you’ll likely get something out of almost every one of these. My favorites are those right in the middle where light meets dark. The Skin We Feel Most Comfortable In, The Visitor, and The Fall of Achilles, but I had a hard time picking and choosing, I also marked The Weight of Vinegar, The Many Ghosts of the Deep, and A Guiding Light. My least favorite is Havelock’s Cuckoo, which has too many triggers for this American girl. And don’t forget that there are a couple solid comedic tales in here, if you can gag and laugh at the same time.
These are some of the best short stories I’ve read, not just the best of Craig’s. He’s at the top of his game. So, if I may suggest, read this book. Let him hold your heart in his hand for just a little while.
-Amanda G.
Order The Skin We Feel Most Comfortable In here
Actual photo of someone’s daughter
P.s. Thanks for coming along for this ride. Next post will likely be if I manage to sync my mania with tech week for Little Shop, so hang in there for tears of joy and depths of doubt that all theater kids know so well.
P.p.s
The Review: continued
The Dark
Beyond the Red Door This story tightens like his tooth key, the list of instruments and purposeful violence struggling to contain tue complete chaos outside the perfect order of these thoughts, reality slipping sideways, and the promise of something terrible and violent with every creaking escalation. This is a good old-fashioned ghost story but grosser and gorier and told in a prettier hand.
The Terrifying Silence This taps very much into how it feels to just be alive when everything seems to be screaming that the world is ending this minute & whether or not it was was not the consequence, but whether you can properly ignore it until you can’t any longer. This is Covid, 28 Days Later, all our new anxietY.
The Many Ghosts of the Deep ‘It begins with the sound of the world yawning.’ And seriously just gets better from there. This is a favorite in the collection, dark and beautiful, sky and water and love and death.
Misery Guts The Rorschach ink blot butterfly in this is a bit of writing genius and laughingly disgusting. This story is hilarious.
The Weight of Vinegar I also had this story marked as my favorite. There’s nothing better than a story with a kid and a red wagon and more hope than resources. This went to such a twisted, heartwarming place.
Havelock’s Cuckoo Overcoming and forced birth and sci-fi/fantasy. I don’t like this one, it’s not for me. It’s too topical, has too many of my triggers. I respect it, but I don’t like it. Craig knows this we’re still besties. And as long as I’m still pointing out the thumbs-down now and then if I see them, maybe he’ll be more likely to believe me in the thumbs-up. Poor Things meets The Handmaids Tale.
The Visitor I have to stop saying which ones are my favorites because I sound like an idiot if 2/3 are my favorite. But, kids, cemeteries, old-fashioned spirit mediums. It’s got all the right stuff, if I asked him to write me one it would be like this.
The Light
The Skin We Feel Most Comfortable In I love Craig’s doctor voice, and I don’t mean in a weird way, I mean I love it when his narrators take the position of knowledgeable skeptic and are broken down by information being processed through the heart first, before the brain. And there’s nothing a parent wouldn’t do for their child, and nothing we wouldn’t do to make life worth living. Worthy story for the title of the book. I cried but just a very little.
The Fall of Achilles This is a great story about the size and shape of shadows, or maybe a coming of age tale, or a father and son yard, but to be sure it has some of the funniest lines I’ve read. It’s not just that Iggy Pop reference. The whole thing is funny, and sweet, just a beautiful story. Tears and laughter and the whole human condition between, and some of the most beautiful language and imagery.
The Angel of the North I have mixed feelings on this one, about a couple on a drive, I’m not sure it belongs in the “light” section; it gave me a little bit of that empty feeling that wasn’t quite schadenfreude.
Dead Ringers This story is so cool, and so clever. Character work, as they say, and nature v. Nurture. And family and legend.
Backpack Alien Blues Nothing is ever what it seems. This is a fun one, in a way, and then it turns on itself. I love the songs, the pop culture references, and of course I love extraterrestrials.
A Guiding Light What the hell are you trying to do to people, classifying this as Light, though I guess it must be?? What a cruel joke.
(See you in July, and thanks for reading)