Kevin Wilson on Strange Loops, Outsider Art and Worst-Case Scenarios

Kevin Wilson is the author of acclaimed novels such as The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here, and the short fiction collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. Wilson’s fourth novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Text Publishing), follows sixteen-year-old aspiring writer Frankie Budge who, along with the talented but troubled Zeke, spend a bored summer photocopying and pasting an anonymous and enigmatic phrase all over their small Tennessee town. It’s a work of art that forges a unique bond between the two lonely misfits, but its cult following also spirals out of control as rumours about the poster’s origins and potentially sinister message spread into a full-blown panic. Twenty years on, Frankie still carries the secret of that fateful summer, the mantra echoing privately echoing in her mind, until she receives a call that threatens to unravel everything.

Alan Vaarwerk spoke to Kevin Wilson over Zoom from his home in Tennessee.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The novel revolves around a very specific phrase. Can you talk a little bit about where this phrase comes from and how it made its way into the novel?

The novel really is focused on these two teenagers who create this phrase: ‘The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.’ It animates their lives, it’s the thing that gives meaning, even though it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But that line itself actually comes from my own life. In the summer of 97, I was just finishing my first year of college, so I was probably 19, I think. I was living in an apartment with my cousin and my cousin’s best friend, this guy Eric, who was just about to leave for LA to do acting and writing and all that. And Eric was just incredibly charismatic, he had gone to film school, he had all these cool cameras and editing equipment. Over the summer we just made movies, he would show me movies, he gave me books to read, and I just was really enthralled by him. We became good friends.

And I had this job that summer, at this medical centre—this was the early stages of the internet, and I was putting this policy and procedures manual, hand typing it in HTML, this 700-page document. And it was very boring, and no one ever checked on me. So I just started making stuff up and putting it in the document, and I just figured no one would ever see it. I asked Eric to give me some stuff to put in there, and he gave me a version of that line. From that moment on, I’ve said that line in my head an infinite number of times. It’s just like a repeating phrase that’s calming to me. I put it in my first novel, The Family Fang, like, just a brief little aside. And a lot of times I’m like, if I can just get it out of my head, if I put it on paper, it’ll get rid of it—sometimes that works, but it didn’t this time. It didn’t get rid of it. So I wrote this book to try to get that phrase out of my brain a little bit, and out into the world to see what would happen.

This is a brief moment where this thing I’ve worried in my head for so long will finally reach a receiver.

The final autobiographical detail is that as I was finishing the book, my friend Eric died unexpectedly, super unexpectedly. And I think I’d always thought that this book might bring us back stronger into each other’s orbit, you know? He knew I was writing it, and so when he died, I was like, well, what do I do with this? What’s this work for? And I was like: oh, it’s what it’s always been—it’s a fictional story that you’re writing, get to the end of this and see what happens. We’ll see—the phrase is in the book, it’s out in the world, and we’ll just see what happens in my brain. I still say it, though. It’s still very calming.

Do you think your relationship to the phrase is going to change now that it’s in so many other people’s heads as well?

I hope so. I don’t think it’s insidious in any way on my part. It’s not like The Ring where I’m like, I’ve got to pass this curse on to someone. It’s actually just a really pleasing, strange little line that echoes nicely in my head. I think this is all art, right? All art is made from someone’s personal obsession or personal interest. And you take it and you worry it into existence. But when you release it, when it touches open air, you can’t control what happens. So who knows? But for me, in some ways, just to know that someone else somewhere will read this book, and read that line, and it will echo in their head for a brief moment—I don’t think it will last for 30 years in their head, but that’s pleasing to me, because so much of art is about connection. So this is a brief moment where this thing I’ve worried in my head for so long will finally reach a receiver.

That’s not dissimilar to the way Frankie thinks about the phrase in the book, wanting to get it out in the world and just see what happens—and when she gets it out into the world, things go horribly wrong. I wonder whether that was something you were thinking about, in terms of what might happen once it was out of your head and in the world.

I think a lot of my books are like worst case scenarios, so that I can be like, well, it’s not as bad in real life for me. And then if this is the worst case scenario, and you can survive it still, that’s reassuring to me too. When I wrote my first novel, The Family Fang, it’s about terrible parents—and we’d just had a kid and I was like, I don’t know if I’m going to be a good parent, so, well, let’s write the worst parents that could exist. I tend to do that, where I push the narrative to the extreme, just to see, and then to realise, oh, there’s still, room here for empathy or weirdness or expansion. And that’s always freeing, when you think the worst can happen and you realise you can survive it. But yeah, I mean, it’s a book about a line that goes out into the world and creates a lot of pandemonium and panic. But luckily, this book is coming out in 2022 and not 1996. I feel like so much has gone viral thanks to the internet, that this is not as unique as it would have been in that time period.

Yeah, it’s like a pre-internet version of virality. Which also relates to the medium Frankie and Zeke use to get this message out, which is a photocopied poster that they stick up all over town in secret, like a kind of street art which, when it doesn’t have that context, takes on a life of its own in people’s minds.

Yeah, I’m interested in street art, and I grew up after the Wild Style documentary, and Basquiat and all that stuff. But I come more from skating, so Shepard Fairey and Obey, Barry McGee and all that stuff. I really dug all of that, I thought it was really cool. That kind of street art feels different than graffiti to me, because graffiti is a tag that claims ownership, whereas Andre the Giant, Obey, is a decontextualised—it almost seems insidious in a way that you can’t quite pinpoint. I was also always really interested in the Toynbee tiles, these little tiles that have these strange phrases about planet Earth and a rocket ship, and they would be posted onto the street on the sidewalk.

It’s a strange phrase that gets mutated, and it turns up all over the world, and no one knows if it’s one person or lots of people. To my mind, that was more akin to what I was thinking of—a kind of outsider art where we can’t understand the intention of the artist. And it may just be that there is no intention that we can really understand, but it grows and takes on this mythos, because we don’t necessarily have a narrative to explain it. I love that stuff—that’s my wheelhouse.

It reminds me a lot of someone like Jenny Holzer, who would place these decontextualised, ambiguous phrases all over the city—you give a nod in the novel to other street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, as well, though Frankie doesn’t necessarily identify with those artists.

Yeah, I think that’s one of the things—like Frankie says, she didn’t know about Xerox art or Andy Warhol or even really much about street art. They were just making these things and then second-hand figuring out all these things that would explain it. I love anything where degradation is built into it, that it’s meant to be painted over, or that it’s meant to fade away or break apart, and then what’s left is people’s memory of it. And people’s memories are unreliable.

For me, it was a policy and procedures manual for a medical centre. I hid it in that and I’d check it over the years, and eventually they put up a better version of it. The internet had become more complex, so it became outdated, and it disappeared, and it’s gone. I can never go back and see it. But for this story, I was trying to figure out what would linger, and I was like, oh, street art—that makes sense to me that these kids, especially because they have such limited means in this little rural place, like, what’s the easiest thing? Well, paper, right? Paper that you can just post up and forget about. I was super obsessed as a teenager with zines, these hidden artefacts that were made and you may never see it again, or only two or three people would have it. And I was like, oh, yeah, this will be like a zine that gets posted that no one can figure out.

It seems like for Frankie and Zeke, the idea of people bringing their own narrative to it is enthralling, but there’s also something scary about it as well. How did those characters grow to become the people we meet in the book? Did they arrive to you fully formed?

Frankie did, for sure. I knew Frankie was going to be slightly angry, because her world had been changed against her will. She was stuck in this place, but her dad had gotten to leave. That all made sense to me, and that she would rebel—or not rebel, but like, try to make a space for herself by making stuff, by writing. So I knew that this was going to be a transformative summer where this thing gets made.

I love anything where degradation is built into it, that it’s meant to fade away or break apart, and then what’s left is people’s memory of it. And people’s memories are unreliable.

Zeke at first appeared to me only as a temporary person, he shows up and he is not going to stay—and that transitory nature was important to me, but he wasn’t shaped in the same way. A lot of it was just playing him off Frankie, and that’s how I could figure out who he was—like, okay, he’s an artist in a different way, but they have this kindred sense of themselves, but he has a little bit more of an expansive understanding of the world, and that was helpful. And then little by little, it became very clear to me that you can each take part in making something, but how you respond to it or how you feel about it doesn’t have to be the same. And that was when the story opened up. I was like, oh, Zeke will be super terrified because he has a little more at stake. He has a plan to be exemplary. He has more money, he has more opportunity, and so he’ll be a little more afraid about this ruining him. Whereas Frankie is like, I want that, I want to be ruined—because maybe then I’ll actually get somewhere.

So much of it is just—I know they’re not real, I’m not weird like that, I don’t cry when I finish the book because I’ve lost the characters. But you live with them long enough that you start to get depth and nuance that you didn’t originally understand.

Something that I think pops up both in this book and in The Family Fang is the tension between making art that is just for you, or just for its own sake, versus having art that is out in the world. How do you approach that tension in your writing, particularly now you have a few books under your belt? Has that changed over your career?

I think now I’m maybe instinctually thinking about an audience. When I was first writing, it would have been insane to be like, okay, let me imagine what my reader needs from me. It was just me writing for myself and hoping maybe that it would resonate later. Now though, I think I do have some sense of, how do I keep a reader engaged as they open the text? How do I keep them connected? Even though I may have these singular obsessions, how do I make those feel slightly more universal, or what do I tie them to? So I do think about that. But still, I mean the reason that I still write is just the pleasure of generating, like making it. Because I know that eventually, no one will want to read my books, or they’ll get so bad that people won’t want to publish them. And that’s fine with me, because no matter what happens, no one can take away the pleasure I got from making it.

I think one of the hardest things about teaching is, I have students and there’s this idea of like, this is my one thing that I made that I’m really proud of. And you want to tell them, you’ll write more—if you love it, you’ll make more. And you will outpace this thing that you’ve made, and you can still feel that connection, the echo of that first time that you felt the joy of creation. But if you do it right, you will outpace it and leave it so far behind that it will really only exist in the nostalgia for the moment of what it gave you, not necessarily the work itself. But, you know, they’re 20. It’s hard to be like, you have a whole life ahead of you. They want the pleasure that they got from making it, they want to try to extend that for as long as possible. A lot of times, the way you extend it is you keep making new stuff, and then each time, your skills get a little better, so you get a little closer to it.

So, yeah, I think for me, it’s more about teaching them to love the pleasure of finally figuring something out and making progress, as opposed to, like, this thing that you made is now the totem that you will carry for the rest of your life. I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy. Like, for Frankie, I think she carries that totem around, this paper, but part of it is just the deep desire for nostalgia, to live in that moment again, to experience it.