CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Kirby Michael Wright

Rappahannock Review Interview Editor: Thank you for submitting to the Rappahannock Review, and also for allowing us to have this interview with you, to get more of a deep dive into “New Boston,” and also just your process as an author. So, yeah, if you do wanna start with new advice to, or advice to new authors, that’d be wonderful!

Kirby Michael Wright: Yeah, I was uh… I have sort of a top eleven points for new authors, and it is— something that I wish I had known about before I got to the MFA program at San Francisco State. But here they are. Number one is, I was reading… I like Fitzgerald, and I was reading his autobiography, and the one thing that stuck out to me was, it’s very simple, it’s to begin with the poem. He said the poem is a good place to start for any writer because it teaches you how to be concise. And it’s that concise language that will lead to all the other genres. So just say you try poetry and, so what?. The main thing is to try to learn to write a poem if you can. And apply that, you can take that.

That’s what I did. I started out as a poet, and I said, “Hey, you know, while I’m in my master’s program, you have a duty to yourself to apply what you’ve learned in poetry to all the other genres.” So you should be writing stories, you should be writing novels, you should be writing screenplays, you should be writing plays, et cetera. They’re all connected. That was what I rebelled against in the master’s program is, “Are the professors trying to pigeonhole you?” “Oh, that guy’s a poet or that.” Guess what I am. You know that’s what happens to me when I’m talking to people, when I walk on the beach, they go, “Oh, what genre are you in?” And I say, “everything.”

RR: I love that. And I did a little bit of research, and I know that, as you said, you started out as a poet. You won a lot of awards for your poetry, but you’ve also done a lot of creative nonfiction, especially with your book series about your grandmother. Do you feel like that… because “New Boston” is also a piece of creative nonfiction. Do you feel like that is your preferred genre? Or do you like a preferred genre? Or are you just everything, like you were saying?

KW: I somehow got involved more in creative nonfiction because my professor had just signed a huge book contract with her Under the Tuscan Sun. So that was Frances Mayes, and I went, “Wow. I think I’d better explore the genre.” And because family is so important to me, creative nonfiction is a good match because you have the ability to be… you’re sort of between genres, between fiction and nonfiction. But what I try to do is get as much real life in, but you need the creative nonfiction to smooth it out. At least for me, it gives you that ability to kind of fly, because you can… Oh, the thing with just pure nonfiction is that it bores me. I wanna have the ability to access my interior world. So, in a way, I’m sort of like Hunter S. Thompson, not quite as Gonzo. I wanna be able to access my interior world, and through that interior world, I’m able to pull stories out from my past.

For example, in “New Boston,” you’ll see I refer to the Cub Scouts, so I’m in the Cub Scouts, and that same ability gives me the ability to talk about specific characters such as George, because then I go into his boyhood world in high school and how he lost his girlfriend to his brother. So yeah, it gives you a lot of cards to play with. It’s like a big deck of cards and you’re shuffling them, and you wanna have that ability to go in and grab a card that, you know, that you maybe would have missed, so that’s what I like about creative nonfiction. You can jump around, sort of, and you insert yourself into it if you can. I don’t always do that because, of course, I can’t write about myself not being born yet, you know, like with my grandmother, so much, but that’s why I like creative nonfiction. I really do. That’s it. But the thing is, again, is like, “Oh, well, now we know Kirby is creative non-fiction.” Not necessarily, ‘cause I have plays that I’m working on right now. You know, I have had plays in New York, also. But having… you know, not to be pigeon-holed, that’s the main thing. And that’s what I rebelled against in graduate school.

RR: Absolutely. And as someone who’s semi-new to the creative nonfiction genre, or the nonfiction genre in whole, I always had this preconceived notion of it being a very mundane, boring way of storytelling. But your story, “New Boston,” really caught the editors’ eyes because it is so, almost fantastical. I had to check to make sure it was supposed to be nonfiction, you know? And I absolutely loved it because of that. And so it does take place, on a drive from Colorado to New Boston. Is that semi-based on your semester at the University of Colorado at Boulder?

KW: Absolutely, because my buddy, who was a black belt in karate, he needed someone to tag along and ride shotgun within his Catalina. And I was kind of at that point where I was sort of in a rebellion phase because I was sort of a Goody Two-shoes in high school. And I needed that. And what I discovered about that is the power of travel, and it is incredibly powerful because you’re in a new environment, and the now is there. It’s on the road, it’s in front of you, you know, so everything is brand new and fresh for even if it’s a bad area or whatever, it’s still fresh. So that’s, the power of travel. And for me, I’ve been getting calls from Europe and Asia and so forth to come and teach. So, one of my first calls came from Hong Kong. And when I went over there, well, I’ve never been, you know, to that neck of the woods, and I’ve never even been to Europe before I started getting offers to teach. So that’s the one thing I would impress upon new writers is, don’t be hesitant to travel. And don’t be hesitant to apply to residencies overseas. Because all of that opens up… that’ll open up a whole new world for you.

RR: I also feel like one thing I loved about the piece, specifically, was the diner scene. Just the way that you completely… I feel like I’ve been in that diner a million times, a million lifetimes. Just like, every single character felt so real. The things they were arguing about, the conversations being had, the random man running from the law. I saw an earlier interview, I think it was from two years ago, where you mentioned James Joyce’s “The Dead” and how, like, with writing characters, you kind of look to that scene and being able to manage a lot of characters. How did you go through the process of writing a scene like that, that is so lively and has so many different aspects?

KW: I think what happened with me is I had a chapter in my nonfiction book about my grandmother, and I had to deal with fifty characters. Fifty. And I don’t mean just, you know, small brush strokes, I’m talking about getting into their heads. And that experience, writing from that perspective, helped me with this “on the road” story, because you get so many people suddenly at any given time. As a writer, you should be able to adopt that and write about it.

RR: Absolutely, yeah, and I think you captured that incredibly well. I wanted to go into more of the theme of “New Boston.” I feel like the first bit of it, you are there, as the reader, just like coasting along with these two characters. And then, towards the very end, you have that paragraph talking about George’s boyhood and just, you know, his maybe lack of control or grasp, and that’s kind of why he’s drawn to do all of these things. I just thought that it was great, and was that your goal to kind of like capture this, this almost ghost town feeling of somebody growing up in a small town, especially in the South?

KW: I think I was influenced in that chapter by two writers. One was Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio. And the other writer is Sinclair Lewis with Main Street. And this is something I’m struggling with right now. Where do I end up living? Where do I end up living? Do I end up living in a city, a small town, a big city, whatever? And reading those books about small towns makes me not want to ever be in one. Because, what you have is… what I discovered, especially in “New Boston,” is that you have people who know each other almost too well, and that our lives revolve around routine. “Let’s all go and meet at this, you know, blah, blah, blah.” There’s a football team. Every small town has its own little team and so forth and so on. But, you know, I thought that I feel that that can be dangerous to a writer because everything is mundane. Everything is the same. And that’s what happened with the main character in Main Street, Sinclair Lewis. Her name was Carol. She was just flummoxed. She didn’t—she wasn’t accepted, ‘cause you were perceived as an outsider. She married the town doctor. And of course, the women were jealous of that cause they all wanted to marry the town doctor. And she was an outsider, and she had lived a life of agony. She was in absolute agony. I’ve never read anything more agonizing about a woman being married to a doctor since Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

RR: I just read that in class, actually!

KW: A woman was married to a doctor and went, basically, insane—yeah, faces in the wallpaper. It does suck. So I think that small towns are great, but on the other side of the coin, I think if you really want to expand it and try a lot of different things, that a small town can also be dangerous. I think at both, I think—you know, you can find some great characters, but I also think it’s dangerous cause you’re not exploring all of the world. You’re not. You’re in one little niche.

So what I discovered on the trip is all these different towns, all these different cities. And so far, that was interesting to me, you know—and it’s sort of like in Hawaii, we have leis and we string the lei, and each one of those flowers for me was a city. So I had a lei by the time I finished the trip. And, I wore that lei, and I still wear that lei because I remember almost everything. And the weirdest thing about it all is memory, because how the heck is this guy writing about stuff that happened forty, fifty years ago? But, there was this need in me to do it, but what the funniest thing is that the first bit of writing that I did about the chapter—I mean, about the trip, was that all my English professors who said, “We’re gonna flunk you out,” “You’ve missed two weeks of school,” “Can you come up with three papers in a week?”

And I’m back in my dorm room at Baker Hall, I’m like, “What am I gonna write about?” Hello, write about the trip! It’s right there in your head! So that was the first story I turned in. I got it back, and there the professor wrote, “Because I didn’t wanna mar your paper with marks, we should have a special discussion about this.” He gave me an A, and he said, “You got any more?”

RR: And they’re not mad anymore, all of a sudden.

KW: Right? But what happened to me personally is, I sort of had a falling out with George, and this is bad, what I did to myself. I rebelled against him, and hurt myself, because I should have been writing those stories, but I didn’t want him to have that. It’s like, “You’re a jerk now. I don’t wanna share that with you.” But then, after I started figuring it out again, “What did I do that for? All this is part of your life, and you should write about it.” You know?

So that’s how I came back to it, and then we talked about “Jetty,” my story about the quarter