It has been remarked that though the day may come when web publishing will make or break an author, that time is not here yet. The Paumanok Review is proud to make the prognostication that Andrew L. Wilson will be the writer who brings web publishing to the forefront of literary consideration.

Anyone who has spent a few minutes perusing the web's best journals is familiar with the work, if not the story, behind Wilson's name. He has a few good reasons for that. Though Wilson's writing started early "By the age of four," he claims his writing career is still getting underway. Now in his late thirties, Wilson has a youthfully enthusiastic attitude about writing and publication. "I've always wanted it, and it's very exciting to see it happen."

His approach to writing has gone through many transformations: for most of his twenties, he wrote only poetry. "I had some success with publication and prizes, and attended the Boston University Creative Writing Program, which has spawned such writers as Sue Miller, Jhumpa Lahiri and Ha Jin. Yet I found that, as a poet, I couldn't do everything I wanted to do. I feel that I can engage readers more emotionally as a novelist, essayist or short story writer. The stance of a lyrical poet is irritatingly Olympian. A prose writer plays in the dirt with the rest of the world."

So, although he shamefacedly confesses that he has not yet abandoned poetry completely -- "I've had some recent poetical efforts published in the fine online journal Mudlark" -- these days Wilson concentrates his considerable energies on writing fiction. "I started out writing short stories -- I always wanted to write a novel. As an adolescent, I read obsessively, often at the rate of a book per day. Whenever I had a clear vision of the future, I always saw myself writing. And I hoped to live an adventurous life, if only in order to provide myself with good writing material."

Wilson grew up, he says, "perpetually on the move". He estimates that, between the ages of twelve and nineteen, he lived in at least seven different states. "No, my father was not in the military -- he was a con artist. I'm writing a long memoir about him." Last year, at Francis Ford Coppola's Blancaneaux resort in Belize, Wilson read part of this still evolving book aloud to an audience of fellow writers, including Pinckney Benedict, Terry MacMillan and Melissa Bank, and the response was "ecstatic."

Wilson's peripatetic youth was partly to blame for the fact that, after dropping out of 5th grade, he did not go back to school until college. He earned his High School Equivalency instead. "I have the certificate framed and hung on the wall next to my Ph.D. diploma."

Another result of so much travel so early on in life, Wilson says, is that he feels "oddly at home in train stations and diners. I like to write in airport bars. In fact, I'm trying to get a publisher to give me an advance for a travel guide to the world's international airports -- rating them on their facilities and comforts the way Michelin rates restaurants, with detailed descriptions of each. (So far, I rate Rome's Fumicello airport highest. Four stars. The espresso bars are exquisitely clean, and [it] has the most chic and painfully beautiful women staffing the cosmetics counters and duty free shops.")

Wilson overflows with ideas for writing projects. "So many I can't possibly tackle them all. I need a secretary, maybe a ghostwriter or two -- a field staff." But when he actually sits down to write, he is capable of prodigious feats of concentration. "I can block out all the sound and fury so that, even in the midst of a crowded bar, I feel alone with language. On my best days, I write like one possessed -- at the end of a day's work, I can sometimes shut my notebook on two or even three thousand words."

So how does the doctorate Wilson earned from Boston College (in English literature, "that most sublimely useless of all subjects") fit into his idea of a writing career? "I'm not sure yet. Right now I don't teach, although I do not rule out that possibility for the future. Some of the work was challenging and vivid. And I had to become conversant in the tongues of various competing academic factions -- structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis, the New (now Old -- but not Oldest) Historicism, etc. I personally was most attracted by phenomenology, which meant I marched to the beat of a Heideggerean drummer while everyone else was doing the Karl Marx rumba or the Lacan hustle."

At Boston College, Wilson wrote his dissertation on David Plante, "a brilliant novelist and, for me, the most significant literary figure in contemporary American letters. A writer who uses stark, clear language to deal with awareness as such, and in the process reveals -- in novel after novel -- what an endlessly mysterious phenomenon this awareness really is. A common reaction to reading him is to realize, with a shock, that up until now one has been taking one's mind for granted."

"Despite my chagrin about aspects of the dissertation -- I thought it overly academic -- it led to my becoming friends with David Plante. He happened to read it, and wrote me kind letter thanking me for the attention to his work and confirming some of my insights. Then, when I completed my first novel, Fragments (1998, as yet unpublished) I sent the manuscript to him at his London address. A little over a month later, I received a long handwritten letter from him postmarked Paros, the Greek island where he goes during the summers to write. He had picked up the ms. in London and brought it down to Greece with him. He started out by declaring that he had read it 'all in one sitting,' and went on to praise the writing as 'wonderfully clear, sharp-edged, and solid' -- exactly the qualities I'd labored so hard to create."

"Although the book was flatly rejected by every publisher I approached, Plante's overwhelming response to my work encouraged me to compose more novels and short stories. Some of the stories have already appeared in print and Web publications.

"However, since then I've moved away from fragmentariness to writing about characters whose lives I attempt to understand both objectively and, if possible, from inside. My most recent novel, King Crab, is a literary crime-noir. Set along stretch of sparsely traveled coastal highway near San Diego, it deals with some sixteen different characters whose lives intersect and get transformed during a single night. It is now making the rounds of agents. As I wrote it, I remembered how much I used to enjoy genre fiction as a child. And gangster movies."

Wilson is now hard at work on two novels -- the ones excerpted here. His literary satire, Clever, is now being serialized in Andrei Codrescu's online journal, Exquisite Corpse. But he still finds the time to edit and publish Linnaean Street: A Web Literary Quarterly, a new online magazine which has been drawing rave reviews for its "beauty" and "elegance."

"My idea is to publish up-and-coming writers alongside more established literary figures. I wanted to give these superb talents a cleanly designed venue in which the emphasis would not be on the cleverness, rakish good looks or winning personality of the writer, but on the enigmatic power of the written word. The design of Linnaean Street is meant to suggest traces of ink on paper. I try to make it as tactile as possible -- a way of playing off the ghostliness of the electronic medium. I feel that writing on the Web, while by necessity often shorter and more fragmentary than in print, can have every bit as powerful and lasting an effect."

 

Read more of Andrew L.
Wilson's work in TPR:

Easter in Sicily Novel Excerpts The Dead Flood (1.2)