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Read Bjork's2001 interview with Juergen Teller from the index archives.



Kathleen Hanna discusses writing and making music in this interview from 2000 with Laurie Weeks.


Isabella Rossellini spoke with Peter Halley in this 1999 interview.


Check out our interview with Crispin Glover by Richard Kern from 2000.
Alexander McQueen's 2003 interview with Bjork.
 
  JERRY HALL
STEPHANIE SEYMORE
MARC JACOBS
  ASIA ARGENTO
DENNIS HOPPER
ABEL FERRARA
BRIAN WILSON
WILL OLDHAM
DJ SPOOKY
 

Wells Tower, 2009

WITH FRANCESCA MARI
PHOTOGRAPHED BY HATNIM LEE

 

In Wells Tower’s first book of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, happiness is a birthright that expired before the characters were born. Tower’s festering characters are defiantly themselves, and these selves might be best described as faithful to their aggressive instincts. These guys struck bloody from the womb, and seek only the contentment they expect is owed to them.
In “On the Show,” after the seventy-year-old stepfather slaps his deadbeat stepson for refusing to help out around the house, the son pins the old man on his back, then releases him, at which point the old man snaps like a rabid turtle at the boy’s balls. In the title story, a tale about Viking warriors, the leader impresses the teens in his troop by performing a “blood eagle” on an unlucky priest.  He slashes incisions on either side of the priest’s spine, sinks his hands into the wounds, and pulls out his lungs. As the priest struggles to breathe, his lungs flap slowly above his back. It’s terrible.
But blame is never easily assigned. Tower makes the reader feel for these jagged people. Ramen-like reversals send the reader's sympathies furling out in all directions. The only given is the immutability of suffering and violence. Tower never tries to rationalize cruelty. Yet, with humor, he offers redemption of a purely secular sort. 
When I talked with Tower in a big empty bar in Williamsburg a few weeks before his book came out, he was not the bitter cynic was expecting. No, he’s a civilized thirty-five-year-old, who splits his time between Brooklyn and a small home just outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He plans to teach a course at Columbia next fall. But his lack of depravity only makes him more terrifying — here's a person who can capture a flawed character, pinpoint an emotional fissure, and explode it, all in under twenty pages' worth of words.
Francesca Mari has written for The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic.


Francesca: Is there a theme that runs through this collection?

Wells: The collection is a bunch of different flying leaps of how to write a short story. It’s a real apprenticeship in short fiction. There are stories wanting to succeed with their voice, there are other stories wanting to succeed with their kind of plottiness, and there are others trying to get by on language stunts. I approached a lot of the stories with the thinking that all the short stories I’d written before had been wrong, and I was going to try to do them a different way.

Francesca: You seem to use a range of emotional voices as well.
Wells: There’s a whole spectrum of earnestness in there. Some of the stories are much more wise-ass, and then there are others in which I just sat down and just thought, “Okay I’m going to write a really, really simple, emotionally naked story that doesn’t do anything smart-ass and doesn’t do anything fancy with language, that just does the things that I’ve been afraid to do or told not to do.” “Leopard,” the story that was in the New Yorker, is one of those. It’s just a super plain, achingly emotionally naked kind of story.

Francesca: In “Leopard,” you use the second person — that’s a device that isn’t used too often.
Wells: I didn’t sit down and think, “How can I come up with a jazzy approach to this story?”I just wanted to — in as straightforward a way as possible — get into the skull of this little kid. I tried it from the first person, and it ended up being too naïve and cutesy. And I tried it from the third person, and there was too much cold puppeteerism — in the third person my view of the kid was too arch, and it was hard to achieve the kind of sympathy that I was hoping to go for. The second person was a meat-cleaver, just to get at the marrow of this kid’s experience. It’s a really chancy thing to do because I think the reader’s gut reaction is, “What do you mean ‘you?’ Fuck you — you can’t tell me how to experience this story. I’m going to experience it however I want.”That story had an emotional tenor that was very different from the stories I got accustomed to people wanting me to write.

Francesca: How did you publish your first short stories?
Wells: I just had weirdly good luck. The first two stories I wrote when I was at Columbia doing my MFA. I sent off to the slush pile at The Paris Review, and they took both of them. That’s something that’s not supposed to happen. They get fifteen to twenty thousand unsolicited manuscripts a year.

Francesca: Where did you go to undergrad?
Wells: I went to Wesleyan, in Connecticut. It was in a sort of beat up New England town.

Francesca: How’d you did you end up there?
Wells: The year before I arrived, somebody had fire-bombed the president’s office, and it just seemed like an exciting place to go to school, where people were doing interesting things. The students there worked really hard and had a lot of anxiety. They were always going through major intellectual epiphany/breakdown sorts of things. 

Francesca: After graduating, you did a bit of journalism, went to the Columbia MFA program, and then spent several years writing in North Carolina. Why did you move there?
Wells: I’d moved around so much that I really wanted to have a home base. I went on the Internet, and found this little 1,100 square-foot place out in the country. It just seemed like a perfect place for me to go. It’s good to know that I have a little lily pad to hop onto if everything completely screws up. It’s about two miles outside of Chapel Hill, which is not far in an automobile. 
 
Francesca: I read that you have two brothers.  What do they say when they read your stuff? Do they call you up?  
Wells: My younger brother Joe is actually my first reader for everything I write. He’s doing a media studies PhD at Iowa. He’s read a lot, and he’s a really ambitious reader, and he’s really good at figuring out why a story sucks if it sucks, or why it works if it works. It’s great to have that. He’s also a kind enough and decent enough person, and he has an ample enough fund of affection for me. If I write something that really sucks, I don’t feel like I’ve forever lost his faith.

Francesca: Does your family often figure in your fiction?
Wells: I’m a little gun shy about really writing from life. My feeling is that when you’re trying to take an anecdote from your real life and turn it into fiction, you lose your bearings on whether or not it’s an important story to tell. It’s important to you because it happened to you, so you kind of grade it on the curve. Anytime I import a personal incident into a piece of fiction, I tend to strip it away from all of its context. I try to will it down to a bare piece of narrative anatomy that I can use to serve the focus of a story. 

Francesca: Do your brothers see resemblances of themselves nonetheless?
Wells: They’ve actually been really cool about it. I’ve done some nonfiction about the family. I actually had a piece in last February’s GQ about the fights that I got into with my older brother.

Francesca: "Retreat" is one of my favorite stories in your new book. It’s told from the point of view of a douchey alcoholic real-estate investor who invites his younger brother, a poor composer, to visit his new cabin in Maine. They both want to repair their relationship but are too suspicious to make any headwayI read an earlier version of “Retreat,” in which the story is told from the point of view of the younger brother. How did you decide to change perspectives?
Wells: I’ve done still another iteration in the current issue of McSweeney’s. I actually had no idea which version they were going to use in my book. After I finished the revision for McSweeney’s, I sent that edit to my editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and said, “I think this is better than what we’ve got in the galleys.” It was this insane, eleventh hour thing.

Francesca: So, you’re a perfectionist.
Wells: I think it was born more out of…. self-hatred is probably the wrong term, but a kind of weird, insatiable want, which I think all writers have, to be better than we are, and not wanting to set anything in stone. Which I think is maybe a bad impulse. The impulse needs to be, “How can this story best fulfill its own limited ambition?” — instead of trying to make it something bigger and better than it’s capable of being. With that story in particular, I just started reading over the pages and got two paragraphs in, and I really just wanted to vomit. I thought, “This is so awful, it’s so bad and glib and cheap.”

Francesca: What was it that you didn't like?
Wells: I wanted to get away from simple calculi of sympathies. With that story, the whole thing was like, “Okay here’s some kind of asshole who acts like an asshole and is punished for being an asshole.” The oscillation of sympathies was so flat. To me, it’s much more interesting if these two brothers are both flawed and complicit in their misunderstanding of one another. They really want to get along, but there’s something so deeply wrong in their relationship that it’s never really going to work out. It seemed like a smart assignment to put myself in the shoes of the brother at whom I’d just taken a bunch of cheap potshots in the earlier draft.
 
Francesca: In “Door in Your Eye,” I like the description of Albert, the father who moves in with his middle-aged daughter.  He keeps a diary full of grievances, but realizes he sounds like a cheap newspaperman, so he stops and starts writing about the weather instead. People do tend to record the worst.
Wells: I took that from my own journal keeping. I noticed that I was only putting in the worst, ugliest stuff I’d seen.

Francesca: When did you keep a journal?
Wells: I still do.

Francesca: Regularly?
Wells: More like when there’s an incident. Or when I travel. I keep a really careful journal. I was doing it a lot a year ago in the fall. I was doing a lot of work up at the Public Library on 42nd Street, going up there to revise my story collection. That was a really boring, boring, boring period of my journal… although there was a fair amount going on there. There was the Korean woman who would show up everyday and just talk to her cuff for six or seven hours and an older professor-type who had an amazing record picking up women. I would see this guy just show up, and he would always leave with some woman on his arm. There’s a funny little ecology down there. It’s really great to have that file to be able to go back and leaf through it for fiction, But I wind up doing journal entries in a really cynical, weird writerly way — I’m not trying to write to make myself a better, more reflective person. I’m just trying to take as much of the world as I can to turn it into fiction.

Francesca: Have you ever tried blogging?
Wells: No… the idea of blogging seems really weird. I don’t know why writers do it. The idea of writing in a way that’s not careful seems kind of insane if you’re a fiction writer, or a long-form nonfiction writer. Maybe there’s something invigorating about it, but for me so much of the process is worrying about every word — just belching a bunch of stuff out there seems strange. Also the web is really weird. I don’t like the idea that stuff you write is just going to be on there, and people will be able to access it whenever, forever. A piece of writing should have its own little half-life and when people are no longer interested in reading or anthologizing, it should be forgotten.

Francesca: Who’s your ideal reader?
Wells: I suppose I write for people who are expecting the usual satisfactions of a short story. 

Francesca: That’s an interesting idea — that short stories have “usual satisfactions.”
Wells: I feel that people read short stories because they want the same sort of plot satisfaction that we get out of hearing someone’s anecdote. At the same time, we want the anecdote expanded to the magnitude of a life-altering moment. We want that formal shape in which you’ve got an introduction and a development and a punch line. If your story doesn’t have that justifying moment, then people are going to feel like they’ve been told an unsatisfying, shaggy-dog tale. That’s the burden with the short story, or at least the burden that I tend to feel.

Francesca: Despite your subject matter, the structure of your work is very traditional.
Wells: I was doing an interview with a British magazine a little while ago, and the guy basically called me out on writing traditional short stories. “Yeah you’re not really doing anything new with form. Why do we need more short stories that are written in this traditional mode?” And whatever I said was inadequate. What I should have said was that we don’t stop living, and we don’t stop wanting to perceive our lives in terms of life-altering narrative moments, and we don’t stop wanting life to matter in this maybe fraudulent way in which narrative architecture makes incidents in our lives seem to matter. If people stopped being interested in these kinds of stories, the publishing industry and Hollywood would have shut down seventy years ago.

Francesca: How are you able to understand your characters’ cruelty so thoroughly? You seem like an even-keeled guy.
Wells: I am even-keeled. I think some of it comes from my non-fiction work, spending a lot of time with people, getting to know them, and getting inside their heads. I also believe that human beings are capable of so much more cruelty and acts of more savage self-interest than you can convincingly put in a work of fiction. You don’t have to look too hard for examples of people being cruel. People are cruel to one another constantly.

Francesca: Is that a scar I see on your chin?
Wells: I was playing floor hockey in college and somebody bashed me. So I went to the emergency room to have my chin sewn up. I could tell that this woman who had sewn it up had done a miserable job on it — it looked like a pork roast — she had just sort of lashed it together. It was really awful. I looked at her and said, “Yeah thanks for stopping the bleeding and everything, but it looks like it’s going to leave a really awful scar,” and she looked at me and said, “What do you care, you’re a guy,” and she turned on her heels and left. I suppose she was going through a bad divorce or something. It’s funny — that that was enough to shut me up. Actually, last year during the primary season, I went down to South Carolina to volunteer for Obama, and I was in a bar down there, and I met a drunk nurse who offered to take me back to her apartment to perform corrective surgery on this botched job. I was close to taking her up on it. She said, “Somebody did a terrible job, I could totally fix that.”







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