Kevin Wilson Author Event/Chapbook Contest Finalist
One month ago, yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending an author event featuring Ann Patchett and Kevin Wilson—with a conversation between the two on stage at Calvin University’s Fine Arts Center and a book signing afterward—and the greater pleasure of being accompanied by my beautiful, tolerant, and accommodating wife at the event. While the prospect of me attending alone, with my birthday looming, likely added the required guilt to coax her into coming, still I appreciated her being there by my side (especially as I was one of maybe seven males in a crowd of around 1,000, and probably the only male in attendance who had not been dragged there by his significant other). And when the talk concluded, she helped me double my efforts by standing in line for Ann Patchett’s signature in my copy of Tom Lake, while I waited for Kevin Wilson’s signature in his novel, Nothing To See Here. After securing each author’s signature, my wife then went above and beyond the call of duty to attain this personalized note (image below) from Kevin Wilson to slip into a copy of his first novel, The Family Fang, as a birthday gift for me two days later. This, of course, shows how amazing my wife is, but also how humble and kind Kevin Wilson is, which was well reflected in his conversation with Ann Patchett on stage at the auditorium.
While it was great to hear humanizing stories from famous authors of that ilk—Ann sharing that she wrote all of Tom Lake while walking at a treadmill desk and then fretting about her friend Kevin’s posture as he habitually writes slumped over his laptop in bed, for example—my greatest takeaways from that event were the generous and creative act of my wife, the unique signature it yielded, and the motivation to read another Kevin Wilson novel.
The reason I am writing today, aside from bragging about meeting one of my writing heroes, is to recommend Kevin Wilson’s work to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. I cherish how he embraces the weird but with a human touch. Never is that more evident than in The Family Fang, which I just finished reading. I will spare you my amateur book review, and just say that The Family Fang became my favorite of his novels after only a few chapters, which surprised me considering how much Nothing to See Here has inspired my own reading and writing.
There is one more reason for this post. For those of you who, understandably, wonder what the hell I could be doing with my time over here, I figured I should share some news on the writing front. My prose chapbook, Gaslighting—a collection of flash fiction and short stories—was recently named a finalist in the 2024 Eggtooth Chapbook Competition. More to come on that soon.
In the meantime, for any of you who haven’t yet discovered the joy of flash fiction (usually defined as a story of 1,000 words or less), I’ve included some links below to a few good online journals that feature that genre (and provide the content for free). So as not to seem biased, I’ve chosen journals here that have not published my work in the past (though that’s a bit like throwing a dart off the end of a pier and finding water).
Happy Reading!