Today we’re fortunate to have the two-time-Pushcart-nominated writer Phoebe Wilcox in the Metaview hot seat. Her work has been featured at Blue Print Review, The Northville Review, decomP and many others. Her micro-story “Book Killer” is ripping up the meta-story space at Metazen this week.
Metazen: Your first novel, Angels Carry the Sun, due out in August 2010 from Lilly Press (That’s like right now. Congratulations!). Why is it that everyone always asks you if it’s autobiographical?
Phoebe: Well, because of the storyline. It’s about a teenage girl who falls in love with her married high school teacher, so right off the bat, everyone is dying to know if I ever ended up in a school janitor’s closet with my favorite teacher. The answer is no! I know that there are plenty of people who wouldn’t have minded at all if this had happened to them though, so I think it’s a fairly universal topic.
Metazen: What was the process like getting published?
Phoebe: I love how this happened for me. The book took me over twenty years (on and off) to write. Then finally one day I woke up and realized that I wanted to do something with my writing and to be involved in some sort of writing scene. I wanted to “come out of the closet.” There was a notice in the paper about an open-mic reading event at a café in a nearby town and I started going to these whenever they had one. It was there that I met Judith Lawrence of the River Poets Journal and Lilly Press. She enjoyed the material that I read at the café and eventually read the first chapter of Angels Carry the Sun in Wild River Review online. At that time I was in the process of going through the Writers’ Market to find potential publishers but I didn’t have an agent and the number of literary publishers was kind of limited. After a few months I’d submitted to every company in that book that I could and had gotten a lot of kind rejections from people that said basically, “Sorry, the economy is bad and we’re not taking anyone new. Good luck to you.” By that time though I’d started getting stories and poems published in a lot of online lit mags. I started to think about submitting to some of the small presses that I saw around on the internet. It was just as I was getting ready to do this that Judith approached me with the offer to publish my book. And she didn’t have to ask twice. When she read the thing in its entirety she said, “I knew it!” This sounds pretty crazy, but she says I’ve actually replaced F. Scott Fitzgerald as her favorite author. And she’s one of my favorite people too now; we’ve become very close. She’s a poet, an artist, and a survivor. It’s a mutual appreciation society.
Metazen: Twenty years. The story must have taken a few turns in that time. Could you let us in on the process? Did the story go through dramatic changes in that time?
Phoebe: I hardly even remember. There were a few periods of dormancy. But it started out really chaotic and overly full of adjectives. I thought that recreating reality on the page necessitated about six adjectives per sentence. For a long time I actually called myself, “Queen of the Adjectives.” My sentences were so cumbersome and overly literary, maybe sort of stream-of-consciousness too. I wanted to get the total feel of outer and inner reality on the page. It resulted in a big mess. I don’t actually remember plot changes at all, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen; I’m sure they did. I do know that one pivotal moment was improved upon after an editor friend read it and saw an opportunity for one of the characters to achieve a level of redemption that she’d been denied earlier in the story. That was very helpful—and I want to remember things like that for the next book—not stylistic issues (which have always been so much my focus) but expository issues.
Metazen: You’ve published quite a few shorter works. Is there a story you’re particularly proud of? And how did it come together?
Phoebe: Yes, it’s called “Revel with Me,” a piece of flash fiction published in Calliope Nerve. I like it because it was one of those pieces that arrived fast and furious without a huge amount of hand-wringing—and it happens to be almost completely metaphorical. This character’s internal emotional life is anthropomorphized in great detail. It’s not really about a nymph, or reveling, or dancing, or nature. It’s just about alienation, loneliness as experienced within oneself and within a relationship. I sort of turned the emotions inside out and exposed everything I could. It was a “self-help” sort of project for me.
Metazen: I like your description of how the story “arrived”: like a dinner guest. How do you write when the guest doesn’t arrive on time or is surly when he finally gets there? Do you have techniques to cure writer’s block?
Phoebe: If the block is there but I still feel like writing I just write anyway. Whether I do a good job or not, writing something is better than nothing and sometimes I end up with something that isn’t half bad. Or maybe it is half bad but there happens to be at least one sentence that makes it worthwhile. Just picking an arbitrary subject and writing about it, like an artist painting a still life, is something I’ve done. In college I tried writing to music—Andy Summers and Robert Fripp—wound up with a girl on a swing and flowering fruit trees, I think. What I do nowadays is take a kernel of truth and embellish the hell out of it.
Metazen: Can you share some writers who have influenced the way you think about writing?
Phoebe: I’d have to start with the authors I read early in life, from childhood on up through my twenties. When I was a kid my favorite books were the Oz books. L. Frank Baum was incredibly imaginative and whimsical. He created entire worlds apart in which to live. It provided the perfect escape for me. As a teen my favorite author was Paul Zindel. He was humorous and wrote with emotional power. When I read him I could tell he was going out of his way to encourage teenagers everywhere to buck up under whatever difficulties or dysfunctionalities they were dealing with and try to be strong. His characters were all underdogs dealing with lots and lots of adult-inflicted weirdness in their lives. I can definitely see the whimsy of Oz and the humor and caring of Zindel in my current writing. I enjoyed Gabriel Garcia Marquez and have incorporated some magical realism into my writing blood also. My newest literary discovery though is the Irish writer, John Banville. He comes up with decent plots that don’t rely heavily on sex or violence to propel them along; there are no cheap gimmicks with Banville as far as I can tell. And his writing style is very poetic—and so sensual. If I were rich, I’d pay John Banville to come to my house and just write sensual things for one full day of my life! What fun that would be! My writing style is sensual too but I didn’t pick it up from him—I was doing that before. I may have gotten that from Nabokov or Oscar Wilde or D. H. Lawrence—or just myself.
Metazen: Are you working on any other writing projects right now?
Phoebe: Yes, my second novel is called Flower Symbolism for Dummies and it’s about a woman who befriends members of a local intentional community/CSA farm and gets a job reading for a very mentally agile centenarian lady. This book is about friendship, romance, betrayal, and emotional winter and sexual awakening. It’s in a very fun, chaotic state right now and I’m enjoying it. I have also partially begun a third novel too. It’s called Venus and her Crown of Thorns and it’s about a female stalker who believes that a rising new-age musician is in love with her. I’m not quite sure yet how dark I’m going to get with it. I do not want it to be at all cliché. These books are both coming so much easier than Angels Carry the Sun did. That was hard because I was teaching myself as I went along how to write a novel in the first place. But it was worth it. Now I know!
Metazen: What advice would I give a young writer?
Phoebe: Practice a lot. Try to accept constructive criticism and be flexible. Do not “submit” to magazines, “bombard” them. Don’t be too easily discouraged. The amount of work you actually manage to publish in ratio to what you send out is utterly ridiculous. You have to send mounds and mounds out to get molehills published. But, as in anything, perseverance (together with talent) should pay off. Most of all though, if you don’t love it, don’t do it. Do it for the love of it.
Metazen: Thanks for being part of The Metaview, Phoebe, and we wish you loads of success with Angels Carry the Sun (out in August 2010).
For more information about Phoebe Wilcox, visit her HERE. Read her micro-story “Book Killer” up now in the meta-story space at Metazen HERE.
