A Short Interview w/ Terrance Wedin
+ submissions open now and audio for stories starting to become available!
A few quick notes, before we get to our interview with Terrance Wedin about his really wonderful and brilliant story, “Advocate,” published last Tuesday.
Submissions are open now! They’ll be open for the rest of the month. Would love to see some stories from friends and favorite writers, would love to see some new names and discover some new fave writers! Looking for stories in the 3k-8k word range; I pay $100 + commission original art (and also pay artist $100) to pair with accepted stories! Spread the word!
Have started uploading audio of authors reading their stories in the archives. Am adding them piecemeal, as they come in, here and there. With this updated we’ve got two more, both stunners (as both stories and the authors’ readings of them!)
Reminder that stories are always free; interviews with authors are an added bonus for paid subscribers. Paid subscriptions help me pay writers and artists!
Aaron Burch: I'm kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?
Terrance Wedin: The seed of the story was that it basically happened. I was a real piece of shit at that time in my life. I was dating one of the most incredible, smart, and kind women I've known, someone who is (miraculously) still a close friend today. But I was in bad shape. I worked at a bar in Austin that had very little oversight. I drank non-stop. Did whatever drug you put in front of me. I was immature and not dealing with a lot of deep emotional bullshit that I wasn't equipped to face yet. Then I woke up and found blood in the toilet and ended up in the hospital. You'd think the whole experience would be rock bottom, but it wasn't.
A couple years later, I left Texas when I got into an MFA program. I was alone in a little studio apartment in the midwest grappling with a lot of my previous bad behavior when I wrote the first draft of this story. I wasn't sober yet. It took a few more years to get to that point. But I was thinking about Amy Hempel's story "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" and that narrator's immense guilt and regret at not being there for her friend dying of cancer. I just thought about flipping that story on its head. A static narrator who can't escape the guilt or the person connected to it.
It definitely feels honest/true/lived in, which no matter how much of it actually happened, is such a big part of why the story works.
I've been reading Nick Rees Gardner's Delinquents lately, and just listened to a podcast interview with him where he talked about avoiding writing about drugs for a long time. How he didn't want to write into the cliche “drug story.” I know for many of us, Jesus' Son looms so large, but also just in general, the “drug story” and just generally authors writing about moments in their lives when they were “real pieces of shit” is so common across literature and can easily into cliche and being too easy, among any number of other problems. Did you have any similar hesitations about writing about this time and this material, and/or can you talk about how to tackle it and maybe avoid those traps?
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