Quotes & Notes: In Praise of Perpetual Self-Reinvention
by Steven Wingate
In commemoration of the recent death of a brilliant experimental fictionist, we revisit this 2009 meditation by Steven Wingate on the words of his mentor Steve Katz.
Steven Wingate is the author of the novels Of Fathers and Fire (2019) and The Leave-Takers (2021), both part of the Flyover Fiction Series from the University of Nebraska Press. His short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) won the Bakeless Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has taught at the University of Colorado, the College of the Holy Cross, and South Dakota State University, where he is currently associate professor of English.
In commemoration of the recent death of a brilliant experimental fictionist, we revisit this 2009 meditation by Steven Wingate on the words of his mentor Steve Katz.
“I come from patriarchy, and I would like to have written myself out of it. Strong female forces commanded several generations. The women were bent and sometimes destroyed by the pressure to submit, and the stories, the narrative drives, kept coming up male.” Terese Svoboda talks with Steven Wingate about her new short story collection and our species’ long-term relationship with the open spaces of the Midwest.
“It was only then that I realized I’d started a new novel, and I just kept going.” Steven Wingate talks with Chip Cheek, author of Cape May, about shifting gears, the shock and elation of a big release, and letting parenthood change your writing life.
“For me, the setting of a novel is the novel in many ways, and it seems right to devote time and space to establishing the geography and history of the place. This forms a frame inside which the rest of the story takes place.” Andrew Michael Hurley talks with Steven Wingate about rural England, the “ghost story” spirit, and developing writerly patience.
Steve Wingate makes his first trip to the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute to learn how books make their way into the hands of booksellers, and thereby into the hands of readers.
“I think all honest, literary effort reflects the fact that we humans are imprisoned by our cultures. It isn’t so much getting the internal conflict onto the page, it is letting it come out.”
“Imagine two thousand people reading your interactive novel and each having completely unique story experiences. To me it sounded like the future—and I, as a writer who believes in exploring new storytelling tools, wanted a piece of it.” Returning to his “Quotes & Notes” series, Steven Wingate explores the pleasures and pitfalls of writing interactive fiction.
“So in the novel I’m driving at the idea that justice and freedom don’t wait. It’s not, well, you need to suffer just a little more and then things are going to be peachy in fifty years. No. That was the rationale for colonialism and you can see the wreckage that left behind.”
“The great pleasure of reading is to be able to fill in and anticipate, and I want to provide that pleasure to my readers as well”: Adrian Koesters talks with Steven Wingate about Baltimore in the 1950s and writing her debut novel, Union Square.
“Twenty-five years ago, serious writers in Idaho were denying the [regional] label in any way they could. Today the climate has changed. One of my students complained, ‘You’re from Montana. I’m just from New Jersey and I have nothing to write about.’” Mary Clearman Blew talks with Steven Wingate about writing the West and her new novel, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin.
