An Interview with Callan Wink
As part of our ongoing author interview series, our contributing features editor Jamie Kahn spoke with author Callan Wink, whose work has been published in the New Yorker, Granta, and The Best American Short Stories. They discuss the influences of masculinity and the American West in his work, what it's like working outside of the traditional literary circles, and his current projects.
Callan Wink is the author of the short story collection, Dog Run Moon. His novel, August, published in 2020, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Wink lives in Montana where he is a fly-fishing guide.
Jamie Kahn: Your novel, August, started off as a short story in Dog Run Moon. What made you want to take that story in particular and grow it into a novel? Did you have the idea that it might work as a novel from the beginning?
Callan Wink: I definitely didn't have the idea when I wrote the story first that it would eventually be a novel. I didn't know how to go about writing a novel—and I still don't think I really do. I was a lot more comfortable writing short stories and I had written a few short stories with the same character. And as I was getting pressured by my publisher to finish the novel, I was like, “Well, there's a way I could probably turn this into a novel.” And that's kind of how it happened.
It came out during the pandemic. How did that impact your experience of its release?
Yeah, that was a weird time. And quite honestly, it was just sort of like: who cares about another literary novel written by a dude in Montana when everything's going on that was going on? I think it was met with a great yawn, understandably, by most folks. That's just how it goes. Timing is crucial. It is what it is. It was a novel I wrote and, pretty much immediately after publishing it, I was more interested in trying to write something different. So that's how I'm trying to approach it.
You’ve said previously that your stories come from a place of reality, whether it’s anecdotal things that you hear from other people or your own life. How do you see this as part of the evolution of your writing in terms of subject matter and style?
I always admire these writers that can completely reinvent themselves with every book and just do things that are wildly different. I, unfortunately, don't think I have that level of creativity. I think part of it is the environment I've been in for the last 20 years. I have this familiarity with it. It's harder for me to, for instance, set a story in a place I’ve just visited once or twice, or that I've never been to. A lot of my characters are shaped by setting [and] I get stuck in these details of how things are and how things should look, even if it's not directly important to the story. Having intimate familiarity with the setting is pretty important for me.
For better or for worse, I'm going to be stuck writing things that I'm familiar with, but the good thing is there's no shortage of material. If you're being observant, one of the great things about where I live—just a small town in the West—is there are a lot of really interesting personalities in my little town. I suppose that's true of every small town, but it seems more so to me than the Midwest town I grew up in. [I’ve noticed that in] the American West people's personalities sometimes grow to fit their environment. You know, the goldfish in a tank sort of thing. Most of the things I've written have gotten their start in different ways, I don't think there's necessarily always one place I start, but I have a lot of crazy people that I associate with on a daily basis and there’s some good story material for sure. I just try to keep my eyes up.
Reading your work I noticed themes reflecting on masculinity, masculine labor and action in particular. Are you trying to engage with that intentionally or subvert it? Or is it something that you're not thinking about, that just comes naturally?
You know, when it comes down to it, that’s just the men I grew up around. Most of [them] don't necessarily read on a daily basis, but I think, no matter what you do, you're trying to impress the people that are important to you in your life and for me, a lot of those people are men. That's maybe a simplistic way to look at it, but I'm trying to think of my ideal reader—someone I would want to appreciate something I've written. I want to write a story that my friends would appreciate.
That’s interesting, especially because your audience reaches beyond those types of men. Do you feel like there's a clash with the fact that a lot of your work has also been lovingly scooped up and adopted by New York City literary types?
That is fine, and it also gets, you know, criticized heavily by New York literary folks as well. So I think it goes both ways. A lot of the folks who are a part of the literary scene such as it is, live in quite a bit different environment than the one I live in. There's a sort of wanting to fetishize, somewhat, the American West, and while there's some of that, people are also fascinated by what's different. I like reading about people in places that are different from where I live, too. So, to me it makes sense.
A Refugee Crisis, which was published in the New Yorker between books, really stands out to me. It has a different texture from the rest of your work. What was the origin or the process of creating that story?
In particular, I had read a novel by Rachel Cusk, Outline, that just struck me. Sometimes when you’re writing a story and you're reading something, either at the same time or right after, you kind of absorb that other writer's style, whether you want to or not. Honestly, that had a lot to do with it. It's not a form that I generally have done or do much, but that self-referential narrator sort of thing that Rachel Cusk does, for whatever reason, was in my head when I wrote that story.
You don’t really talk about writing these days. Is there a reason why?
I don't really have many friends who are writers at this point, so [writing is] kind of a seasonal job for me that I do by myself. It’s something I do and don't talk about regularly, which is okay. I was teaching for a little while, so I had to do some of that, but I haven't taught or been a part of any sort of writing community in quite a while now. Half my year I don't write at all because I’m fishing. I'm just coming off of that season.
So, can I ask what you are working on at the moment?
The short answer is I'm hardly working on anything. I do some commercial writing for some small outdoor films, for the money basically. I just finished fishing guiding a week or so ago. What I have right now is essentially three novellas that I'm kind of finishing editing, and we're going to see if we can sell them. It’s the sort of thing publishers don't really like because it's not a novel, but it's also not a short story collection. So I’ve got to work on that this month and then start something new after that.
I’ve found that I like writing novellas; it's not quite as much of a commitment as a novel, but you don't need quite as many story ideas as you’d need for a collection. I think the longer you write, the harder it is to just continually come up with good short story ideas. When you have a good idea, developing it into a longer thing is actually easier than continuing to burn up your beginnings and endings. The novella was kind of like a nice sweet spot in between both of those forms, but no one really likes the novella other than probably other writers. It’s one of those weird forms. I think they’re pretty good. Whether or not anyone will take a chance on or not, we'll see. Fingers crossed.
Jamie Kahn is the contributing features editor at Epiphany, and has written for Glamour, Brooklyn Magazine, Huffpost, The Los Angeles Review, Epiphany, and others.
