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A conversation with Wells Tower. Listen to program
Wells Tower and his stories make me terribly homesick. His first book, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned has turned the whole of the literary world on its ear. But when he deftly compares the North Carolina sun to a canned peach, he is speaking to me and I am parched for home. It isn’t fair of me, really, knowing him as little as I do, but there is something strangely small town and adjacent about our lives. Back in North Carolina, Wells hung out on the front porch of the party house across the street from our party house on Mitchell Lane. Our band’s drummer taught third grade to his band’s drummer’s brother. In the heat of the summer, he was most likely at band practice while I was sitting in the attic of a humid farmhouse trying to write short stories and become, in some magical, unpredictable explosion, a writer. Wells, with his secret combination of sweat, self-deprecation, and precise, acute genius, became that writer. He splits his time between New York City, North Carolina and artist colonies that won’t let me in. He has a fiction desk without Internet connection, where he often writes longhand. I caught up with Wells in New York, where we talked like old friends bumping into each other far from home. One day, when I abandon city life to return to the quiet repose of that good place where I am from, I will not be surprised to wave to Wells across the yard when collecting the mail. After all, we’ve always been neighbors.
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