Four Questions on Farsickness: Steven Wingate

Four Questions on Farsickness is an interview series with creative writers for whom place is essential to their work. Each writer answers the same four questions—and featured here is novelist, short story author, and memoirist Steven Wingate, whose latest novel is Of Fathers and Fire. 1. Share a little about where you’re from. When you were growing up, what place—real or imagined—most fascinated you, and why? I’m originally from New Jersey, about eight miles west of Manhattan. My father dreamed of moving to Colorado, though he died before he could make it, so Colorado was the mythic destination of my youth. It was a place to start all over again, get away from people, and experience wilderness like you can’t in the suburbs of New York. Looking back on it, this fascination with Colorado had many layers. On one, I simply glommed on to my father’s fantasy of escaping New Jersey. Beneath that, I bought into the Western mythos—which I got plenty of from John Wayne films as a 1970s kid—with its promises of self-renewal. Deeper still, I was coming to terms with the fact that I needed to escape the homeland just as badly as my father did. After he died and my family exploded, my mom wanted to escape too. Naturally she took me to Colorado because the seed was already planted. Now Colorado is my home even though I don’t live there anymore.   2. What travel has been a particular inspiration to your work? Road trips shaped me, and it wasn’t just because I read Kerouac’s On the Road at seventeen. Having an early automotive migratory experience—the drive from New Jersey to Colorado—gave me a sense of rootlessness that was facilitated and abetted by the automobile. A car could not only get you from one place to another, but actually take you from being one person to being another. This became an unspoken mantra for me. In my twenties and early thirties I used to love driving through the American West without any particular destination. I’d imagine myself living in middle of nowhere towns like Jerome, Arizona or Glenns Ferry, Idaho, believing—like my father, I guess—that geographical fresh starts were also psychological ones. I cultivated this a bit too fervently, to the point where I couch surfed a lot and at some points lived out of my car. I think that’s why so many of my fictional characters are transient people, either newly arrived in a place or desperate to escape it. I suppose I write what I know.   3. Where do you “escape to” to recharge creativity? I like to visit cities and oceans, both of which give me the same feeling for different reasons. I get subsumed by them, recognize my essential smallness in comparison to them. It’s a humbling, self-emptying feeling that shakes loose a lot of things inside me and creates a vulnerability that helps me creatively, especially when I’m about to launch onto a new project. I need the freedom that comes with feeling like I’m a tiny speck in the universe. When I’m in cities, I like to walk around the way Charles Dickens used to. I want to feel the place on a human scale and smell what the people living there smell. I’m also a bit of a nut about figuring out the public transportation system of any city I go to. When I’m by the ocean, I like to let it pummel me. I get in and let the waves hit my chest and knock me over. It’s a very tenderizing experience, and it makes me humble enough to try new things. 4. Where would you most like to travel to next? Decades ago my high school paper interviewed a teacher and asked her, as a final question, “Is there anything else you want to talk about?” Her answer was one word: “Portugal.” Ever since then I’ve had Portugal stuck in my mind as a place where I can lose my old self and try on a new one. Portugal has oceans and cities, right? I can walk around and get to know the public transportation system and jump into the ocean so it can pummel me. I feel a pull toward Portugal the way I felt my father’s pull toward Colorado when I was a child, and my dream of the place is a lot like the dreams I had when I drove through the American West wondering who I’d be in those tiny nowhere towns. It’s the dream of a new self and a new understanding of life. If I get to Portugal—which at this point is a tenuously realistic retirement fantasy—my circumstances will be very different than they were in my twenties. By the time my wife and I get there, our kids will be taking road trips of their own. My body won’t be as strong as it used to be, but your body doesn’t have to be strong to get lost in a place. I might not be able to walk as far or take as much pounding from the ocean as I used to. But as long as I can move my feet and let the waves wash over me, I’ll believe that a place can make me new.   Steven Wingate’s works include the novel Of Fathers and Fire, published by the University of Nebraska Press in April 2019, the digital memoir daddylabyrinth, which premiered at the Singapore Art/Science Museum in 2014, and the short story collection Wifeshopping, which won the Bakeless Prize from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2008. He is an associate professor at South Dakota State University and associate editor at FictionWritersReview.com. Find him online at stevenwingate.com, on Twitter (@stwingate) and on Facebook (@stevenwingateauthor).