Steven Wingate fiction & more
Wifeshopping
Stories by Steven Wingate
Winner of the 2007 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
A Mariner Original from Houghton Mifflin Books (July 1, 2008)
An honest, absorbing debut fiction collection, Wifeshopping centers on the ultimate human quest: the search for companionship, love, and understanding. These captivating stories feature American men, love-starved and striving, who try and often fail to connect with the women they imagine could be their wives. Some of the women are fiancees, some are new girlfriends, some are strangers who cross the men's paths for only a few hours or moments.
In “Beaching It,” an artist traveling on the summer circuit begins an affair with a rich, married local. In “Me and Paul,” a lonely traveler adopts an alter ego to help him impress a single mother. In “Bill,” a trip to a flea market highlights the essential differences between a man and his fiancée. Throughout this thoroughly entertaining read, Wingate’s sympathetic characterizations reveal both the hopefulness and the heartache behind our earnest but sometimes misguided attempts at intimacy. centers on the ultimate human quest: the search for companionship, love, and understanding. These captivating stories feature American men, love-starved and striving, who try and often fail to connect with the women they imagine could be their wives. Some of the women are fiancées, some are new girlfriends, some are strangers who cross the men’s paths for only a few hours or moments.
Stories by Steven Wingate
Winner of the 2007 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
A Mariner Original from Houghton Mifflin Books (July 1, 2008)
An honest, absorbing debut fiction collection, Wifeshopping centers on the ultimate human quest: the search for companionship, love, and understanding. These captivating stories feature American men, love-starved and striving, who try and often fail to connect with the women they imagine could be their wives. Some of the women are fiancees, some are new girlfriends, some are strangers who cross the men's paths for only a few hours or moments.
In “Beaching It,” an artist traveling on the summer circuit begins an affair with a rich, married local. In “Me and Paul,” a lonely traveler adopts an alter ego to help him impress a single mother. In “Bill,” a trip to a flea market highlights the essential differences between a man and his fiancée. Throughout this thoroughly entertaining read, Wingate’s sympathetic characterizations reveal both the hopefulness and the heartache behind our earnest but sometimes misguided attempts at intimacy. centers on the ultimate human quest: the search for companionship, love, and understanding. These captivating stories feature American men, love-starved and striving, who try and often fail to connect with the women they imagine could be their wives. Some of the women are fiancées, some are new girlfriends, some are strangers who cross the men’s paths for only a few hours or moments.
Wifeshopping Q&A (special thanks to TGV)
Q: Let’s get the autobiography question out of the way immediately. How much of Wifeshopping comes from your life?
A: Everything and nothing. If you subscribe to Chekov’s dictum that all characters you create are some distilled aspect of yourself—and I do—then all of the characters in the collection are to some extent autobiographical. This goes for the women as well as the men. You can’t create believable characters without knowing them intimately, and that knowledge starts in the dark corners of the self that fictional characters crawl out of without the writer even noticing. On the other hand, there isn’t a single character in the book that directly represents a live individual that I knew. Ex-girlfriends have called to ask me “Am I in it?”; but I couldn’t write fiction using a real-life model for my characters, because it simply wouldn’t be an imaginative process. It would be a documentary process, and that isn’t conducive to fiction.
Q: So what exactly is the relationship between the book and your life?
A: On an individual level the stories come from life—not from relationships I’ve had but from small things I observed that incited my imaginative curiosity. Each one was first drafted between 1991 and 1999, between the end of a failed “starter” marriage and the run-up to a successful one that, so far, has survived through six years and two children. So I was definitely “wifeshopping” in literal reality while I wrote the stories, trying to figure out, on both a conscious and an unconscious, creative level, what marriage meant and what it required. The conscious level of figuring ended up in my life decisions, and the unconscious level ended up in the book—though I had no idea of this while I was writing the stories, which grew out of moments of empathy and curiosity for people I’d see in the world. I’d catch a glimpse of someone’s life, typically a woman’s, and wonder what it was like to be them; then imagination and the fictive mind took over. “Knuckles,” for instance, originated from a single glimpse of a woman in mourning as she stepped into a waiting car near Boston’s Public Garden. The germ of “Me and Paul” came to me at a Wyoming hot spring, where I saw a woman playing basketball with her son. After a late-night film shoot in LA, I saw a paramedic gloomily eating a burrito, and thus “3 A.M. Ambulance Driver” was born.
Q: At what point did Wifeshopping start to come together for you as a collection?
A: In 1999 or so I was about to get married again, and essentially stopped having the particular kind of curiosity that led to those stories—my imagination found different angles into people’s lives. I wasn’t “wifeshopping” in reality anymore, not wrestling inside with the same questions, so that vein of imagination dried up. But I was drawn to the desperation of the stories I wrote during that phase, and kept going back to them and polishing them—really figuring out the fundamental human contradictions that made those characters tick. All of them were stuck in emotional situations they had no easy way out of, and the dissonance between who they thought they were and who they really were struck me as great creative fuel. I rewrote their stories over and over again because I wanted to understand them better. It was in that rewriting that the common themes between the pieces became clear to me, and the collection was born. It grew organically and cumulatively, rather than from a predetermined central theme. Ultimately I got used to their unfathomability and stopped digging into them so much, and that’s when I knew the collection was ready to be read.
Q: Is Wifeshopping intended primarily for a male audience?
A: That’s the easy assumption because of the title, but I didn’t intend that and don’t believe it will play out that way with the reading public. Two of the people who awarded prizes to it, Amy Hempel for the collection as a whole and Antonya Nelson for the opening story, “Beaching It,” are women, which make me feel that the book will not be received as exclusionary. I think I’ve created full enough female characters—although they don’t get as much airtime as the men, with the exception of Bethany in the final story, “In Flagstaff”—for any reader to see the women’s points of view. You could take each story’s lead female character and spin the narrative around to see the relationship as she experienced it, and that new story would have the same poignancy because of the intimacy of the shared experience. Some of the male characters might think they’re isolated, or feel compelled to objectify women for their own emotional self-protection; but they are all involved in a complex dance for two, and some objectify themselves just as much as they do others.
Q: You mentioned isolation. There’s quite a bit of it in the collection.
A: And that isolation is usually a function of self-acceptance, or lack thereof. I don’t want to psychologize my own characters, but when you work with them for fifteen years, you see some common denominators. The men in Wifeshopping tend to have trouble achieving intimacy with self and others, and that creates sort of a gradient by which you can assess them. Some have more trouble than others; they flail around and choose destructive relationships, desperate and unaware of what they’re doing. Other men are more cognizant of what they bring to relationships, and how their own expectations are influencing the outcomes; they’re hip to how they mess things up by getting love mixed up with personal identity, and they try to work against that.
Q: Does that mean there’s a narrative arc to the collection as a whole?
A: Not precisely, but I do think that the people at the end of the book—men and women both—have a better shot at finding lasting relationships than those at the beginning. It’s by no means a lock-step progression, but there’s a sense of gradual evolution re: preparedness for marriage the book. I’m a romantic and believe that it’s possible for people to find lasting love, but it takes a tremendous amount of self-acceptance to love another human being. The book is a journey through that process, and I do hope readers will have a hopeful catharsis at the end. I hope to get dozens of emails from people telling me that they met their spouse by reading Wifeshopping on a park bench, on a subway, in a cafe, or wherever, and got pulled into a conversation about love that never ended.
Q: Let’s get the autobiography question out of the way immediately. How much of Wifeshopping comes from your life?
A: Everything and nothing. If you subscribe to Chekov’s dictum that all characters you create are some distilled aspect of yourself—and I do—then all of the characters in the collection are to some extent autobiographical. This goes for the women as well as the men. You can’t create believable characters without knowing them intimately, and that knowledge starts in the dark corners of the self that fictional characters crawl out of without the writer even noticing. On the other hand, there isn’t a single character in the book that directly represents a live individual that I knew. Ex-girlfriends have called to ask me “Am I in it?”; but I couldn’t write fiction using a real-life model for my characters, because it simply wouldn’t be an imaginative process. It would be a documentary process, and that isn’t conducive to fiction.
Q: So what exactly is the relationship between the book and your life?
A: On an individual level the stories come from life—not from relationships I’ve had but from small things I observed that incited my imaginative curiosity. Each one was first drafted between 1991 and 1999, between the end of a failed “starter” marriage and the run-up to a successful one that, so far, has survived through six years and two children. So I was definitely “wifeshopping” in literal reality while I wrote the stories, trying to figure out, on both a conscious and an unconscious, creative level, what marriage meant and what it required. The conscious level of figuring ended up in my life decisions, and the unconscious level ended up in the book—though I had no idea of this while I was writing the stories, which grew out of moments of empathy and curiosity for people I’d see in the world. I’d catch a glimpse of someone’s life, typically a woman’s, and wonder what it was like to be them; then imagination and the fictive mind took over. “Knuckles,” for instance, originated from a single glimpse of a woman in mourning as she stepped into a waiting car near Boston’s Public Garden. The germ of “Me and Paul” came to me at a Wyoming hot spring, where I saw a woman playing basketball with her son. After a late-night film shoot in LA, I saw a paramedic gloomily eating a burrito, and thus “3 A.M. Ambulance Driver” was born.
Q: At what point did Wifeshopping start to come together for you as a collection?
A: In 1999 or so I was about to get married again, and essentially stopped having the particular kind of curiosity that led to those stories—my imagination found different angles into people’s lives. I wasn’t “wifeshopping” in reality anymore, not wrestling inside with the same questions, so that vein of imagination dried up. But I was drawn to the desperation of the stories I wrote during that phase, and kept going back to them and polishing them—really figuring out the fundamental human contradictions that made those characters tick. All of them were stuck in emotional situations they had no easy way out of, and the dissonance between who they thought they were and who they really were struck me as great creative fuel. I rewrote their stories over and over again because I wanted to understand them better. It was in that rewriting that the common themes between the pieces became clear to me, and the collection was born. It grew organically and cumulatively, rather than from a predetermined central theme. Ultimately I got used to their unfathomability and stopped digging into them so much, and that’s when I knew the collection was ready to be read.
Q: Is Wifeshopping intended primarily for a male audience?
A: That’s the easy assumption because of the title, but I didn’t intend that and don’t believe it will play out that way with the reading public. Two of the people who awarded prizes to it, Amy Hempel for the collection as a whole and Antonya Nelson for the opening story, “Beaching It,” are women, which make me feel that the book will not be received as exclusionary. I think I’ve created full enough female characters—although they don’t get as much airtime as the men, with the exception of Bethany in the final story, “In Flagstaff”—for any reader to see the women’s points of view. You could take each story’s lead female character and spin the narrative around to see the relationship as she experienced it, and that new story would have the same poignancy because of the intimacy of the shared experience. Some of the male characters might think they’re isolated, or feel compelled to objectify women for their own emotional self-protection; but they are all involved in a complex dance for two, and some objectify themselves just as much as they do others.
Q: You mentioned isolation. There’s quite a bit of it in the collection.
A: And that isolation is usually a function of self-acceptance, or lack thereof. I don’t want to psychologize my own characters, but when you work with them for fifteen years, you see some common denominators. The men in Wifeshopping tend to have trouble achieving intimacy with self and others, and that creates sort of a gradient by which you can assess them. Some have more trouble than others; they flail around and choose destructive relationships, desperate and unaware of what they’re doing. Other men are more cognizant of what they bring to relationships, and how their own expectations are influencing the outcomes; they’re hip to how they mess things up by getting love mixed up with personal identity, and they try to work against that.
Q: Does that mean there’s a narrative arc to the collection as a whole?
A: Not precisely, but I do think that the people at the end of the book—men and women both—have a better shot at finding lasting relationships than those at the beginning. It’s by no means a lock-step progression, but there’s a sense of gradual evolution re: preparedness for marriage the book. I’m a romantic and believe that it’s possible for people to find lasting love, but it takes a tremendous amount of self-acceptance to love another human being. The book is a journey through that process, and I do hope readers will have a hopeful catharsis at the end. I hope to get dozens of emails from people telling me that they met their spouse by reading Wifeshopping on a park bench, on a subway, in a cafe, or wherever, and got pulled into a conversation about love that never ended.