Beauty, farewell, and ending the world:
a conversation with William Wisner

By Randy Koch

On a Sunday evening in late May, I met with writer, artist, and librarian Bill Wisner at Danny's on north McPherson. We sat near the kitchen where plates clattered and the voices of waiters and cooks rose above the hum of customers in the restaurant. We drank iced tea, munched on chips and salsa, and talked about our daughters before turning to the things that have occupied so much of Bill's life.

Koch: What most influenced you as a writer?
Wisner: As a person, as a writer, I keep returning to central Kansas and the Midwest. I took a drive up there about four years ago and felt so dumb going back to these old places, but there's something about the landscape and the people who influenced me and my work. My best writing has always been a sort of thanking of the mentors I met there -- John Cody, Pete Felten, Loren Eiseley. And the essays that I managed to get into print, the best ones have been in that mode. It's very rich and meaningful and then you're bounded by mortality. Several of the people I knew have passed away, but it's all tied up with the land and the place.
K: When did you start feeling the influence of these people?
W: At an early age -- about 13 or 14 -- I started making friends with artists and writers. John Cody had just published a book on Emily Dickinson, and he became a friend. I do a lot of writing, but I also do a lot of artwork. The same with John. He was a Dickinson scholar because he loved her poetry, and an expert on Richard Wagner, the composer, so he wrote a huge book on him, but it's never been published. John had always been a medical illustrator and a nature illustrator, so he had been on several expeditions to the jungle in South America, where he saw these big, beautiful, night-flying moths. He was fascinated by their velvety, rich colors, so he determined to be perhaps the only moth painter in the world. His work was eventually noticed by Gloria Vanderbilt, and she introduced him to the editors at Audubon, and they did a spread on his paintings. In the meantime, right around 1972, John published After Great Pain, a big book on Emily Dickinson, which showed her psychological development, and backed it up with so much evidence that he postulated that Dickinson had a couple of major breakdowns. It was a fascinating read. I was 16 and began going to his home in Hays, a big, interesting, three-story house, the oldest in the city. The other influence at that time was Pete Felten, a sculptor, and I've been doing sculpture ever since. My favorite thing in the world is not writing. It's actually stone carving. I'm not very good at it. I'm a much better writer than I am an artist, but the writing is more like work.
K: I don't think I've seen any of your stone sculptures.
W: I'd be glad to show them to you any time. Sell them to you!
K: (Laughs) You have some at home?
W: I have some. In the last year I managed to do four or five major pieces, which is pretty good because they take a lot of time. Pete taught me to do it right; I get a finished look, a really focused vision, and it takes a long time. The biggest key to stone carving or art of any kind is patience.
K: Are these large or small sculptures?
W: Since I'm so busy I can't do big things, so people might say they're small, maybe 18 inches long by ten inches wide, but something like that can take 60 or 70 hours or several weeks of intermittent carving.
K: Right.
W: One of the things you have to do as an artist or as a writer is shape your form or the genre to what you're doing. For example, essays work very well for me because I don't have a lot of time. It was all I could do to write that book [Whither the Postmodern Library: Libraries, Technology, and Education in the Information Age, McFarland, 2000] because of the amount of time, and it's not a very long book. Essays work for me, so I trimmed everything back to the essay form. If I had unlimited time to write, I'd write longer books; I don't have a lack of ideas but a lack of time.
K: I was reading your essays on Loren Eiseley. "A Boy, a Bird, and a Book" especially suggests you're trying to do what Eiseley did, that is, take these ideas and then incorporate some personal experience and autobiography into it, much like you did in your book.
W: I have always been a confessional writer, meaning that I put myself in it, and that's what makes writing it so hard, especially if there are peak experiences with a lot of pain. Like the book. It's ostensibly about libraries, but a lot of it was about my relationship with my father. And because I had a publisher interested in a book about libraries, I seized that opportunity to expand that. Writing has always been painful and costly, but I didn't think I could get anything true if I wasn't willing to pay that price. I've always been forthright about saying what I feel or how I feel.
K: When you say that it was "costly" --
W: Costly emotionally. I had to give up something to get it out on the page.
K: Has it been costly in terms of people's reactions?
W: Well, the reviews of the book almost always acknowledge that I was honest. The amount that I've given into it has allowed them to be involved in the work. Sometimes, though, it can be hard for people. Certainly if they're looking for an objective account, they're coming to the wrong place.
K: You said in the book that "the introduction of art into one's life is perilous." What did you mean?
W: Art is perilous because it's out ahead of you all the time and prompting you towards a sort of dangerous place. Beauty isn't really about serenity and peace. There's a mystery that's very dear in all this. Frequently noncreative people -- and they often speak in clichés -- say of artists, "Oh, they're inspired" or "They view the world to know the world and to tell us the truth." I don't take that view. Artists don't construe the world very well; they're not inspired really. They're obsessed or obsessive-compulsive types. They keep going over the same territory again and again because they want to find something there, and they may not find it the first time or the second or ever. Not every artist is like this, but their lives often reflect that view: their relationships are troubled, they're often unhappy, jealous, all sorts of things.
K: Does this also apply to you?
W: Definitely. I have a very narrow range of work centered on the mentors and figures that I knew in Kansas. The thing that obsesses me is why beauty and farewell are entwined. Why is the ending of things so bound up with beauty? And maybe that's what the perilous nature of art is really about.
K: In the book you come back to your father and how his death affected you. You also talk about Barbara, to whom you were engaged.
W: Yes, we had been with each other for about eight years before she died, and we were briefly engaged at the end of her life. She represented a turning point in which I turned more decisively to a much darker overall life view and I became more angry. I didn't understand how someone who is young and has so much promise. . . . You have to ask, "Why?" and "What does that mean?" And I don't think I've worked those things out very well. I haven't reached any real conclusions. It sounds almost callous, but it's like I didn't really break. It occurred, and something locked up, and I stayed that way.
K: But you've written about it.
W: Yeah, there in the book--
K: And in this other one, too --"Turbulent River" -- which has never been published. When I first read it, I wondered if it was autobiography or fiction.
W: It started as a short story called "Altarpiece" and went through several drafts, and then this emerged, and I submitted it to Gettysburg Review, who rejected it immediately. But I like it, I think, as a work.
K: Absolutely. So do I.
W: Is there something in particular you liked?
K: The frankness of it, the specificity.
W: Well, it goes back to the idea of being honest. And this has never benefited me.
K: It's not the opinions about the border that would make readers uncomfortable but your honesty about your personal experiences.
W: Maybe so. Certainly the border is unlike any area I've lived in, but I don't know the whole border. I know Laredo, or parts of it. I guess people both love it and hate it. When I'm really old, it's going to be in my memory a lot because it's so intense. I can't imagine a more intense place, frankly, than Laredo. And for a fairly intense personality like mine, it's a good match. Much of my best writing has come out of here, is centered here. Eventually it will be like Kansas for me.
K: You wrote, "There is no other geographical alliance on the planet weirder than this one; nor is there any which is likely to represent the future disintegration of things so well." How long ago did you write this?
W: About a year ago.
K: Do you still feel that way?
W: Yes, I do actually. One of the hard parts to understand about a lot of what I write and what I believe is that I'm not saying that the world is going to end. It is ending. And to really get me and to get my work you have to get into that idea. Civilization isn't going to survive with the multiple onslaughts occurring right now. If I look at any category -- politics, religion, economics, education, technology, any of these areas -- I see massive breakdowns. Any or all of these might not be enough to fracture East and West, but the continual destruction of the natural system and of nature itself is going to cause it to react. It's amazing that we haven't picked up on this more concretely because we shouldn't be wondering about this. We should be afraid of it. And I have found that I can write an essay like "Turbulent River" and maybe convince a few people that there's something to worry about, but if I take a book and alter it by using gold leaf and then go down to a ranch with a friend and blow a hole in it with a shotgun and set this up as a work to be considered, it says more than I can say in an essay times ten. It's like the sacred -- whatever is at the center of the culture -- is being annihilated. And the border is like a window seat on that -- it's unpredictable, overwhelming, frightening, uncontrolled.
K: But still you stay.
W: Well, it's the perfect place for me. I'm sort of obsessed by the end of the world and the consequences of it -- I know this sounds loony -- so where else would I want to be?
K: Your visual art and your writing both contain a lot of personal history or allusions. Talk about the process and the connections between the disciplines, where the work comes from and how it eventually develops.
W: Usually I think about something for a long time, and then I'll notice an opening, like at the Sewanee Review. I typically send a query letter to get some interest from the magazine or review; I don't want to write unless I have some feedback from the publisher. Sometimes they'll send a contract, but usually they want to see it first. That's about the most you can hope for. So we might exchange a letter or two firming up content and so on. Again, I don't want to spend several months writing a piece that will not be published.
K: This applies primarily to the essay.
W: Right. With the essay, once I get something going, let's say the publishing opportunity, I'll think about it pretty extensively. When I get the first sentence exactly right -- and I don't know when that might occur because occasionally I've scribbled it down on a napkin -- the rest of the essay is almost completely written in my head. There'll be the one draft, the corrections, and then I'll word-process it.
K: So you're writing long hand?
W: For some time I wrote with a word processor directly on the screen, and then a situation developed where I wasn't near a word processor, and now I like writing longhand again. It's slower, not as facile. It forces me to think and back up and correct and edit as I go. But of course it's not perfect the first time it comes out. I make additions and corrections, but that's about it.
K: Is the process different with poetry?
W: I would never claim to be a poet. To me, poetry is the highest form of writing. You have to master so many nuances; it's very hard to do. Nevertheless, I have written poetry. I guess a lot of details come together in my mind and they're sort of arranged and unified by a thought.
K: What do you think of the poetry being written around here?
W: Maybe I'm wrong about this because I haven't read a lot of poetry from this area, but I would like to see more provocative socio-political commentary. A lot of what I've heard at readings tends to be "I love someone, and they're not there" and "I remember something in my past." I would like to break away from all of that sentimentality and nostalgia and cut through to some major issues about politics, about economic differences, about "What does all this mean?" I guess I'm asking for realism. It would be great to write a poem about statistical summaries of TASP scores or something like that and infuse it with commentary. That would be bravery on the page for border writers. What would it result in? Hopefully, people thinking, a challenging form of poetics. We could do with less of the nostalgic stuff, less personal expression, less "I'm interested in myself." (Pause) And here in this interview I talk about nothing other than myself.(Laughter)
K: I wonder if that's what people write because that's what's published about the border. Oscar Casares [author of Brownsville; Little, Brown, 2002] was here in May, and his stories are based on small events in the lives of people who live in the Valley. There are maybe just one or two references to politics. Books by David Rice and Ito Romo are similar in that respect.
W: I agree. Tom Wolfe, the writer, took on one of the postmodern writers in interview format where there was a third person, and just excoriated much of the popular writing these days as being excessively introverted. And the lady who was opposed to him said, "Well, what do you expect us to do? Sit down with members of a corporation?" "That's exactly what I want you to do," Wolfe said. "Go into something that's real and listen and take notes and expose it." That's what we need, and my poems "Border Crossing " and "Sonia's Excellent Adventure" and my short story "Outer Loop" do just that. The other thing I have a problem with -- and this is a touchy area-but mixing English and Spanish in a single work of art is not very successful. It should be in one language or another, but the attempt to blend the two regionalizes the artwork and always excludes somebody. I'm not putting any language down, but when you combine two languages, it becomes problematic from a critical point of view. Only two works of art that I know of have survived this. One is "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot, which presented enormous critical problems throughout the 20th century. I love the poem, but you almost spend more time reading the footnotes than you do that poem. The second is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which is a marvelous novel, but it has -- and somehow he managed to squeak this past the publishers -- 20 or 30 pages of untranslated medieval Latin in it. You have to write in one language or another. It doesn't happen very often that writing in two will be successful.
K: You mean that because of the critical problems with using two or more languages, publishers are not going to be willing to look at these things?
W: That's part of the problem. Your audience is going to be more limited. Let me put it this way to take the English-Spanish problem out of it. I go to a play in Duluth, Minnesota, and sit through it and enjoy it very much; it's a fine play, but suddenly major parts are in Russian, which I don't know. What can I say? Now if you take that situation to Switzerland, it's less of a problem. The population there might routinely speak four languages, so that problem disappears. What I'm really trying to attack is exclusion as a sanctioned literary practice. Art should be universal and, therefore, inclusionary. The idea of writing in two or more languages sounds good at first, but I don't think it works in the long run.
K: What's the implication of that for writers on the border and in Laredo?
W: If your intention is to be read only within this region, it's no problem at all. If your intention is to write a universal work of art within American literature, I don't see how you can do it, at least at the present time. Some phrases might be obvious in context, but if it gets longer than that, there's a problem. The truth is a really good writer can take on the strongest political and economic issues and still stay within one language. You could produce the feeling of living in Laredo in either language.
K: Right, but what about big publishing houses in New York, those that published Oscar Casares or David Rice or Rene Saldaña, all of whom have written stories about or based on personal experience or observation? You're suggesting more writing should be out there on the edge, should deal with more controversial issues. In a similar way, incorporating two languages into a work is controversial, too. Isn't there a contradiction between those two views about choosing subject matter that's more controversial but choosing a less controversial form within which to present it?
W: If the desire is to talk more frankly about border issues, you would presumably want to reach the widest possible audience. If you want to do that, it would be best to write in a way that most people could read it.
K: You described publishing as "a bitter, difficult and frequently disillusioning enterprise." That surprises me because your work has appeared in some prominent publications.
W: You really have to fight for everything you get, and I knew that when I started out. Editors are not your advocates. They're usually inundated with more than they can publish, they're responding to the publisher or the publishing house, and that person is setting the creative direction for the magazine, so they're all following a certain line. And your idea has to match the publisher's idea of where they want the magazine to go. They certainly want to make money, so your piece has to help them do that, and there has to be a reason for publishing the piece at that time. If, for example, I want to write about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, August 9th and 12th are going to be important, so I'm going to propose that idea to, let's say, Harper's probably in January. If you do it too early, it's not on their radar yet, but if you do it too late, you don't have enough time to write the piece, so you have to out-guess six or seven different possibilities if you want to get that article in. I don't mean to turn people off to writing because publishing is hard, but it is important to realize that it's very different from the writing part of it. The best book I've ever seen on this is by Scott Edelstein -- A Checklist for Writers. I discovered it late in my own publishing career, and it contained everything that I so laboriously had to figure out by myself. The bottom line is if you're just starting out, publish anywhere you can -- a small newspaper, a local review. Build a resumé and never stop because you have to have real constancy about what you do, and it will eventually come.
K: Your daughters must be an influence, too, since you're working on some stories for them.
W: I began telling Leah bedtime stories when she was about four. There had been a party that night, and a yuppie conversation got started about the virtues of eating humus, and then that night Leah suddenly asked for a story. You know how kids are-you have to make up the story and it has to be perfect and you only have about 30 seconds. (Laughter)
W: So I cast around, and I came up with a character, a frog named The Baron von Humus de Harnoncourt. Nicolas Harnoncourt was a classical music conductor that I admired, so I tagged him on at the end. Leah and Sophie were both in the story as the Princesses, and the Baron lives in Bohemia on the coast in a big castle. Of course, here's where the punning comes in because Shakespeare had set a play on the coast of Bohemia. But there is no coast; it's inland. In other words, this is everywhere and nowhere. So they had a lot of adventures in the castle, and this tapestry of stories evolved. I've told Leah and Sophie maybe two hundred of these. The way to do it is with archetypal forms, which you alter slightly. There's the same romance form, the same quest form, so you can become fairly facile at it once you get started. And the richness comes with the details and the quirks. Like Lord Reginald, the swan, who is always out of sorts, grumbling about everything. Sounds like me.
K: (Laughs)
W: It's interesting. Kids are verbal so they had been into this, but the funny thing is my wife Rosie De Leon suggested I write some of these down, and the kids were interested. And I have never had such difficulty with any writing in my life. I selected four that I thought were the best and tried to write them. I don't know what it was. They were just very hard to write.
K: But you already had the plot and the characters. Was it the language?
W: I had everything in place, and I wonder if I wasn't over-confident because I thought this is going to be a piece of cake. And it wasn't. I discovered that it was hard to get in a child's mind and that a great children's writer is able to do that. But it was the writing -- what details to keep in, what character traits to develop. The worst thing, of course, is moralizing, trying to tell the child what to believe. There is a moral component to this genre. It's just very interesting. A lot of animals around the castle embody different types -- some wicked, wicked monkeys are cowardly but dangerous and others like Lord Claw are initially evil and then are redeemed through love. A lot of my own life is in this, too. "The Persistence of the Rose" deals with a lot of things out of the Baron's past that he broods over. And the children that come into his life redeem him. The stories are always pointing at something beyond merely the adventure being described.
K: You wrote another short story that was published in La Frontera -- "The Poet Wore Black" -- and that got a real strong reaction from one reader near Seguin, partly, I think, because he thought you were in it.
W: Well, it's funny because he really got the story wrong. He didn't read it carefully. Part of the way I write is to get inside the person's head. Here's the deal: I try to initiate anger or blowback at me as the writer in order to unlock in the reader the kind of re-examinations that I'm really after. So if I'm getting a reaction or anger, that's not necessarily bad, but the potential is opening up for the work -- which is what the thing is about in the first place -- to change, alter, renew perceptions in the reader. The poet in the story, who was older, was trying to espouse sentimental poetic ideals, and this young Hispanic with his Anglo girlfriend was sitting in the audience, and he can't relate to any of this. His is a world of dot-coms and the Internet. This guy in black had been a Chicano poet and inside the Movement, so this kid is not making this leap. There's nothing there that he recognizes. This is, in a sense, about technology, which tends to level things, differences and that. It connects people. So this young man raises his hand and criticizes the poem and puts him down. Now when this young man -- this is where a subtle reading is important -- starts going on about "Hey, I've got a BMW, and I started a dot-com in Austin with my friends, and I don't know what you're saying," you realize that he's buying into the world of materialism, technology, and money, and there's nothing enviable about that either. In a way, if I've done my job correctly, nobody really knows what I believe, or, you could say, I'm hostile to both viewpoints. I'm condemning a view of the past, which is merely nostalgic, and a view of the future, which is merely materialistic. By the end of the story I was trying to imply and emphasize what is universal about all of us. Not the differences that are dividing us but what brings us together, what commonalties we have.
K: Is it tough to keep yourself out of your fiction when you intentionally put yourself into your nonfiction, poetry and artwork?
W: My own personality and perceptions are forcefully present in every genre I work in, whether that's art or poetry or anything else. I invest myself very heavily in it, so they are very non-objective. Maybe it's a sort of subterfuge to say that I'm not there, that you can't locate me there. See, I think artists are obsessed by a particular thing; they're working that same ground over and over again, and they misperceive themselves as they do that. The critic's job is to come along later and say, "Wait a minute. There's a whole set of things that expose what's going on." To me, that's the critical function. Artists don't want or need to know what some of their motives are. If their motives disappear or are exposed, the tendency to work so intensely may go away. But it's the critic's purpose to expose the artist even though the artist may be trying to escape his own nature. It's imperative, in a sense, that I not be myself.
K: For the sake of the creation of the art?
W: Well, you could almost put it in Biblical terms: If any of us were really ourselves, we would all be found to be unworthy. What if you actually failed every test? That would, in a sense, drive you to write and paint. What a perfect motive for the artist.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)