Interview with Wendy Wimmer, Author of Entry Level
Wendy Wimmer is a writer living in Wisconsin. Her work has been published in Barrelhouse, Waxwing, Paper Darts, Believer, ANMLY, Per Contra, Blackbird, and others. She is the co-founder of Green Bay's UntitledTown Book and Author Festival and previously was a Black Mountain Institute fellow teaching creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she earned her PhD in English with a creative dissertation.
She tweets at @wendywimmer, is on IG @wendy_wimmer and online at www.wendywimmer.com.
Wendy Wimmer’s debut short story collection, Entry Level, won the 2021 Fiction Prize from Autumn House Press. She sat down to answer questions on identity, loneliness, and her writing process.
Jacquelyn Scott: Congratulations on winning the 2021 Autumn House Fiction Prize with Entry Level! What was that moment like for you?
Wendy Wimmer: Thank you! It was so unbelievable – Christine Stroud from Autumn House left me a vague voicemail message to call her back, and I had been submitting to a few places so I checked my records and Googled to see if somehow it was a scam because I didn’t believe I could have possibly won the contest. Entry Level had been in submission to other contests and didn't win, so I was feeling very glum about the entire project’s prospects. It was kind of a “pinch me” moment.
Scott: Identity plays a significant role in Entry Level. What is it about identity that fascinates you?
Wimmer: I grew up in the upper Midwest, where in many ways it’s more socially acceptable to be nice and helpful rather than to be smart or wealthy. In some ways, that’s incredibly wholesome and earnest, but if you happen to be smart, there’s a pushback culturally about showing off or seeming as though you think you’re smarter than someone else. So you have this very strange dynamic where smart people are playing down their intelligence, and wealthy people are playing down their income levels, all to fit in.
I grew up in poverty but with a single parent who worked in fine restaurants, so she prioritized manners, etiquette, and the Queen’s English, and my grandparents paid for me to attend a private school, so I was expected to wear much more formal school attire (no jeans or t-shirts allowed) and was learning alongside upper-middle-class peers while at home our phone was getting turned off regularly for nonpayment and we were relying on food stamps and welfare to survive. So I learned to code-switch very early, just to be accepted and liked and on some level, to disappear into the crowd. It’s a weird dynamic because no one actually wants to be poor and no one actually wants to be stupid, so here was an eight-year-old fronting to be just wealthy enough to look “normal” in the crowd while wearing essentially business clothing to school but also playing down my vocabulary and not raising my hand very much so that no one in the class would feel bad about not knowing the answer. In reality, this made me feel like an Other in any situation – with kids in my socio-economic strata, they felt weird that I didn’t have any jeans or t-shirts and I talked like they do on tv and laid two forks out when setting the table if we were having salad, too.
To make things more confusing, my parents divorced when I was quite young, and my mother remarried and enrolled me in kindergarten with my stepfather’s last name, despite the fact that he had not adopted me. It was a different time back then, you could apparently just enroll kids in school without any proof of ID? So I grew up thinking that everyone had their “real name,” which is the one that everyone called you in real life, and then your “doctor name,” which is the name they called you at the doctor’s office, and I was quite old, maybe eight or nine, before I realized that it was really, really odd.
Scott: All of your 15 stories start with great opening lines. What kind of editing went into your openers, or were they the original lines you began with that then kicked off the rest of the stories?
Wimmer: The opening is usually the first and the last thing I write in the story. Rarely does my first draft’s first line remain by the end of the editing process – only one story (“Seven Minutes in Heaven”) still contains the first line exactly as written originally, and another story (“Passeridae”) is structurally the same as the first draft. Openings and endings are my favorite parts of the editing process. I fuss over story endings like a baker making a wedding cake, more frosting, more layers, more intricate designs, but with openings, I go in like a surgeon with a scalpel and cut everything away until it’s at its barest essence of the story, and really, you can’t do that until after the story has been fully formed and you know where it’s going. I think of openings and endings as a call and response – it’s inordinately pleasing to me when they have some kind of parallel or hold each other in contrast.
Scott: How does loneliness or irrelevance play a role in shaping your characters?
Wimmer: I think a lot about the human condition of loneliness. Culturally, we’re frequently reinforced to be self-sustaining and self-reliant. Even during the pandemic, the prioritization of “self-care” – what a farce that is! Essentially we’re saying that, look, society can’t or won’t take care of you, so you’re on your own, kid. And now, we’re seeing higher levels of suicide and skyrocketing mental health emergencies and calls for treatment. But “survival of the fittest” was never about being Superman and some kind of super strong individual; it was about the members of a population who could get along with each other and who cared for each other.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead is famously quoted as saying that the true measurement of an advanced civilization was a healed femur bone because a primitive person could not have survived without being able to stand, hunt, and defend themselves. It meant that someone took care of that person until they healed. And in essence, many of the characters in my short story collection are searching for exactly that – they’re trying to survive, they have some part of themselves that’s broken and they’re limping along in search of someone who will see how hurt they are. Many of the stories end with the characters either rising up in the realization that they’re alone in this, either by their own decision or the luck of draw, and they’re going to need to take things into their own hands to make a go. No one is coming to save them, but in caring for others, they can perhaps save themselves.
Scott: How do the characters in Entry Level maintain their resilience or find some glimmer of hope to keep them going, despite their struggles?
Wimmer: The characters in Entry Level have widely varying levels of success in keeping a stiff upper lip! Some of them, like Maeve in “Feogin”, Elle in “Intersomnolence” or Clementine in “Seven Minutes in Heaven” have actively taken matters into their own hands and are setting up a plan for redemption.
Others, like Tyler in “Texts from Beyond” or Darby in “Flarby” are seeing that they’re alone and they’re going to suffer but at least they’ll indulge in some guilty pleasure, even if it’s ultimately self-destructive.
And some of them, like Dahlia in “Fuse” and Mabel in “INGOB” have finally recognized that they once had a true connection, perhaps their greatest love, and now they’ve lost that person and will mourn for the rest of their lives. No matter what, though, they now realize that they did have something that was theirs and that is still something to hold onto. There’s power in that.
And others, like the crew members in “Passeridae” and Clementine have gone through something incredibly traumatic but they’re determined to save themselves, to keep on going, and to understand that the trauma may have been awful but they are changed forever and now the only option is to move from being victims to being survivors, with no apologies for how they managed it.
Scott: When did you start writing, and when did you first call yourself a writer?
Wimmer: I think I’ve always been a writer, even though I didn’t know what it was. I played pretend for hours with my Fisher-Price Little People when I was a kid. My grandparents were always picking up second-hand random toys at garage sales, and I had some cheap plastic horses that came with cowboys and fences and I’d spend hours on the floor of my grandmother’s living room, creating vast dramas involving those horses, who could all talk to each other. When I was in second grade, I wrote a rhyming poem personifying the north wind and my second-grade teacher insisted I had copied it from somewhere or memorized it, refusing to believe I wrote it. By the time I was in fifth grade, teachers were remarking on my reading and writing ability and by the time I was in seventh grade, I realized that I could write stories in class and it would just look like I was taking notes – it was all over at that point.
But I don’t think I called myself a writer until probably late in undergrad, despite the fact that I had won some awards for writing and even wrote two one-act plays that were produced locally. You know how teenagers are – they are doing so many things, acting, playing in band, singing, dancing, and it feels disingenuous to refer to yourself as an actor, a musician, a singer, a dancer, etc. It comes down to that concept of identity again. Who are we all really? The story we tell ourselves matters.
Scott: What is your writing process? How do you make time and space to write?
Wimmer: I’m very bad as a disciplinarian for my writing – I don’t write nearly enough, nor frequently. Generally, I keep a document open on my computer for whatever I'm working on, and I find myself picking or pruning in breaks during the day. My most successful writing efforts in terms of bulk are when I write in tandem with an accountability partner.
Authors Melissa Gorzelanczyk and Amanda Skenandore are my favorite friends to write with – they are both far more disciplined than I am and actually get down to work drafting! I also have a group of writer friends called the Coven and a weekly writing group that meets on Zoom to set accountability goals with each other. The Coven isn’t afraid to give a hard talk to make me stop procrastinating, and in fact, were helpful when I was stalling on rewrites for “Outer Midnight” in this collection. And a summer short story challenge with my weekly writing group resulted in “Fuse” for this collection as well. I guess I need friends to make me write!
Scott: What inspires you?
Wimmer: Art for the sake of art. Earnestness. Courage. Also, weird fears that seem irrational until you put some thought into them – I love that the brain/subconscious has it all figured out but hasn’t seen fit to explain everything to your conscious self.
Scott: What are you currently reading or working on?
Wimmer: I’m finishing edits on a novel about a social media influencer who finds herself alone during a world crisis and the only person who seems to care is her online best friend whom she’s only met once, years before. I’m starting a novel about two families who have lived next to each other in a Northern Wisconsin town for over a hundred years and have hated each other for even longer. It’s an interrogation into generational trauma and how we can be alone despite being surrounded by our closest family.
Scott: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve received?
Wimmer: I asked Dan Chaon “How do you, um, write a novel? Like, how do you actually DO it?” and he said, “You just do it.” I pressured him to give me a formula, and he explained that you have to figure that out. He had his formula, but it wouldn't work for anyone else. Someone else has their formula and that wouldn't work for Dan or me. My formula, whatever that would end up becoming, will only work for me. You just do it. That was a mind-boggling answer, yet he’s completely right; you just do it.
The other advice I received about creating wasn’t really from a writer, but I applied it to my writing practice – I was taking a ceramics course from master potter Rick McKinney and his pottery wheel was opposite mine, so we’d sit on cold winter Saturdays and throw pots all afternoon while listening to great music and chatting about other stuff. And I was getting very frustrated with the wheel throwing process – I couldn’t center, I couldn’t pull the walls up without it going flobbety flop – and he’d offer very light tips, nothing prescriptive, just mostly encouragement. Finally, he told me I was caring too much about the pot I was making – it was just clay, it was just practice. “But I’m trying to make a bowl for my cereal!” I'd whine back over another misshapen wet puddle. “But you won’t know that until it’s been through two firings and made it home. Until then, it’s just clay.” And he was right – a million things can happen in the process of creating a piece of ceramic – it can warp, it can get bumped on the shelf, it can break in the bisque firing because of an air pocket, someone else’s pot can shatter in the glaze kiln and become a bomb that takes out the entire rack of wares, the glaze could be gross, anything. Until you accept it as finished, it’s just in process, it’s just practice. And he told me that potters in China traditionally need to throw 10,000 pots before they keep a single pot.
Until then, it’s just all practice, making for the sake of making. Once you take away the preciousness, the pressure for perfection is completely off. Anything that comes out of it that you like? Awesome. Anything that doesn’t? Ah well, just keep making.
Scott: Any last thoughts?
Wimmer: My collection is all about being overeducated and underemployed – a condition that I experienced for many many years, and it’s a very surreal experience to now have a creative work on this very topic while holding a PhD in English but my actual day job is in technology editorial media. Even my colleagues find this a bit surprising and worry that it means I’m unhappy in my job – and I can understand why they might suspect that, but it couldn’t be further from the truth! I have happily found a day job that uses my skills in wordplay and communication but also has the added benefit of being about something that I’m always curious about.
That is the key. I think a big problem with how culture views something you’re good at and that you enjoy doing – in my case, inventing fictional scenarios – and then it decides that it has to be a thing you do full-time as your job. But some of my happiest jobs have had nothing to do with creative writing. And it’s unfair to writers to expect them to do it full-time just because they love writing. One of the best writers I know, Dave Housley, works in information technology for a school. Another amazing writer friend works as a community director for a big tech company. It’s also a big disservice to the artists and creators among us to expect them to make a living off their art when our culture doesn’t reward that art with a livable wage. If I had a dollar for everyone who made an offer of using my skill for the exposure.... people die of exposure! And the reality is that we all hear about the Stephen Kings and Colleen Hoovers who are making a fantastic living off their work, but the rest of us out here are just doing a job that is engaging without draining every ounce of creative juice from our bodies and still find time to apply our crafts. The cool thing about art is that you don’t have to be good enough to earn money off it – you don’t even have to be good to enjoy it! Just make stuff for the sake of making it. That goes for drawing, dancing, singing, and writing. We need to stop setting everything up into a cash analysis benefit and chase art for the sake of the joy that it brings us.
From Autumn House Press:
Entry Level by Wendy Wimmer
Wendy Wimmer’s debut short story collection, Entry Level, contains a range of characters who are trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities. These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployed—whether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factors—and the toll this takes on an individual.
Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying stories. Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmer’s characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them.
These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience.
Get your copy from Autumn House Press.
Do you have suggestions on who I should interview next, or would you like to be featured? Send me a message or find me on social media.
