An Unlikely Interview with Michael Wehunt

“Bookends,” as suggested by the title, uses the emergence of periodical cicadas to frame two of the most significant events of your main character’s life. The very nature of periodical cicadas feels deeply mythical with its cycle of birth/death/rebirth calling to mind various hero journeys to the underworld. What came first, the idea of framing a story this way, or the core of the story itself?

It was more the idea of the framing that came first, and I immediately thought of bookends and stuck with that title. I had this image of a man standing in a back yard, listening to all those cicadas, overwhelmed, and I thought, well, something significant must have happened the last time the cicadas came. And yes, I thought of that circle of birth/death/rebirth, as you aptly call it, and I realized the man had lost his wife by gaining a child, and I wondered how deep a darkness that might cast, and whether someone could make it through. This sort of tragedy was once almost common, but to me it felt as dark as the underworld.

On your blog, you recently said you’ve been seriously considering writing a novel. If you’ve begun the process, how have you found it different from writing short stories? If you haven’t begun yet, have you found your short story writing process altered at all by your ultimate goal of writing novel length fiction?

I haven’t started a novel yet, and until recently I would’ve claimed it would have no effect on my short story process. But it seems I’m wrong, as a new story I just finished is 11,000 words long, stretching well past my previous record into uncharted mid-novelette territory. It was not my intention to go that long-form, and I think novel thoughts may have informed that. Just letting a larger frame breathe as it wants was pretty liberating.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

I’m skipping this one. Not one single job I’ve had could be even exaggerated into weirdness. I’d never really thought about it before you asked. Now I regret not being more adventurous when I was younger!

One of the perennial points of contention in the world revolves around education -- who should get educated (and to what degree), what should be taught, who should be excluded. Meanwhile, children in their classrooms ask, “Why do I need to know this?” Tell us one obscure thing you learned in school that you think is important, and why.

I grew up in a rural town in Georgia, less than a mile from the largest of the forts used to hold (read: imprison) Cherokee natives before they were sent away on the Trail of Tears. As a lower middle-class white male in a place of lower middle-class white people, I learned a good deal about how my region came to be this way. I learned about that tragic part of history. I learned about local Native American culture. And it’s very much stayed with me. But as I grew older, I began to realize how revisionist the history I learned had been, how glossed over. Not in any conspiratorial or overtly ominous way…just in an ignorant way. And that has stayed with me, too, but in a much deeper, under-the-skin way. So I guess you could say I learned to learn underneath the learning, which taught me to know there’s nearly always a richer history waiting to be discovered, wherever and whenever you are.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

The current batch of “relatively obscure” authors I love, such as Laird Barron, Simon Strantzas, and Nathan Ballingrud, have recently been making bigger names for themselves. Others are newer and on their way, such as David G. Blake. As for an author who’s long overdue, Robert Aickman, a writer of self-styled “strange stories” who died in 1981, is finally set to take the stage at this year’s World Fantasy Convention, which is paying homage to him. Relative to his influence, he’s been obscure for far too long. I’d recommend his short stories, such as “The Stains,” “The Hospice,” and “Into the Wood.” Stories that worm their way into horror but ignore all of horror’s rules and end up somewhere better. No one did ambiguity better than he did, the sense of unreality that makes the reader truly feel in tune with the protagonist. And yet his stories, for all their creepy strangeness, always feel true, somehow. There’s a warmth, even a humor, to them.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

My first published work was the story “Notrees” in Innsmouth Magazine back in June of 2012. I actually read it not long ago and thought it held up better than it did in my mind. It’s fairly standard Lovecraftian horror and could use some better structuring, though what I find most amusing now is my early, rather trope-ish attempt at creating my own sort of Elder God-styled mythos. The elements to a good story were all there, just without the experience to (Love)craft it in a more unique way.

What else are you working on have coming up you want people to know about?

I recently received my first private invitations to write stories for two great anthologies, each from a well-known editor, which is like getting to cross one of the major items off my bucket list twice. But as these are both works in progress, I can’t blab the details. Speaking of my bucket list, I do have a short story forthcoming in an issue of Cemetery Dance. It’s called “The Inconsolable” and I’m very excited for it to be in the world.