Kevin Wilson’s story “Biology” appears in the winter 2020 issue of The Southern Review. Here, he discusses the badass women of basketball, story elements inspired by his experiences with Tourette’s syndrome, and other themes spanning both “Biology” and his recent best-selling novel Nothing to See Here.
Preety Sidhu: This story contains so many memorable elements: the game of Death Cards, the student-teacher friendship between Patrick and Mr. Reynolds, the basketball games between Mr. Reynolds and the badass middle school girls. In what order did these elements come together for you, as you were developing the story?
Kevin Wilson: The story began with something from my past—a teacher I really liked who was involved in an ill-advised sporting contest for money with badass middle school girls—and I just started building the other elements around that. The Death Cards were something I’d been holding on to for a very long time, just waiting for a story where they’d make sense. And once I thought about Patrick, it clicked. And I’ve been writing a lot of stories where characters look back at moments from their adolescence, wondering how that strange moment made them the person they are now, probably because I’m at the age where I’m doing that a lot.
PS: Both this story and your recent novel Nothing to See Here feature queer protagonists—in this story Patrick is working out that he’s gay, and in the novel Lillian is propelled partly by her not-platonic love for Madison. At what stage of the writing process did you know this would be a part of their identities?
KW: I knew immediately that they would be queer, but I also knew that the way that they processed it, the confusion of it, would be the necessary element. It’s just what I write about a lot, the complexity of sexuality, that feeling of inadequacy stemming from the anxiety that other people, from the outside, seem to understand their identity so clearly, but I’ve never worked that way or ever felt that. So it’s natural, I guess, to write about it. It’s been there since my first collection of stories, and it’s comforting to work with it in a place removed from the world itself.
PS: Similarly, basketball (especially as played by women) is a recurring theme in both “Biology” and Nothing to See Here. What role does basketball play in your own life, and how does that connect to the role it plays in your writing?
KW: I have trouble watching sports, even though I deeply love them, because I don’t enjoy the uncertainty of the enterprise. It makes me so anxious. It feels incredibly intimate to me, to watch someone put every ounce of themselves into succeeding and realizing, in real time, that it won’t be enough. In a perfect world, every single team would win a championship, and it would just rotate for all eternity.
But basketball is the sport that I love so much that it’s worth watching. It’s just the most beautiful thing to me. I spend a lot of time watching clips on YouTube; watching Dominique Wilkins highlights is about as happy as I get. I’m obsessed with it.
And in the real world, shooting baskets is incredibly calming for me. It’s as helpful as medication for my mental health.
But to go beyond that, my best friend, the poet Caki Wilkinson, played basketball in high school, and we love talking about the game, and we both had a deep love for the UT Lady Vols of the ’90s. Latina Davis played at my high school and went on to UT, which to me as a kid was about the greatest thing that could happen to you. When I was in high school, I would go to Grundy County to see Kim Woodlee play, who is still maybe the best basketball player that I’ve seen in real life. She was so good, so effortless. And I remember those women on our teams in school, how they seemed focused beyond the ridiculous stuff that made adolescence so unbearable. They had a kind of confidence that I wished that I had. They had a spirit of togetherness, of being a single unit. I wanted that feeling.
So these two works are just looking at that world from two different perspectives, the boy in “Biology” being intimidated by those basketball women and then Nothing to See Here is looking at it from the perspective of someone so good at it and yet not really able to experience it in the ways she used to.
In terms of how it connects to my writing, it’s the closest I’ll get to being good at sports. That moment when you’re writing and the story opens up and no matter what you do, you’re just working from muscle memory and finding your way to something good.
PS: In a recent interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, you explained that the spontaneously combusting children in Nothing to See Here were partly inspired by your own experience with Tourette’s syndrome, in which violent images such as “falling off tall buildings, getting stabbed, catching on fire” would suddenly burst into your head. To what extent was this also the inspiration for the Death Cards in “Biology,” in which players might suddenly draw cards “that featured people dying in horrific, graphic ways”?
KW: They’re completely connected. I keep trying to figure out ways to deal with these things in my head. I never made literal Death Cards, but I would do it in my head, trying to imagine my life and seeing how long I could go before I fell into a combine or something, because I knew that was always coming. And that ending in “Biology” to play the game without the Death Cards, was an incredibly cathartic thing for me, which sounds so fucking corny, but it’s true. I am grateful for that teacher in the story, for that moment of kindness. It helped me.
PS: What opportunities and limitations did each of these metaphors—Death Cards and spontaneous combustion—afford you in exploring this experience?
KW: The danger is always that you lean too hard on the metaphor that it doesn’t get to work in reality, or it’s too specific to be relatable. For me, I still don’t know what’s in my brain. That’s most of the reason that I’m still writing.
Because it can sometimes be hard to explain myself to people, these metaphors feel like a kind of searching, sending something out into the world and just hoping that someone receives it and can make sense of it. And the hope is that someone else says, “I know what you mean. I know that feeling. I don’t have the words either. But I know it.” That’s what books have done for me. That moment when I realize that an author has said something I can’t say, could never say, even though it was somewhere inside of me.
PS: Mr. Reynolds encourages Patrick to play the game once without any death cards while Lillian teaches Bessie and Roland to control their bursting into flames through yoga and breathing exercises. What do these two instances of mentorship mean to you, and do you see them in conversation with each other in any way?
KW: I like the way that you’re looking at those relationships, the idea of mentorship. I don’t know what we’re doing here on earth. I don’t know what this all amounts to. And in that uncertainty, all I can figure is that we have to protect each other, to try as best we can to help everyone get safely to whatever comes after this life.
And that sounds nice, maybe, but the reality is that we’re all damaged in different ways and so sometimes even as we try to help each other, our weirdness seeps out in ways that complicate those altruistic desires. And in both of these cases, it’s just damaged adults doing whatever they can to help these young people feel less alone, less damaged. That’s what people did for me. So many people kept me from disappearing from this world so that I could get to this point.
PS: What are you working on next?
KW: I’ve got sixty pages of a new novel, about a teenage girl and this single summer where she and this friend secretly make something, a work of art, that spreads across the country and creates a huge panic. It’s based on a line that I say a lot in my head, a repetition, and I felt like it was time to really deal with it. I am not sure that anyone else will care about that line, but right now the writing is for me. I’ll figure out the reader later.
Kevin Wilson is the author of two story collections and three novels, most recently Nothing to See Here. His stories have appeared in A Public Space, One Story, and Ploughshares. He teaches in the English department at Sewanee.
Preety Sidhu is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and an MFA candidate in fiction at Louisiana State University. Originally from the eastern shore of Maryland, she earned a BA in Astronomy at Swarthmore College before working as an independent school math teacher in the New York and Boston areas. She is currently hard at work on her thesis, a novel.
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