Kirk Wilson
Photo by Tomas Pantin
Bio
Kirk Wilson’s work in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of the New Millennium Award for Nonfiction, a Pushcart nominee, and a finalist for the Crazyhorse Nonfiction Prize, the Machigonne Fiction Award, and the Wordstock Short Fiction Competition. A chapbook of his poems, The Early Word, was published by Burning Deck press. His true crime classic, Unsolved, has been published in six editions in the U.S. and U.K.
As long as I have thought of myself in terms of the work I do, that work has been writing. As a child I wondered at the mystery of things and tried to describe it. In college I published poems and edited a literary magazine. Then came a long career—journalism, film, advertising—in which I wrote for money. I knew the real work wasn’t getting done, but I still loved putting the sentences together. And I loved reading. In spare hours I studied how the sentences were made by those who had done the work and were still doing it. The mystery I recognized in childhood never left me. With the end of my business career on the horizon, I hoarded time at night, on weekends, in-between things, trying to get at it. I made submissions and published my efforts in journals and anthologies among peers younger than my children. I did all the things those young writers do—mimicked the voices of authors I admire, stumbled and returned to the keyboard, and stumbled again. I never dreamed of seeing my name on anyone’s best seller list. All I wanted was to see improvement in my craft, and maybe, if fate smiled, to earn a modest place at the table with those who do the work. Then one morning I received a call from Amy Stolls, telling me about the fellowship. I had forgotten that I applied the year before. The afterglow of that moment has lasted. In retirement, the money that came through Amy’s call is meaningful. But it is the message I heard in the call that I carry to my daily work. The message is that I may yet earn that place at the table, if I keep at it—a place somewhere down at the end near the establishment’s back door, but still.
Excerpt from "A Brief and Necessary Madness"
“The wooden steps explained nothing, no matter how long one stared at them.” -- Kafka, The Trial
We called the tree a “knockaway,” but it is properly called Anacua, after a tribe Cabeza de Vaca described without affection. Even that name is probably a fiction, or a mispronunciation of whatever those vanished people called themselves. We’re told the tribe attributed occult powers to the tree that became their namesake. I could see why. The specimen in the right front of our yard was timeless and indestructible, a Triceratops with branches. Its bark, rough as scales, rode the trunk in an armor of shadowed channels. Its leaves were sandpaper to the touch, and wore a green so dark I thought the liquid in their veins ran black. I never doubted that the tree had stood there since de Vaca wandered past, witness to countless summers like the one that year, when the temperature passed a hundred each afternoon and the pavement deep-fried anything it touched.
The layers of time were not static in that place. They rolled like waves above an undersea canyon, so that we were never far separated from the Stone Age tribes, or from our ancestors who came into that flat brush country with nothing and lived out of lean-to structures, or for that matter, it seemed, from the generations who would follow. In rare accidents of light you could glimpse the citizens of those other times, caught like fish in a crest, sometimes as spirits and sometimes as incarnate humans walking in an era not their own. The wave that was the summer when this story begins stood out because it was the midpoint of the worst drought any living person had experienced, and deer, coyotes, and bobcats were limping into town from the surrounding chaparral, driven mad by thirst. The Anacua was indifferent to it all. It was a portal to be negotiated when walking toward the listless businesses downtown. From certain angles it blocked the view of the squat, square-shouldered building across the street, with its steel-barred windows and its Deco-lettered sign that said Bee County Jail.
(From "A Brief and Necessary Madness," which appeared in River Teeth, Issue 14.2, Spring, 2013, and subsequently appeared in the New Millennium Writings anthology, Issue 26, 2017, copyright (c) 2013 by Kirk Wilson)