Author: Ted Wheeler

“The Hyphenates of Jackson County” Published in Artful Dodge

| Ted Wheeler

dodgeheaderMore late spring publication news, as my story “The Hyphenates of Jackson County” was published late last week in the recent issue of Artful Dodge!

Get your copy of the issue here.

Thanks so much to editor Daniel Bourne for all his work with the story, and to Erin McGraw, who selected “Hyphenates” for an AWP Intro Journals Project award while I was a student in the Creighton University MFA program. The story was nominated by CUmfa, so thanks to Dave Mullins for that.

Long-time friends of the blog will surely recognize the title of the story, as this was the original title of my World War I novel, what has since become Kings of Broken Things. In its earlier versions the novel focused entirely on the character of Jake Strauss (fka Jacob Strauss fka Jakob Strauss fka Jacob Bressler) and his introduction to the underworld elements of Omaha after being forced to flee his rural home of Jackson County. This short story is basically the opening scenes from that iteration of the novel.

More generally, the story is set in a fictional Jackson County, Nebraska, during World War I, and deals with a German immigrant and his two sons’ struggle to hold together their family, church, and farm amid threats both local and global.

Here’s an excerpt:

With the war in Europe raging late that summer, Jake was awakened by his father in the middle of the night more than once, the Pfarrer compelled to voice a worry that the German army would claim Fred and Jake, somehow, conscript them into service over on the Eastern Front, because that’s the side of Germany the Pfarrer was born to, in West Prussia, south of Danzig. There were always rumors of Kaiser Wilhelm’s reach, but the Pfarrer’s mania was peculiar and unfounded, as it always boiled over in the middle of the night. With all that had happened, he felt something was lacking in their connection to the Lord. “There’s a debt there,” was how the Pfarrer put it.

Jake and Fred agreed. But what was there to do about it?

That August, Jake found his father sprawled in the creek on the other side of their claim, water damming up and washing over his naked body. His clothes lay out on the grass. The jacket was on top, a shirt showed under the lapels. His pants were below with a shoe at the bottom of each leg, laces tied. It looked like the Pfarrer had been sucked out of his clothes, the way they’d been arranged. Two bottles of wine nearby, a half empty jar of horse cleaner. Jake didn’t know if his father had poisoned himself or not, if he’d soon die. Jake had heard of people doing that—eyes lost pigment after drinking horse cleaner, hair fell from heads. It hurt horribly. His father was naked in the cold creek, rolling to be facedown. He was pale, his breathing slow as Jake yanked him from the water and demanded to know what he’d done. He woke looking into Jake’s eyes. “I couldn’t do it,” he said. “The horse cleaner?” Jake asked. “No. I didn’t.”

Jake lifted the Pfarrer to his shoulder and carried him up the hill. His father was large, but Jake showed no struggle. He had urgency on his side and his muscles responded to the charge. The Pfarrer glanced to Jake, almost shy in his drunk, tepid and put-off as he was set to the porch, surprised again at how his younger boy had grown. Jake felt it well up in his gut, in his muscled shoulders and forearms, the anger and guilt, the tension of struggle. What did his father want to accuse him of?

Bad Faith Cover Preview!

| Ted Wheeler

Bad Faith final pngCheck out the awesome wrap-around cover for my short story collection Bad Faith! The cover was designed by Brian Mihok with artwork by Michael Mihok. Brian does all the covers for Queen’s Ferry Press, and I’m really excited about what he’s done with Bad Faith. This definitely has the QFP feel to it while also representing the book pretty well too. Thanks to Brian and Michael, and to QFP Editor Erin McKnight for all her hard work in helping to get everything just so.

PS: I heard that the advance reader copies went out to book reviewers last week, so we’re getting there.

PPS: Check out my events page, as some book tour dates have been added. I’ll be out on the road reading with Tyrone Jaeger (So Many True Believers) and Dave Madden (If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There) in early July, with stops in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Iowa City, and Des Moines, in addition to Omaha and Lincoln. Thanks so much to QFP publicist Kelsey Hall for setting these up. I’m hoping to secure a few dates on the coasts soon too, so stay tuned.

Bad Faith Blurb Preview

| Ted Wheeler

12400715_10102357215153903_1410032962247269600_nAs the July release date for my story collection, Bad Faith, inches ever closer, we’ve been pulling together some of the promotional materials. Here are the blurbs, if you’re interested. Thanks so much to Jonis, Amina, Brent, and Mark for their generosity in taking the time to plug my book! (And check out below for a teaser of the front cover that I’ve been sending out on postcards.)

“These stories turn the reader’s expectations on their head as Wheeler spins stunning arabesques, scoring the surface of his characters’ reality to reveal the malice, confusion, and ultimate frailty of us all.”     – Jonis Agee, author of The Bones of Paradise

“Theodore Wheeler’s debut collection of fiction Bad Faith is a perfect lesson in perfidy, deception, and duplicity, a contemplative exploration of the vagaries of the double-minded human heart.”     – Amina Gautier, author of The Loss of All Lost Things

“Wheeler’s characters occupy the edges of their lives, the gray places of the heart. They yearn for inclusion at the same time that they feel pulled into isolation. At the heart of this brilliant book is the desire to connect—with others, with the world around us, and with the lost parts of ourselves. Filled with powerful insights and a nuanced understanding of human nature, Bad Faith is a major achievement, and Theodore Wheeler is a writer to be reckoned with.”     – Brent Spencer, author of Rattlesnake Daddy: A Son’s Search for His Father

“Superbly chiseled prose conveying extraordinarily hardscrabble lives, Bad Faith explores dark alleys within the epiphany that some of us are more fated to hell than heaven on earth. Theodore Wheeler is the real deal and then some.”     – Mark Wisniewski, author of Watch Me Go

 

 

“Violate the Leaves” Published in Boulevard

| Ted Wheeler

tumblr_o59mwifpuo1tx58ago1_1280According to the Internet, the new issue of Boulevard has arrived from the printers and is headed out to subscribers as we speak! In addition to my story “Violate the Leaves” the Spring 2016 edition features new work from Stephen Dixon, Amit Majmudar, Miriam Kotzin, Adrian Matejka, Phong Nguyen, Joyce Carol Oates, William Trowbridge, and Mary Troy, and a symposium on the future of literary publishing.

To get the issue, head to the Boulevard web site, where you can get a three issue subscription for $15. If you want a real steal, go for the three-year subscription, 9 issues for $30.

“Violate the Leaves” is a story I kicked around for a long time, with the original pages written circa 2003 when I was an undergrad at the University of Nebraska. It’s something I picked at every once in a while until the right elements finally came together during the summer of 2014 when I was at Akademie Schloss Solitude. It’s a father-and-son story about how the two deal with each other during a summer when the boy’s mother is overseas in Iraq. A spare, reticent voice has almost always been a hallmark of my work and this story pushes things even further in that direction. Also, it seems notable that this was the first thing I worked on while a resident of Schloss Solitude. It should come as no surprise that the major features include: 1) a parent who leaves his/her family for an extended period, 2) a central character who is nearly incapable of expressing himself verbally, 3) an examination of nationality, and what it means to be a an American, if anything. There you have it, autobiographical fiction!

This is the fifth time I’ve had a story published in Boulevard, something of a milestone, I guess. I can’t wait to get my copy.

Here’s an excerpt from “Violate the Leaves”:

In the evening there were video calls with Mom. She was just getting up. Or just going to bed. I don’t remember what time it would have been over there. She was tired. My father dialed in the PC that sat on the floor next to the television, but he went outside before she answered. I brought the fishbowl downstairs to brag how I was keeping my goldfish alive.

She talked about the food she ate, once the PC was dialed in, the kinds of equipment she had around her neck and in the pockets of her med kit. Her stethoscope, her thermometer. Rubber gloves. Her voice digitized, sometimes doubling over itself in echoes. She always wore her hair up, over there, wore khaki tee shirts that fit tight around her. She smiled big when she saw me. So big the video broke up in pixilation. She asked how my day went and told me about her day. She tried to tell me about the people she worked with, or the bunker she rushed to if the Sense & Warn detected incoming, she said; and the geography, the mounds of desert that blew in under the doorways; and on the airplane going over, watching the sunset and sunrise only three hours apart over the Arctic Ocean.

I didn’t hear any of that. 

If she told me to shut up about asking when she was coming home, I would.

The Rumpus Interviews Vivian Lee

| Ted Wheeler

vivian-lee-alt-2-2809-200x200Over the weekend The Rumpus featured an interview with Vivian Lee, my editor at Little A. In addition to a shout out for Kings of Broken Things (coming in August 2017 from Little A) and some hilarious recollections of how the Pizza Hut Book-It program spurred on a lifetime of reading and a career as an editor, the space gives a glimpse of Vivian’s take on race and publishing. After getting together last Thursday at AWP in an L.A. ping-pong bar, I couldn’t be more excited to be working with Vivian and the Little A team on this book. This interview provides some insight as to why I’m so enthusiastic.

Be sure to check out the full interview. Here are a couple highlights:

Rumpus: I love how unapologetically blunt some of your tweets are when it comes to race. Like this one: “This may come as a surprise but the onus is not just on POC editors to acquire books by writers of color (esp bc there are so few of us).” What’s your MO as an editor?

Lee: When I tweeted that, it was because someone made a passing comment about how I could be known as the editor who only publishes Asian American authors. It was so othering to me. It made it seem like the only reason I was publishing authors was because we had a similar background. I’d like to think I’m publishing quality books—and it just so happens that a lot of these writers are of Asian descent. If it is a good narrative with an emotional core, then it’s a good book.

As far as my MO as an editor, I am interested in the beauty and transformational power of language and a good story and that’s what I gravitate towards. My list is predominantly writers of color mostly because I’m surrounded by wonderful communities of them and I want to be able to go to more readings and panels that aren’t comprised of all white or almost all white writers. I think I’m in a very good position at Little A as an editor of color to publish these voices and experiences that are not often heard. It’s a unique place to be in and it’s something I take very seriously.

—

Rumpus: What’s at the root of the diversity problem in publishing? What do you think needs to change?

Lee: There’s a lot of hand-wringing over the “diversity problem” but not a lot being done yet. I think the root of the problem goes back to my tweet earlier. Everyone in publishing needs to take accountability for diversity—not just POC editors. From the ground up we have to hire diverse editors, designers, marketers, publicists, etc. I do think once we change from the “inside out,” then publishing will realize that Junot Díaz, Zadie Smith, etc don’t have to be the sole voice of an entire group of people. I can’t speak for other houses, but I am excited to say that Little A is committed to publishing diverse stories, voices, and authors.

In my dream scenario as an editor, if we all seek out more writers of color and diversify our list, then agents will have to also diversify their list and seek out more writers of color, and readers will get more of a chance to read stories they normally wouldn’t read, and then more books by writers of color will be published. I’m pretty direct with agents about what books I want and it forces them to look at their own list and see where they can improve.

March Updates

| Ted Wheeler

bad faithThings are coming along as the July release of Bad Faith gets closer. After a few rounds of edits and cover design meetings and inside design meetings and proofreading and proofreading, we’re almost to the galley stage. Then, some proofreading! The process has actually been pretty cool, and I’ve really enjoyed working with editor Erin McKnight. That the book ended up with Queen’s Ferry Press was a real stroke of luck. More on the book soon, including a preview of the cover in a few weeks.

-My short story “The Missing” (published in The Southern Review last year, and in Bad Faith) was featured on a new book podcast called Story Buds. The series has an interesting premise: the hosts re-imagine the plot of a published story going off of only three sentences from the beginning, middle, and end of the piece in question. (NSFW)

-Last month I mentioned how Julie Iromuanya’s novel Mr. and Mrs. Doctor was named a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for debut writers. Not satisfied with only one major nomination, Julie’s novel was recently named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award! Pretty cool stuff for a Lincoln native and UNL creative writing program grad. If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, do so soon.

-Michael Catherwood has a new collection of poems coming out later this spring, If You Turn Around Quickly, that’s currently up for pre-order at the discount price of $8 at this link. Mike writes the best poems about Omaha going (not to play favorites) and his previous collection (Dare) is one I’ve gone back to many times.

-Richard Burgin’s newest short story collection, Don’t Think, came out from Johns Hopkins University Press a couple weeks ago and continues a solid run of Burgin books the last few years. Be sure to check it out!

41sm3ftriyl-_sx322_bo1204203200_In Don’t Think, his ninth collection of short fiction, Burgin offers us his most daring and imaginatively varied work to date. The stories explore universal themes of love, family, and time, examining relationships and memory―both often troubled, fragmented, and pieced back together only when shared between characters. In the title story, written in propulsive, musical prose, a divorced father struggles to cling to reality through his searing love for his highly imaginative son, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In “Of Course He Wanted to Be Remembered,” two young women meet to commemorate the death of a former college professor with whom they were both unusually close―though in very different ways. In “V.I.N.,” a charismatic drug dealer tries to gain control of a bizarre cult devoted to rethinking life’s meaning in relation to infinite time, while in “The Intruder,” an elderly art dealer befriends a homeless young woman who has been sleeping in his basement.

Spring/Summer Schedule for PTL Literary Pub Quiz

| Ted Wheeler

51fzkloefyl-_sx327_bo1204203200_Some pub quiz news to share, as last week we finalized the schedule of guest hosts for the Pageturners Lounge Literary Pub Quiz through July. As a refresher, this is more or less a traditional trivia night–21 questions, teams competing for prizes, we meet at 8pm on the first Wednesday of every month–with the twist that we feature a literary guest to introduce to the community via a short interview and a special category of questions that the guest presents. Fellow Omaha writers Drew Justice and Ryan Borchers co-host the event with me. It’s been a lot of fun so far and the reception has been great.

Some of the categories so far include more usual topics like US Cities, Christmas Stories, and 20th Century Literature, and range to saucier topics like Buryin’ the Librarian, Hollywood Hunks, and Hotboxing with Baudelaire. See how much fun this is?

Having authors and editors come in to share a little about their work has been an interesting aspect to manage, particularly with the eclectic group of novelists, poets, editors, and librarians we’ve had in during the first five months. A lot of the time the whole idea of an author event can be kind of awkward in the sense that it’s typically an opportunity to sell the persona of the writer, and not necessarily their actual written work. That’s the cynical view anyway–and the pub quiz kind of cuts to the chase as far as this goes, hopefully generating some exposure for our authors and their projects. All the guests have seemed to enjoy themselves at least. And I’m really excited about who we will be welcoming the next few months. (JCC!)

Here’s a link to the Facebook page for our March 2 event, if you’re looking for more specific information. Otherwise, check out the extended schedule below.

PTL Pub Quiz Schedule (First Wednesday, 8pm, 5004 Dodge Street, Omaha, Neb.)imp-final

March 2: Britny Cordera, author of Wingmakers.
April 6: Blue River, literary journal run by the MFA students at Creighton University.
May 4: Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Make Your Home Among Strangers and How to Leave Hialeah.
June 1: David Philip Mullins, author of Greetings from Below.
July 6: Monsters of Short Fiction Tour, feat. Tyrone Jaeger (So Many True Believers), Dave Madden (If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There) and Theodore Wheeler (Bad Faith).

Miscellany on a Snowy Day

| Ted Wheeler

12633710_423636127833827_391863279269080749_oSince it’s a slow, blizzardy day here in Omaha, and I’ve got a few minutes before the girls wake up from their naps, here’s some miscellany of interest to the blog.

-First off, happy book birthday to Amina Gautier, who’s third collection of short fiction The Loss of All Lost Things was officially released from Exilir Press! Here’s what Christine Schutt had to say about the book: “Loss, loss of home, family, love–the freighted loss of children themselves–these are Amina Gautier’s subjects but prepare for enthrallment and surprise: These unexpectedly comforting stories of loss mend loss with reminders of our heroic inadequacies to love well. The Loss of All Lost Things is a touching collection of limpidly composed, irresistible stories,tempting to read in a sitting.” Make sure you pick up a copy, either from Amazon or SPD.

-Congrats to Julie Iromuanya, whose debut novel Mr. and Mrs. Doctor made the shortlist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize! The Bingham Prize honors “an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work—a novel or collection of short stories—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. The winner receives a cash award of $25,000, a stipend intended to permit a significant degree of leisure in which to pursue a second work of literary fiction.” Just announced today, this is quite an honor, and very much deserved. Way to go, Julie!

-Yet more congrats are in order, as a couple weeks ago Jaquira Díaz was awarded one of two 2016-2018 Kenyon Review Fellowships! KR fellows are supported for two years while they complete a significant book project and teach one class a semester at Kenyon College. It’s a pretty cool thing. I met Jaquira at the 2012 Key West Literary Seminar as part of what turned out to be an exceptionally talented class of scholarship winners. She’s definitely a writer to watch.41q8ajkcfal-_sx322_bo1204203200_

-This is a couple weeks of an early happy book birthday, but check out (and pre-order) So Many True Believers by Tyrone Jaeger, a short story collection that’s due out on February 16 from Queen’s Ferry Press. While still in the planning stages, it looks like I’ll be getting out and doing a few readings/signings with Ty this summer. More on that later, of course, but for now… “So Many True Believers gives voice to the wanton, the restless, and those hellbent on self-destruction. The Nat Mota School for at-risk youth is the nexus of Tyrone Jaeger’s spiraling narrative; loosed from it is an array of characters yearning, raging, and chasing down their misguided dreams. There is Jeremy, mourning the loss of his girlfriend to a UFO cult; Harold, the betrayed husband exploring intimacy in unfamiliar waters; and Ginny, the teenage runaway hiding out with a band of video-obsessed squatters. Mystery, magic, and gritty realism are coiled against a backdrop of failed relationships and addictions in this darkly humorous debut collection depicting the frayed edges of the American psyche.”
 
-Finally, be sure to check out this interview with Alexander Chee, “Maybe It Was Worth It,” on The Millions this week. In addition to talking about his second novel, The Queen of the Night, which also releases today, Chee addresses at length the issues that confront novelists working in the age of omnipresent social media presence. Here’s a longish excerpt from the interview, and be sure to check out the whole thing over at The Millions:

TM: Did you feel commercial pressure, or worry about your own livelihood?

AC: This is a constant under capitalism though, right? But nothing in the book is there to make it more commercial or I would have used quotation marks around the dialogue. Other people may be able to write cynically, but when I do I want to die. Which was never the point of writing.0618663029-01-lzzzzzzz

The biggest pressure was when I had run out of the money. I was paid for this book, everything else was essentially unpaid work during which time I also had to work to pay bills. And the longer the novel wasn’t published, the more it seemed to endanger everything in my life — my ability to get teaching work, to successfully apply for grants, my relationship, future projects. Each small delay, each mistake, each wrong turn in the writing became enormous as a result and it was unendurable in the last two years.

The novel also ruined every family holiday vacation for a decade, too — typically the down time between semesters when you can get writing done.

Right near the end, I had a student write a story about the workshop, in which she was unkind to everyone in the class except herself, who she portrayed as a talented writer and a great beauty. This is something that happens at least once in every writing teacher’s life — the student who thinks it is brilliant to write about the class and make everyone talk about what she thinks of them. Me? She portrayed me as a failed writer who couldn’t sell his new book.

All I can say is, I look forward to when this happens to her.