Hypertext Magazine asks: “What question do you wish you’d been asked about your work?”
Check back tomorrow for an excerpt from Wild Things. If you live in Chicago, you can hear Jaimee read Wednesday, November 9 at The Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln Avenue. For a complete list of readings, visit JAIMEEWRISTONCOLBERT.COM.
By Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Great question! So far I’ve had three interviews, and one concentrated on the environmental angle (I am thrilled to have Wild Things listed with ECO-FICTION.COM!), and the other two were more about the political themes: income inequality in post-manufacturing, rust-belt America, with its decline in jobs, the demise of the working class and drug addiction. These are all essential to understanding what this book is about, but since we read stories to become engrossed in other lives, as in we read (and most of us fiction writers write!) for character, I would’ve loved for someone to ask me about Jones! The story I shared on Hypertext has several oblique references to him (as in the “kidnapped girl”), but he is the main character in the two “Wild Things” title stories, and it is his random act that creates a novelistic arc to this collection, and essentially links the stories. He abducts a fifteen-year-old girl from an abandoned parking lot, takes her to his trailer in the woods and keeps her tied up there, ostensibly as a means of rescuing her from her drug-dealer boyfriend who was trying to “make her do things” (sexually) in his car. I love this character because in the creation of him, instead of the monster one would expect, tying up and holding hostage an underage girl, he becomes more and more sympathetic in his naiveté and innocence, as in he genuinely believes he is “saving her” from a damaged world that makes people do things they don’t want to do. At one point he even says, that with him “she can just be.” He is a man more comfortable among nature and “wild things” than people, and sees himself as a savior of sorts to wounded and disappearing wild life. I was initially inspired by the Jaycee Dugard case, and at first saw my story only from the abducted girl’s point of view (Loulie in Wild Things), because of course in the Dugard case her captor was truly a monster. But then, to my surprise and delight, the more I developed my own abductor, Jones, the more sympathetic he became in his almost Billy Budd-like innocence and genuine (if incredibly misguided) wish to keep Loulie safe. I love being surprised by my characters, giving them the reins to show me who they are. This incident, and how it works out, is the “hook” that links the stories, such that in the end we understand this book is really about community.
