Ep 499: Weird, nerdy, and totally delightful: our conversation with Kevin Wilson

·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

Author Kevin Wilson explains why his fictional town Coalfield drives his publisher crazy by existing in two different Tennessees.

Coalfield starts as a real place. In Kevin Wilson's books, it turns into something stranger: a private fictional town that can move, change shape, and ignore the map when the story needs it to. His copy editor catches the contradictions. Wilson sounds amused by that, and by the odd freedom of making a town feel true even when it refuses to behave accurately. Anne Bogle meets him in that space with an easy, curious tone. She gets what makes his work fun to talk about: the ideas can be weird and nerdy, but the feeling underneath stays close to home. Run for the Hills becomes the main path into that. Wilson says he often writes about found family and biological family, then started wondering what would happen if those two labels suddenly crashed into each other. That idea has a personal ache behind it. He connects it to his mother's childhood in Nashville, where her Japanese mother was left by an American sailor husband. He talks about poverty, abandonment, and the hard anger his mother felt toward another family whose children had the same father. Then the story shifts again. When that father left the Texas family too, those children were tied together by loss as much as blood. His wife's adoption brings in another thread. She was not looking for biological parents, but a DNA test still opened up ancestry matches and a little door of possibility. Wilson keeps the heaviness from going stiff, especially when he jokes about the letdown of the British ancestry result. Bogle gives him room. The episode stays warm, bookish, and a bit wonderfully odd, then closes with thanks to Wilson, the Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club community, and everyone listening toward the next book.

As heard by us

A warm, off-kilter conversation about fictional geography, family inheritance, and the strange routes between them.

Kevin Wilson's Coalfield emerges as a magically unstable Tennessee town, able to expand, contract, and even misplace its mountain, while still linking back to his fiction through characters who live there or come from there.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You get Coalfield, Tennessee as Kevin Wilson's private, shape-shifting place, plus family threads that appear out of nowhere.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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