J. W. Wood

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Cowlam: It seems timely that with a collection of short stories just published by AN Editions, you have recently sold a short story to Substack in LA, quite a laurel given the stiff competition you must have been up against. Substack has truly established itself as an alternative to mainstream publishing, opening up possibilities for authors the mainstream overlooks, not only for publication, but for payment too. Do you foresee a time when Substack and other such initiatives will bring about widespread democratisation for poets and writers of fiction?

Wood: What an excellent question. The short answer is: I’m not sure. In the near term, Substack has a huge number of readers and subscribers – five million is I think the number they are claiming. The story you’re referring to was, according to the publishers, read by just under 8,500 people from the 19,000 people who subscribe to Short Story Substack; speaking personally, this is one of my larger readerships. A horror story I wrote a few years ago which was published online in the US reached – apparently – a readership of something like 50,000. So these numbers are huge. And there’s a lot in what you say about democratising poetry and short stories through these platforms.

On the other hand, there’s something about the printed word and the book – something to do with the permanence of the printed word on the page – which I think will take a long time to die, if it ever does. Better minds than mine have written about the “permanence of the written utterance”, and how physical books are (with a small p) political, inasmuch as they enable a physical and direct relationship between reader and writer, and also allow readers to own, in a very practical sense, their copy of a work. So in short, I don’t see the book going away. I think I see both forms co-existing for a long time to come.

Cowlam: Captcha This!, your collection of stories published by AN Editions last week, consists of ten short stories, all of a witty, satirical nature. Can you give a flavour of the book, its aims, its subject matter, and what it was that brought you to write it?

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Wood: I wrote most of these stories when I lived on an island about ten miles off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. When we moved there, I was tired of writing things for companies in permanent jobs, and basically did zero work for money for two or three years. For a long time, I’d noticed the growing discrepancy between the way people wanted to live their lives, and how technology and politics were forcing them to live: on top of which, technology also enables people to confect utterly fantastic existences that bear no relationship whatsoever to reality – even as it constrains them from living as they wish to. At the same time, I was reading writers like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illic and becoming more aware of the dangers the digital life poses to our sense of being human. So a lot of the stories came from that – and the desire, as Horace put it, “to entertain and inform”, rather than hectoring people. Not to mention the need to have a laugh, which for me is an essential part of being alive, like eating, drinking and breathing.

Cowlam: Satire is a major political tool with a long and distinguished literary history – one has only to think of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and especially of Voltaire, three very different masters of the genre. Do you see parallels now with what those Enlightenment figures were trying to achieve?

Wood: I think any one of those figures had more talent in a single fingernail-clipping than I could ever dream of laying claim to, so all comparisons – however flattering – must be resisted. But all three of the figures you mention were writing at a time of political and social foment, so in that sense there may be a parallel. Indeed, one can go back even further and look at the parallels between Chaucer’s work, or that of Langland or to a lesser extent Gower, and what was happening in the England of the 1370s and 1380s. Then, as now, natural disasters and changes in technology were forcing huge changes on society. Depending on who you read – Trevelyan blames the medieval church – ordinary people were becoming aware of the enormous hypocrisy visited on them by the ruling classes and economic elites: and that might be the strongest parallel with where we find ourselves now. Most people are intelligent, and to treat them as if they are not is the worst kind of folly, yet it’s a temptation rulers find near-impossible to resist.

Cowlam: You have a body of published poetry and fiction to your credit. What’s next for J. W. Wood – more prose? Another satire?

Wood: Over the years since I wrote my 2011 thriller, Stealing Fire, readers and friends have asked me about the sequel, which I have written but had shelved a few years ago as I became more interested in satire. AN Editions have expressed an interest in publishing that next year, so I’m currently rewriting it to bring it up to date. After that, I have plans for something much more deep and involved, likely a novel that expands on a lot of what I’ve been writing about and brings together some of the different genres I’ve worked in over the years. I’m sorry if that sounds vague, but – as the great Anthony Burgess said – “If I told you what I was going to write about, I’d never write it!”

Reader’s Questions

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Cowlam: We collated a few questions from your appreciative readers. Would you mind answering them, James?

Wood: Of course. Go ahead!

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Reader: Can the digital world be used for good as well as dehumanisation?

Wood: Most definitely yes: but the evolution will depend on us as human beings and our ability to move beyond cat videos, raging one-sided political rants and outright lies based on idealised versions of our own experience. In my mind, the right balance is something like the early “Star Wars” films, in which — although there’s high tech used everywhere and drones and droids aplenty — the characters still choose to have friendships, love affairs and so on IRL (in real life), as they say. In other words, we as a species have to get over technology as some kind of wonder-weapon and start treating it like a tool: good for some things, but much less so for others. Until the health-monitoring smartwatch came along, for instance, digital watches were more or less dead because they had novelty value in the 80s, then everyone decided they preferred old watchfaces. I can think of plenty of technologies we’d be better off without – like bank chatbots, automated reminders, the various bleeps and bloops our cars and phones make under the seeming direction of some malevolent spirit — but it’s up to us to change that. We don’t need to use tech just because it’s there.

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Reader: Tell us more about why you went to go and chop wood in Canada? Was it nominative determinism? How did that change your world view and your writing?

Wood: At that time in my life I was completely and utterly sick of corporate politics and pettifogging procedures such as procurement and expense management, many of which were being used as weapons by some of the less savoury characters I encountered. After I’d resigned to go and write on an island, I discovered that the management accountant where I’d worked before had been running shadow procurement exercises on everything I’d bought and had tried to question my purchase of a 45-pence bottle of water on a business trip. So I had had enough, and found myself in my mid-40s adopting a lifestyle most men reject as being too strenuous to continue at that age: felling trees, digging trenches, concreting, cutting paths in the bush, putting up fences and so on. I was absolutely blessed by my neighbours, who showed me so many of the skills I lacked.

As to how it affected my life and writing, it taught me that one really doesn’t need to work for money beyond the essentials. It’s a choice, but — as the brilliant John Seymour is careful to warn everyone in his “Complete Book of Homesteading” — I also learned that it’s not a life for everyone, and between my mid-40s and early 50s it became increasingly clear to me that I couldn’t sustain that lifestyle forever. As a writer, it gave me that most precious of gifts: time. I had the time to develop my approach to short fiction, having become somewhat tired of my own voice as a poet after six or seven books of verse that had been politely reviewed in a few places but otherwise ignored.  

Reader: Are your stories a plea for voluntary simplicity?

Wood: In many ways, yes I think they are. I mean, who doesn’t love dark chocolate cherries soaked in armagnac, hot tubs, limousines, massive stereo systems, designer clothes and expensive wines … but none of that matters. I’m not even sure if, to pervert Woody Allen, they are among the best meaningless experiences one could have. And I definitely think that luxury items are a distraction from what does matter every bit as much as technology is. I’m of the view that we were put here to respect each other and the world, and to safeguard that world — and our civilisation — for the future. We have a clear purpose: we just need to go and fulfil it to the best of our abilities. I don’t know if a bacon-wrapped sausage in a fine-milled Kaiser Roll with horseradish cream, washed down with a fine-hopped lager, helps in that quest. But perhaps it does. 

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Reader: There are many different characters in your stories. Some make me smile with recognition. Do you think people will recognise themselves in your stories? Would they be right to do so?

Wood: At a personal level, I do hope people don’t recognise themselves, as I was very careful not to co-opt anyone living or dead as a character in their entirety, and of course any resemblance to anyone living or dead [see legalese at the front of books] is of course entirely coincidental. No, really. Honestly. Truly. I promise. 

Anyway — all that said, some of the archetypes – the vain, preening businessman; the bullshitting “policy specialist” in government; social media fanatics, wannabe actors down on their luck, corporate verbiage-spouters, etc., will I imagine be easily recognised by us all – and that’s how it should be. 

Reader: Weren’t you tempted to be more cruel?

Wood: Never. There’s far too much sorrow in the world and in all our lives for me to want to add one iota to it. “La tristesse durera”, as Van Gogh said on his deathbed. 

Reader: The deep enjoyment I get from your stories generally comes in their satisfying endings. Others must have found the same enjoyment because several of them have won prizes. Did you find a catharsis in writing your carefully written bubble bursters?  Any one in particular?

Wood: Another great question, and thank you for the kind words. I suppose at some level I must find it cathartic, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I mean, the adoring legions of female fans and piles of money that send Soros into an envious rage are fine, but they do pale after a while. Or so I’ve heard. 

I think what interests me is having an idea and seeing where it goes. With some of these pieces – “Flare-Up!”, for instance, or “A Riveting Tale” — I definitely had targets in mind. But “Crunch Time for the Pheasant” had an entirely different genesis, which was that there really was a one-legged pheasant hopping around outside my sister’s house during lockdown and it would not shut up. Meanwhile another kind of squawking was going on via the TV and Radio – that of the government controlling us through their edicts. So I guess the stories can come from very different places, but the work of figuring out how those stories might interest people remainsvery much the same.

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Reader: Has your voyage through the world of commerce and commercial writing helped you hone your literary and poetic skills?

Wood: Funnily enough, I was talking to another commercial writer about this very subject last week. He writes books about architecture and landscape, and I don’t think either of us could ever be accused of taking our work too seriously. On the one hand, I’ve never had much patience with the whole, “I … am … a … WRITAH!” crapola, and very much see writing as a craft that has to be learned the hard way – hours and hours at a desk, trying to get it right and asking yourself who, if anyone cares. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that having been successful as a commercial writer has given me confidence I have never had before, and I think anyone should be proud to earn a living from their skills – especially writers. I have zero patience with this idea that it’s OK for Scarlett Johansson to flog perfume but somehow if I write a brochure for someone I’m a sell-out. And I have to go further: when I was put up for a job in Switzerland, I got it in preference to two other writers who shall remain nameless but who are novelists with contracts at major publishers who “didn’t want their names revealed” – meanwhile, a cursory glance at the internet reveals their moody, side-on headshots and a website that suggests they live comfortably off their fiction, unencumbered by the vulgarities of commerce. Hypocrisy at that level sends the wrong message to young writers and I refuse to be a part of it.

Reader: Why AN Editions?

Wood: I have to acknowledge my former publisher, the poet and editor David Cooke, here. I say that because David persuaded me to publish my New and Selected Poems 1989-2019 through his wonderful press, The High Window. At that time in 2016 and afterwards, I didn’t give a damn about publishing another book. I thought, and maybe I still do, that publishing is all fine and well if you have the power of a big multi-national publisher behind you, but can seem rather pointless otherwise. All of that said, Phil Hall contacted me on Facebook to say that he found some of my stuff funny so I agreed to throw my lot in with AN Editions for another turn of the publishing trireme, as it were. And I have been stunned to see that some people — anyone — actually wanted to buy my book. Given that I’d banished any thought of publication in book form for these stories, I am enormously grateful to AN Editions for the chance to publish. And the fact that I have met so many fantastic talents and such creative souls while doing so is just another blessing among many.

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Peter Cowlam, the Literary Editor of Ars Notoria Magazine, is a poet and novelist. As a novelist, he has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. The Quagga Prize is awarded for independently published works of fiction. Other work has appeared in The Battersea Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Blue Nib, The Galway Review, Easy Street, Literary Matters, Eunoia Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Liberal, and others.