For this week's paper, I interviewed Wells Tower, author of the excellent short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (for a mere sampling of the glowing reviews garnered by the collection when it came out last year, see here and here). We talked about book tours, Towers' year living in Portland, his attitude toward the internet, and more. There wasn't room in the paper to run the whole thing—hit the jump for the complete transcript.

MERCURY: You’re touring for the paperback release of the book, after the hardcover release last year. How is the second lap different from the first?

WELLS TOWER: Well, it’s been a long year of promo stuff. I had the hardcover tour, and then I said yes to a bunch of literary festivals and things overseas, just because it seemed at the time kind of amazing that anyone would pick up plane fare to bring me over to Australia or wherever.

It doesn’t seem amazing anymore?

I did so much of it that it really did take a bite on my writing time, I’d had a pretty solitary little life up until now. I was doing some magazine work, and traveling a fair amount for that, but I wasn’t in the position of product spokesperson until this year. Doing all that stuff is a little strange. It’s weird to go from the place of being the person who is creating work in solitude and fretting and throwing things away and revising and wondering if you’ll ever get anything decent on paper, to then be a person who, for a good stretch of months, all you’re doing is talking about your stuff and repeating the same canned paragraphs you’ve emitted many times before. Even with my piddling level of success with it, it’s been a little bit destabilizing, I wonder how people like Eat Pray Love manage it.

Elizabeth Gilbert was actually just in town, but I didn’t interview her.

I’m sure there are certain word chains she can just disgorge.

I always picture people doing crosswords while I’m interviewing them, changing diapers…

Actually, I’m regrouting my bathroom.

I noticed that you don’t have a website or much of an internet presence, why is that?

I just find the internet to be so troublesome. I really wish that I could work longhand, but at this point, I grew up being able to cut and paste stuff, and swap things around on a computer. But to me there’s something wrong and regrettable about having the writing machine also be a television and a jukebox and a shopping mall.

Some contemporary authors go out of their way to use Facebook and Twitter to communicate and connect with their fans; that’s not something you’re interested in?

I don’t see how that’s my job. If people like the book, that’s great; if they hate it, that’s fine too—I’m not gonna try to convince anybody that they should be reading it. I think the work speaks for itself. For me, too, books that I really admire—I don’t particularly want to have a personal relationship with the author. It’s the work, and I think confusing the work with the person who wrote it is… weird.

You mean you’re not a violent, damanged male figure?

No, I’m really very nice.

You mention Oregon several times in the book, do you have a connection to the area?

I lived in Portland for a year after I got out of college. Do you know where the Hungry Tiger is? I lived not far from the Hungry Tiger. I loved Portland, though I really was not at all prepared for… I mean, I know it’s a hackneyed thing to talk about, but I wasn’t prepared for the precipitation you guys deal with out there. When I was getting ready to move, people said, “You know, in the winter it rains every day,” and I was like… it’s probably once a week. But no, it’s actually every single day. And I also was working some really truly miserable jobs there. I had a job at a place that distributed electronics parts, down by the river doing data entry, and then I had a job in the Nike warehouse in Beaverton. I sort of hacked it for about a year, and then I moved back to North Carolina.

And there’s a family connection in North Carolina?

I have a house down here. It’s really very lovely. It’s kind of a small town scene, but there are lots of university’s here, so it’s not too back-woodsy culturally, and it’s a quiet place with decent restaurants and smart people and good bookstores.

I’ve read that you’re working on a novel—can you talk about the novel or is it a secret?

It’s not that it’s secret, it’s just that it’s probably senseless to talk about it [at this point]. I’m really a zany reviser. I go back and do large violences to my first drafts. The short story collection, everything in there had been published in a magazine previously, but even after they’d come out in a decent magazine I would come back and pretty much destroy them. I might tell the story from the point of view of a different character, or I would get rid of all the characters and I would keep the setting, or I would keep the setting and jettison the central dramatic rationale—I would sort of go back to the foundations.

What are you thinking about when you revise?

When you’re writing a first draft you have no idea what a story is about. You might have a scene, or a bit of dialogue, or some kind of dramatic notion that seems appealing, but then as you write and the people in the story start to become real to you… at least for me, a different sort of emotional core starts to emerge from what I thought it was going to be when I started out. For me, the revision is really all about trying to find the most efficient and good-faith route to what the story’s central emotional problem seems to be. Generally in the first draft, or the first three or four drafts, I have no idea what that problem is. It’s sort of interesting going back, looking at a story that might’ve come out in a magazine awhile ago, and saying, now I understand, this story is really about this person’s relationship with this other person. It’s not about this glib language, or the clever structural stunts I’m trying to pull off here—and so then I’ll go back and try to revise toward that emotional thing. And sometimes when I’m revising, the revisions are way too earnest—one of my big pleasures as a writer is using language in ways that I find interesting, but often when I go back to revise, I think, oh, these are just a bunch of cheap language tricks, and I need to make sure the language is put to some really heartfelt purpose. So often, actually, I’ll need to back away even from that super-earnest revision, and try to mingle a little bit of irony and cruelty from the early drafts in with the treacle of the later stuff.

Are you ever satisfied?

I picked up the book again recently, and… I like it. I had a standard set of reading repertoire that I was doing, but then I got tired of it so I was delving into other stories… I like them. I’ve done all that I can do with them.