Guest blogger Geoff Wyss writes “About a Character”

Last week I had fun answering questions posed by a writer who generated a blog relay to which novelist Thaisa Frank invited me. This week, my friend Geoff Wyss has agreed to participate. Since Geoff doesn’t have a blog, his answers are posted here.

BIO: Geoff Wyss’s book of stories, How, won the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction and was published in 2012. His first novel, Tiny Clubs, was published in 2007. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Image, Ecotone, Tin House, and others and has been reprinted in New Stories from the South and the Bedford Introduction to Literature.  He teaches and lives in New Orleans.

Warning: what you read below may make you rush out to find his book.

Come back tomorrow to find out what Chicago writer and Columbia College professor Don De Grazia  has to say about one of his characters. Don is the author of the acclaimed novel, American Skin.

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1. What is the name of your character? Is s/he a fictional or a historic person?

My character’s name is Gary Wilkins—or sometimes (depending on the story) Gerald or Gordon, sometimes Weldon or Wellman—and he’s basically an alter ego for me, so I’m not sure what to say about ‘fiction’ versus ‘reality.’  (I don’t try to hide my association with the character; he has my initials, my job—teaching high school English—and my smart-ass demeanor.)  So the narrator of my teaching stories is basically me (as the other characters are basically my co-workers), but the events are made up.  My stories about teaching move around in this halfway space and are energized (so it seems to me at least) by a hybrid vigor.  So the answer to the question of “fictional or historical” is: yes.

2. When and where is the story set?

Two of the teaching stories in my book How, “Child of God” and “Profession of the Body,” are set in a Catholic school, Our Lady of Perpetual Succor, in a suburb of New Orleans.  The stories occur around the time I wrote them, a few years before Katrina.  (I mention Katrina not because it has any bearing on the stories but because the teaching stories I’ve written since the storm are set in the all-boys Jesuit school where I now teach.)  The unnamed suburb is modeled on St. Bernard Parish, where I then taught.

3. What should we know about him?

He’s been teaching for about ten years, long enough to have gotten good at it but also long enough to have started feeling the institutional weariness that comes with the job.  He is idealistic about his work in one moment and cynical about it in the next as a result of this weariness.  (Most teachers will tell you that it isn’t the students and classroom that wears them out; it’s everything outside the classroom and the other adults in the building.)  His complex relationship to the religious mission of the school often gets him in trouble when he can’t keep his mouth shut.  He is (in these two stories) unmarried, one of those lifelong bachelors you commonly find in high schools.  He’s tightly controlled and out of control.  His messes are mine.

4. What is the personal goal of the character?

In “Child of God” Gary hopes to defend a favorite student, senior Ashley Brimmer, from the over-heavy hand of the institution when she turns up pregnant.  Girls in Catholic schools in New Orleans are not expelled when they get pregnant, but they are asked to leave campus when they begin to “show” and to finish the year at an alternative school.  Even though Ashley’s pregnancy won’t be visible—the school year is almost over—the school’s Campus Minister, Ted Infante, is exerting his influence to have Ashley removed.  In a fit of moral (or amoral) outrage, Gary schemes to get Ted fired and save Ashley’s school year (and her last couple months in Gary’s class).  What deeper wishes Gary might harbor regarding Ashley, Gary himself would be unable to say.

 5. What is the title of this book, and where can we read more about it?  When was the book published?

“Child of God” appears in my first book of short stories, How, which was published by Ohio State University Press in 2012.  It can be found in the usual places.  “Child of God” first appeared in Image and was later reprinted in New Stories from the South 2009 and The Bedford Introduction to Literature.  More information about the collection as a whole can be found in this review from the Times-Picayune:

http://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2012/08/new_orleans_writer_geoff_wyss.html

I can be reached at geoffwyss@hotmail.com.

Thanks to Paulette for the chance to take a shot at these questions.  The next writers I’ve asked to participate are three of my personal favorites:

Louis Maistros is a longtime resident of New Orleans’s 8th Ward.  A former forklift operator and self-taught writer, artist, photographer, Louis published his widely hailed historical novel, The Sound of Building Coffins, in 2009 with The Toby Press.  Coffins is currently in its third printing.   When he is not writing, Louis is compulsively taking pictures of his beloved home city of New Orleans.  Louis’s responses will appear on his website, http://www.louismaistros.com/home.html.

Cary Holladay writes fiction based on the history and culture of her native Virginia. Her seven volumes include Horse People: Stories and The Deer in the Mirror.  Her answers will appear on her website: http://www.caryholladay.net/.

Patty Friedmann is an award-winning New Orleans author whose nine darkly comic literary novels include Secondhand Smoke and Eleanor Rushing—the latter soon to be released in e-form as Through the Windshield. She also has published short stories, essays, reviews, stage plays, and more.  Her An Organized Panic took first runner-up out of 406 entrants in the Faulkner-Wisdom novel competition.