Kevin Wilson’s latest novel Run for the Hills is about family relationships lost and found.
The novel contains some of his classic elements, charmingly eccentric characters, complex family relationships and people trying to better understand themselves and their connection to those around them. It starts with Madeline Hill at home on the family farm twenty years after her father left. A visit from a stranger, Reuben Hill, reveals that her father had multiple families and lived under different identities. Mad and Rube take off on road trip in search of their siblings and father and find connections they never dreamed of.
Wilson shares his writing journey here.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that stayed with you and that you can share with us?
WILSON: I wouldn’t have made it without mentors. In college, Tony Earley taught me to write stories, and more than anything else, it was just his calm assessment and encouragement that, if I wanted to try to become a writer, he thought that I could. It meant the world to me. In grad school, Padgett Powell forced me to really dig into that desire to create, to fight harder for the right to tell a story and to make it pristine in its execution. But more than anyone else, Ann Patchett mentored me. I was her dog sitter and we became friends and she obviously mentored my writing, and I’m so grateful for that support, but her friendship was more important, because she helped model how to live in the world and be an artist, how to be a literary citizen and to be kind to people and to insist on the need to write stories. I wouldn’t be here without those three people.
AUTHORLINK: Where did the idea for Run for the Hills come from?
WILSON: A character in my previous novel Now is Not the Time to Panic had written a novel about a woman who drives to her father’s funeral, making stops along the way to pick up all of her half-sisters from his other marriages, and they all had the same first name. In the book, the reception to her novel is pretty terrible. And yet, because I am who I am, I thought, “I like this. I want to write this book.” And then I thought about my mom, who was left by her dad, who started new families, and the strangeness of those relationships with her half-siblings, and how it became more intimate when he also left those families, as they now had this bond. And my wife was adopted but isn’t interested in finding her birth parents, and yet she did a DNA test to look for possible biological issues with illness, and then people would email her and ask how they were related when she popped up in their genealogy, and when they’d learn that she was adopted, they never would write back, because they were probably realizing, in real time, that someone they knew and loved had a kid that no one knew about. So I wanted to explore those complexities, of being both a biological family and a found family at the same time.
AUTHORLINK: You often write about family, and the strength and sometimes burden of family connection. What draws you to this subject?
WILSON: What else is there? I’m most interested in family, and the two questions around it. 1) How were we made? 2) How do you make something? I started out as a kid, made by my parents and my larger family, and the people in my community, and my friends. And then, at some point, I reshaped those elements into my own identity and then set out to find my own family. And once that happened, once we had kids or once we made connections with other people, I started to think about my responsibility to the people in my life, and that became a new source of inspiration for my work.
And I think because I’m so interested in domesticity, in building a home that will hold all the people you love but also allow them to leave and to be flexible enough to take in new people who might need shelter, I think family is just the way I build my stories.
AUTHORLINK: Your characters are very distinctive and quirky. How do you go about character development?
WILSON: I always pretty much just start by making them take on some aspect of my own interior life, my own obsessions or personality, and then the real work starts, as I have to then build a real character around that little shard of my own identity. And if I do it correctly, I can always feel that connection to the character, but I’ve worked so hard to make them a distinctive person with their own desires and behaviors, that the reader can’t even really see that original piece. But, because I am a weird person, maybe that little element is always going to make my characters a little strange, a little wobbly and funny.
AUTHORLINK: This story is a road trip story, among other things. Do you have a favorite road trip novel or movie and did that influence the development of this story?
WILSON: Little Miss Sunshine is a movie that I really love, and I’m sure that I was thinking about the emotional range in that film, how it can be zany and funny but then turn toward darker elements, but always with a tenderness and open-heartedness that makes you feel like the journey will be worth it. For books, Charles Portis wrote The Dog of the South, and I like the zaniness of it, though it didn’t quite influence this book, although his most famous novel True Grit, is a kind of road trip novel and I deeply love that book and used its framework as a model for Run for the Hills.
AUTHORLINK: Your subject matter is serious, parental abandonment, but the book is infused with humor and charm. How did you pull that off?
WILSON: If I pull it off, I think it’s that I usually start with weirdness and humor, and that helps the reader ease into the more difficult or serious elements of the story. I like to start light and then gradually turn down the brightness until the reader realizes how much darker it’s become, but then I always want to remind them that I can bring it back to lightness, that I can find a way toward that absurdity and humor, so they trust that I can work between those two distinct tones. But I always have to be silly first.
AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing Run for the Hills?
WILSON: I’m not used to moving through space in my novels; I tend to like characters to stay in one place, and so one of the immediate challenges for me with a road trip novel was my reticence to, you know, actually go somewhere. I like having a kind of fixed space where I can let my characters open up and unpack the story, and so I was worried about leaving Tennessee, where all of my novels are set. But once I thought of the PT Cruiser, that I could have this fixed space, the story got easier for me to imagine. The characters were get into this weird car, and they’d be together, traveling across the country, and I could still feel the comfort of that space, but it would actually be the literal engine that moved the story along.
AUTHORLINK: This is your fifth novel. Has your writing process changed?
WILSON: I think I’ve figured out how to make space for writing even with a full-time job and a family. And for me, it’s to cut out the extraneous aspects of making art, and really trying to focus on utilizing the limited time that I have. I don’t actually sit down and write very often, and I can go for months without writing a word. But I’ve learned to write in my head, to think about the story over and over and over, so that when the time comes and I can sit down, I’m ready. I’ve become a much faster writer, but I’ve always become a more compressed writer, so my novels are shorter, more compact, more specific. Your process often is a component of your regular life, what’s possible and what’s not. I don’t ever want writing to feel like a chore, or to feel guilty if I haven’t written. And so it’s always lovely for me, and it makes me happy to write, and I think it makes me appreciate it more when I’m doing it.
AUTHORLINK: I’m wondering what advice you offer to apprentice writers about either craft, or staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both.
WILSON: I can’t pretend that talent doesn’t play a part in success, but I think that’s just a kind of baseline that you hope to develop in order to be ready for the next stage of artistic development. And to me, there are two factors: luck and perseverance. You can’t really do anything about luck, but you can outlast everyone else so that your luck exponentially increases. It’s not always the most talented who ends up succeeding; a lot of times, you have to decide that you love making stuff, and you’ll accept failure and disappointment as part of the process and just keep going. I just never stopped. I wasn’t going to quit, even if I never published, and it meant that, when that window opened up for me, I was ready.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
WILSON: I’ve been working on a linked collection, but it’s more like a bunch of stories that all have these recurring elements and plot points, and I don’t know what it will become, but I enjoy writing them and eventually I’ll figure out if someone else might care about them. I’m also working on a novel about the afterlife, but it’s also at such an early stage that it’s really just for me. I’m always just writing for myself, and it’s only later that I start to realize why someone else might care. It’s a pretty lovely part of the process, honestly, when I don’t have to please anyone but myself.
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and five novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017), Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection, Now is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco, 2022) and Run for the Hills (Ecco, 2025). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English & Creative Writing Department at the University of the South.
