Steven Wingate
Photo by Kate Heiberger
Steven Wingate is the author of the novels The Leave-Takers (2021) and Of Fathers and Fire (2019), both part of the Flyover Fiction Series from the University of Nebraska Press, and the short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). He is associate editor at Fiction Writers Review and associate professor of creative writing at South Dakota State University.
Twitter: @stwingate
Facebook: @stevenwingateauthor
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
Being a writer is all about what I do on the page. It’s nothing but me alone with the words, and that’s where I feel most at home. Being an author is what I do when interfacing with the world—doing a reading or classroom visit, answering interview questions like this, etc.
I typically start my day in writer mode to keep that time sacred. Only very rarely, such as when I have a book coming out, do I use that early morning time for public interface, and even then I can’t keep away from writer mode for too long. (My family tells me I get quite unpleasant.) Once writer has been satisfied, then I can be author and shift my focus.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
All the time—especially when I step into author mode. I’m not the world’s most outgoing guy, and I like to think about things awhile (usually quite a long while) before I say something about them. Yet most of the authors I see who are “getting out there” successfully seem able to instantly generate lots of shareable content on social media in very little time. They’re dynamos. Some days I look at what they’re doing and say “I can't hang with these people at all. What am I doing, pretending to be an author?”
Those are my worst days. My best days come when I remind myself that I love the work I’ve created as a writer and want to share it with other people as an author. Both acts are part of a continuum, and castigating myself for not doing the public-facing part of it at the same scale as other authors brings on imposter syndrome. The best way I’ve found to keep it at bay is to focus on the people I come across as I try to share my books with the world. If I keep author mode on a human scale—one reader at a time, rather than a giant, amorphous reading public—then I can better stay out of the whirlpool of self-doubt.
What period of history do you wish you knew more about?
The ancient world has always fascinated me, and I spend lots of time imaginatively speculating about our species’ sociocultural evolutions. I want to know more about the invention of language. I want to know more about when we started burying people. Think about it—somebody was the first human to be buried instead of getting left behind for scavengers to eat. Who was that person? Why did they get buried? What was going through the minds of the people who buried them?
For decades I’ve been a casual reader of books about human prehistory, and someday when I’m not working I hope to throw myself into it more. I’ve got a list of archaeological museums around the world that I want to visit with a notebook so I can look at ancient things and write down the words they pull out of my head. Nothing quite unleashes the storm of words inside me like the tangible remnants of ancient cultures.
Favorite non-reading activity?
I’m a saxophonist—not a good one, but a saxophonist. The first thing I wanted to be was a jazz musician, and since my dad loved jazz it was a bonding thing between us. But he died when I was ten and within two years I’d stopped. It took over twenty years for me to get back into it, but now it’s something I do every day. Not being able to read music anymore limits my ability to play with others, but I get great pleasure out of improvising alone. It’s not much different from the feeling of writing freely—a storm of notes instead of a storm of words.
Recently Yamaha came out with a digital saxophone, and splurging on one is one of the best decisions I’ve made lately. It has a headphone hookup that allows me to play any time of day or night, which keeps me from annoying my family. It’s also highly transportable, so that when I live my fantasy life someday and travel around the world visiting archaeological museums, I can bring it with me (though I think the museums might frown on me playing there).
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
I’m partial to not-too-overwhelming cities on the sea. I think a lot about places like Pisa, Marseille, Barcelona, Lisbon, Heraklion or Thessaloniki in Greece. I need the cultural stimulation of a city, but I love being close to the ocean and what it does to my breathing. When the flow of my breathing and the roll of the sea become one, it’s the most peaceful thing on earth for me. I look forward to seeing what my digital saxophone can add to that formula.
My desire for this kind of geography is immensely strengthened right now because I’m teaching in a rural environment in South Dakota and live almost as far as you can get from salt water in North America. I’m in my fifties now, and I can see the fantasy next chapter of my life starting to form. Simple living near the sea, making music, learning more about the ancient world. It will change my writing and change my being. If I could snap my fingers and make it happen right now, I would. In the meantime, I think about Colombo in Sri Lanka, Beppu in Japan, Bergen in Norway, Ravenna in Italy. Places I can unfold.
