Our Q&A with Nick Rees Gardner
Below is a brief interview conducted with Nick by email. Some responses are very lightly altered for clarity or concision. (I’m his editor after all.) The collection comes out on August 13 and can be pre-ordered through our site. This article’s feature photo was taken by Max Bodach.
KB: How did this collection first come to be?
NRG: It’s funny, I was recently reading through an old draft of my first attempt at a novel from 2015. It started as a NaNoWriMo project, and I completed a draft in January 2016. 101,000 words, titled Delinquents. The novel told the story of a recovered junky returning to “normalcy” in a fictional Ohio town. This was in the wake of my own return from rehab to a small, Ohio town. While that novel draft was mostly unsalvageable, I grew a lot from the experience.
I drafted most of the stories that make up the current iteration of Delinquents while in grad school from 2019-2021. I was reading books like Rion Amilcar Scott’s The World Doesn’t Require You and Andrew Martin’s Cool for America, and those books sort of opened the door for me to play around with a linked collection based on characters in a specific town or region, how the history of that place emerges in different people.
The name Westinghouse, Ohio began as a joke. My small Ohio town struggled after the deindustrialization of the 90s and 2000s, especially after GM closed their local plant. I was frustrated with the way the town kowtowed to these industrial giants and it didn’t seem unrealistic for a small town to name itself after a plant or factory that didn’t give a shit about the town itself.
Of course, I didn’t want to trash talk my hometown. Small towns across America, however Podunk, are often filled with brilliant, disaffected young people. Artists, musicians, writers; we’re all told by the world that we need to move to some coastal mecca to achieve any recognition or success. But in my hometown, there were shows in abandoned opera houses, art festivals in a former church. A winery where I worked for five years ferments some of the finest expressions of California fruits I’ve found anywhere. It wasn’t all failed football player drop-outs and drug heads, though there are plenty of those as well.
The characters of Delinquents evolved from this binary: You either have to stay and succumb to podunkness, or leave and deny the place, the people you came from. This push-and-pull can be catastrophic for someone too anxious or too unprepared to make it out of the town into the city. In order to stay, people find escape through things like half-baked come-ups, art, tumultuous relationships, drugs, and extreme sports.
I moved to DC three years ago, and one of the first things I did was rework my collection, eliminating a couple of stories that didn’t quite fit the voice or theme. I became an outsider by moving to the city and that gave me a new perspective on the lifers, the locals, the hangers-on. I was able to better process what it’s like to stay and what it’s like to leave, and I feel like these stories now reflect that challenge.
KB: What made you consider Madrona as a home for this manuscript?
NRG: We met at an offsite reading at the AWP conference in Seattle, and you gave me an advance copy of Weft to review. That was my introduction to Madrona. Though Weft was much different from Delinquents, I was drawn to the Midwest themes (malls). I just wasn’t sure if Delinquents was the right fit, so I held off submitting it for a while. But I kept going back to Weft. The cover and the layout was perfect, and the prose was clean and original.
I wanted my publisher to be someone who really got the book and understood its themes (even the ones I still hadn’t completely sussed out). I also lived in Olympia, Washington for a few months after high school, so I kind of felt like this was something meant to be (as much as I hate it, I’m a sucker for fate or circumstance or whatever.) I sent the manuscript.
KB: What was the editorial process like for you? How has the book changed or evolved since you first submitted it?
NRG: I really wanted to work with an editor. Though I got a lot of feedback and worked with editors on individual stories in Delinquents, nobody gave me feedback on the collection as a whole. You saw the collection as “linked” short stories, which was funny to me. I had previously received a rejection because the publisher “failed to see a through line.” So I knew you got what I was going for, maybe more than I knew myself.
The story “Digging,” and the novella, “Captain Failure” needed almost complete rewrites and with some editorial guidance, I was able to step back from the pieces and see how a reader would understand them. This helped not only the coherence of the collection as a whole, but added a bit of depth to the stories, making them more resonant. The attention also helped. You approached the edits with an infectious enthusiasm that actually made me excited about the collection again. It was a tough couple months of edits, but I feel like, with the collaboration, we brought the book to its best possible iteration.
KB: Your book is now a thing you can hold and page through! What aspects of it are you most proud of?
NRG: I’m going to talk about collaboration again. I’m immensely grateful for John Thrasher’s artwork, as well as your layout work on the spine and back cover. It amazes me to see how John interpreted the book. The color is playful, but not goofy, a fine line. The sky is Mid-West-Gray. I would never be able to draw or even conceive of a cover like this. It takes a different kind of mind. When I hold this book in my hands, I see the work of three different artists celebrating all of the complex ideas and themes of the book. I’m proud of each story on its own, but packaged together with your layout and John’s art, it’s so much bigger than I, at first, imagined it could be.
KB: What advice, or words of encouragement, would you offer authors who are also in the throes of pre-publication?
NRG: Don’t wait. Put your energy into another project. Sure, you might have to work on edits or spend a few hours on submissions, but don’t put all your focus on the book you’ve finished. Expand your world. Write every day as much as possible. Create something new, and know that one day you’ll look back at your prior writing and think it was shit. That’s progress. Then, when your book is published, celebrate the fuck out of it.