Just One Thing with Jeremy T. Wilson

Jeremy T. Wilson’s story “Happy Hibernation!” throws us into an unpredictable journey where desires take strange shapes and squirrels come along for the ride. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“In his often quoted essay ‘The Figure a Poem Makes,’ Robert Frost writes: ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.’ But how do I surprise myself when I’m the one doing the writing? Tricks. I initially drafted this story like a poem, one sentence per line. This is not typically how I draft a story, but isolating every sentence resulted in a spare and declarative style which prompted a surprising shift in later drafts to second person point of view. Writing line by line also provided an opportunity to reinvent the story after every sentence, a sort of visual cliff. Each sentence was disconnected from the sentence before, which allowed for turns and surprises. Mr. Peanut was not planned. Mr. Peanut can never be planned. All of this is to say, I try to stay open to surprises when writing, both surprises in style and surprises in content. Like Frost, I ‘enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.’”