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An Interview with Jonathan Wilson, author of An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble
by K.M. Jenks
YBP CS Support Bibliographer

Two years ago, at Boston University, I heard Jonathan Wilson read from An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble, then a work-in-progress. The audience response was loudly enthusiastic. The verve and the charm of the selections made me impatient to read the rest. Recently published by Pantheon, the book was worth the wait. The short stories of the collection vary in scope and setting, but have in common energy and elegance. That the characters frequently suffer the upset of expectations they know from the outset are hopeless makes some of the stories serious, but others laugh-out-loud funny. Jonathan was kind enough to respond to questions about his work.

YBP: I love your latest book, An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble. Did you set out to explore this not-completely ironic theme, or did you write these stories over a period of time and then recognize their common thread? And-are you in trouble?

J. Wilson: I wrote the stories over a ten year period. The link only popped up at the end. Yes, of course I'm in trouble-isn't everyone?

YBP: Do you think that men are in more trouble now than they were a generation ago?

J. Wilson: I think the nature of the trouble in the suburbs may have shifted a little. There is a sense of guy redundancy. The soccer moms are running the show. The men are concentrating on their illnesses. Of course in some of my stories there are men in serious trouble with the law-which is quite different. Sometimes I think that in and around Boston where there is the highest ratio of doctors and shrinks to members of the general population in the country, trouble comes as an obligation-a way of giving the health professionals something to do.

Photo of Jonathan Wilson by Nina Nickles

YBP: Ambulance is also about women. Mixing it up in one fashion or another is at the heart of each of these stories; there are no hermits here, but people in relationships and in all sorts of trouble. The woman in "Fundamentals" has an affair that lands her in the middle of a terrorist plot. So why Men in Trouble?

J. Wilson: Well, there are also men in trouble in "Fundamentals." And it just seemed to fit. I guess one shouldn't dwell too long on titles. I mean, Lady Macbeth has a tough time too, but the play isn't called The Tragedie of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

YBP: There's a tight credentialing of writers these days, as if the writer's background is more important than the work, or as if each person has only one story to tell. You defy this easy categorization-you're an American citizen who grew up in the UK and who has lived in the Mid-east. Does one of these places/backgrounds seem to interest your readers more than the others?

J. Wilson: I don't really know the preferences of my readers in this regard. I do resent the pigeonholing that you describe, in particular the one that is linked to my dangerous academic credential. I'm the Chair of an English Department which, oddly, signifies to most people in the fiction world that I probably can't write a sentence that isn't both deathly boring and a mouthful. I'd like to think that I defy that stereotype.

YBP: One of the things that gives Ambulance so much zest is that the settings are all over the map. The reader flies to Spain, drives around Jerusalem, gets lost in the Caribbean, parties in the States. Do you yourself identify more strongly with one or the other of the places you have called home, or find that one more strongly influences your choice of subject?

J. Wilson: I've visited or lived in all the places in which my stories are set. I like to travel-the eye expands and sometimes you can get the flavor of a place very quickly-enough anyway to help create the illusion that you know the city or country really well. I think a lot depends on the intensity of the experience during the visit. In Mallorca I was there to interview one of the world's largest marijuana smugglers who had recently been released from the federal pen. I was on an assignment for The New Yorker. The piece never appeared but I got a story out of it. It was a wild time.

YBP: You take chances with the narrative voice, and your range is impressive for including, among others, a drug dealer and a woman. Outside of the requirements of your different narrators, do you consider the flavor of your stories to be American-international-non-national?

J. Wilson: I'm not conscious of a strategy here. The voice comes and I go with it. I am oddly unaware that I have an accent. In England people often ask me what part of the States I'm from. Here, they hear the British. I'm interested in carrying a dark subject in a light basket. I'm happy with whichever voice allows me to do that.

YBP: "Sons of God" and "Mini-Joe" are very funny stories. The situations and the characterizations contribute to the humor but a key factor is that the timing in your dialog is beat-perfect. Is that a gift, or years of work? If the latter, did you have particular inspiration, a funny relative or friend?

J. Wilson: Well, maybe it's the result of years of reading and writing-but not the stories themselves. In general a short story takes me about two weeks. Then I may make little changes. I have many sources of inspiration, but they are fragmented and usually take the form of a great thing someone has said to me, or a beautifully (beautiful for my purposes that is) phrased response or line that I've overheard.

YBP: One of the hallmarks of this collection is how well you render the mood of a moment. I think of the three characters in the title piece, "An Ambulance is on the Way", who tell each other stories, and the changes that ring through the larger story as the smaller ones unfold. Do you feel the mood as you're creating it, or does its capture have more to do with technique?

J. Wilson: The former-the mood overtakes me. Or sometimes what I'm writing creates a new mood. I guess I got melancholy about English football in the scene that you describe. But now I have FoxSportsworld so I can watch international soccer all day and I'm much happier.

YBP: You wrote poetry at one time; do you still?

J. Wilson: Yes. I'm trying to write a book of linked conversation poems at the moment. Individuals talking about the dark secrets of their love lives.

YBP: You do more with your sentences than just move your story along. Your turn of phrase, in many places, makes use of consonance, alliteration, and the symbol. Do you add in this loveliness later, or does it tend to show up in the first draft?

J. Wilson: Thank you! It's there from the beginning.

YBP: You teach creative writing at Tufts. How would you describe your style as a teacher? What advice do you give your students?

J. Wilson: I don't believe in exercises. I try to get my students to write from the heart, to write about something that matters to them. The form or genre doesn't matter, as long as what they are writing matters to them. I also try to get them to read more. It's sad what has happened to the reading life: it's almost non-existent. Nobody browses anymore, there's no discovery.

YBP: Given the demands of teaching, how do you arrange your time to allow for your own writing?

J. Wilson: My former colleague, the poet Philip Levine who had worked in the Detroit auto industry as a young man, once said to me, "We must never tell anybody the truth about this job." Let's leave it at that.

YBP: What are you working on now, and have you, or has the work, chosen a particular direction?

J. Wilson: I'm writing a short biography of Chagall for Schocken Books. I've also begun a new novel which is something like an extended version of one of the stories in Ambulance.

An Excerpt from "Mini-Joe"

It was thirty-two years since my father died, and I had a pain like hot curry in my left shoulder. Bathylle, Dr. Da Silva's nurse, directed me into his office. She told me to take my shirt off and then she left me alone. I was there for about twenty minutes, so I started to use the doctor's phone. I dialed my wife. She wasn't home. I was about to call a couple of friends when the phone rang. "Cardiology," I answered, but whoever it was hung up. I star-sixty-nined the caller, but no one responded. I made one more call, to an old girlfriend, Alison Zawicki, whom I hadn't seen for twenty years. I'd found her number while fooling around on the Internet's "Search for a Person" and transferred it to a small piece of paper, which I'd carried around in my wallet for a month. Alison's voice, when I got through to chilly Edwardsville, Illinois, was, I thought, constricted by the smoky lassoes of time and nostalgia, but it turned out that she was eating a tangerine. Since 1976, when we had parted in anger, joy, and pouring rain outside the Hungarian Pastry Shop on New York's Amsterdam Avenue, Alison had married, raised three children, lost her mother to cancer and then her husband on account of an affair that Alison had unwisely embarked upon with a colleague in Marketing. In an impressive coincidence, her sons' middle names were the same as my sons' first names.
"How are you?" she asked.
I told her.
"You wait twenty years and then you call me when you've got a punch in the heart and fire rushing down your arm. That's nice."
"It's only a pain in my shoulder," I corrected, "but you're right. It's bad timing. I'm sorry to have intruded on your life. I won't phone again."
"Oh yes, you will. This has got to be at least a two-parter. Of the lousy men that I've slept with over the years, you could be the first to die. If you don't pull through, maybe someone in your family can give me a buzz."
"I'll see what I can arrange," I replied.
We talked for a while about a spring afternoon when we had cycled uptown to the Cloisters. The sky was crystal blue and the wind over the Hudson blew hard toward the Palisades. On hills our young legs hardly required the aid of gears. We kissed at a stop-light. At this point in our long-distance conversation the unicorn of blissful memory lay its head in our laps. We stroked and caressed it until it fell asleep.
"My life has been full of disappointment and regret," Alison concluded, "and I'm sorry I stood you up that night at the Ninety-second Street Y."
"That must have been someone else," I replied. "I've never been there."
Nurse Bathylle poked her head around the door. When she saw the receiver in my hand she gave me a scathing look.
"The doctor will be with you shortly."
"It rang," I said, and put the phone down on Alison.

_____________________________________________
Jonathan Wilson is the author of A Palestine Affair (2003), The Hiding Room (1995), and Schoom (1995). His stories and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He chairs the English Department at Tufts University. Find more information about Jonathan Wilson at www.pantheonbooks.com

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