Popping in the VHS Tape: Tangible and Intangible Artifacts with Michael Wheaton, by Alex Gurtis
Michael Wheaton, publisher of Autofocus books and the author of Home Movies
If you looked for a textbook definition of a good literary citizen, Michael Wheaton’s name would almost certainly come up. Wheaton is best known for his work as the publisher of Autofocus Books and as the producer for the podcast, The Lives of Writers. He is also a talented essayist, whose debut book, Home Movies, came out in February from BUNNY. Curious about the intersection of writer and publisher, we corresponded over email.
You have made a name for yourself as the founder and editor of Autofocus, can you tell us a bit about what it is like to step out from behind the editing desk and be in the writer’s seat?
I suppose publishing my own short book has been both exciting and a little strange. I became a publisher and editor partly because I had sort of let go of the idea of myself as a writer (or at least a writer primarily). I think it's likely that my work as a publisher and editor is what opened the door for me to also consider myself a writer as much as any other thing I do anyway, so most likely I'll always tend to prioritize that work over my own. But more than being known as a writer or editor or publisher or whatever, the biggest compliment I ever get is when someone calls me a great reader. I love that. I hope that I am. Everything branches out from there.
What made you want to be a writer?
Before I was 14, I liked to read in school and occasionally at home, but it's possible I liked the idea of books, or the fact of them as objects, more than I liked reading them. I would read whatever was popular or my friends read--Goosebumps or Matt Christopher sports books--but I think I liked going to buy them, smelling them, holding them, thinking about them, even more than I liked finding out what happened in them. I liked that too, for the most part. But I wouldn’t say I read that much.
At 14, I pulled The Outsiders and The Catcher in the Rye off my reading teacher's back shelf when we were allowed to choose whatever books we wanted for our projects. I chose them, I think, because my older brother had read them in high school classes, and they seemed to have curse words and kids my age in them. I remember reading those books knowing they were fiction but feeling that they were the realest of communications. I think at that point I thought I'd like to replicate that kind of power in art one day. But I wouldn't try for a while, and it still took many more years to become a more dedicated reader. I realize now that both those books have first-person narrators who include their act of writing the narrative within the telling of the book. There is probably something to explore there in relation to the work I like to do now.
After being the editor for so long, can you talk to the experience of having the role reversal and being the one being edited?
I love to edit, and in developmental situations, I see it as a fulfilling creative act. It's that way too on manuscripts that don't need developmental feedback or structure or content changes, or on works that need more sentence-level fine tuning instead, but I deeply appreciate when an author allows me into their work and process on a piece of theirs and especially a whole book. It's a pretty deep trust.
I've been fortunate to find great matches with the authors I've worked with, which is not a given. Editorial clashes can be pretty uncomfortable for both parties, and they happen. I've been lucky with editors as a writer too. It's nice for someone to give enough of a shit about my work to try to improve or heighten it. It's hard to know what isn't coming across in my own work sometimes, or what is coming across in a way I didn't realize, or I didn't intend. Even editorial feedback that an author decides not to implement can matter to a piece, or at least the author and editor's own understanding of the rules it plays or doesn't play by. We've got to get the words right somehow. I find that a back-and-forth conversation about the contents of a book helps writers feel more settled about the final choices they make with the words they use (for a while).
The title of your new book, Home Movies, evokes the dusty home VHS collections of the 90’s. Can you talk about how you view the sections of your essay and how the structure of the book is influenced by these objects?
Each section of the essay can likely be seen as its own mini-essay. A few sections were published previously online as such. But I've always seen them as parts that were communicating toward a bigger project; it had just occurred to me at some point that they could function on their own terms too. I felt they were more effective "in concert" with some of these other pieces all approaching the subject of day-to-day media unreality in my life from various, and at times similar, angles. The object or idea of a home movie comes up a few times across the different sections, and I suppose the style of the narration often purports to be writing the pieces "live" from a certain time and location, a kind of recording of my thinking in the context of a certain space at a certain time. And each piece is its own little clip or sequence of clips, arranged within the broader sequence of all the pieces together. It's not so much plot as thematic accumulation. Yep, perhaps like a VHS of different home recordings over time.
So could we call this book a VHS shelf?
I don't think so lol
In your book, you talk about not only the creation of culture but the creation of material culture and tangible objects. How does this relate to your role as a publisher of books?
At this point, as far as I can see, media is culture. Or media is our access to and dominant experience of culture. And media is the way we often contribute back to culture. It's safe to say that most media today is experienced digitally. Even when we're in our physical contexts, we are also often partly inside the digital realm. And digital media is so pervasive and accessible as to almost be meaningless. To fight the seeming meaninglessness of it, I access it more to find or will a meaning there. Or else what have I been doing with my life this whole time?
So physical media, because of this, takes on both a lesser and greater importance, depending on the person. At times, I feel both that lesser and greater importance, but I tend to side with my desire for the importance to be greater. It doesn't mean we should fill our lives with extra physical shit, but that the things we do fill our lives with could become more meaningful to us if we want them to be, or perhaps offer respite or removal from a totally digital world.
But of course, the digital world is full of media that could previously only be accessed physically. We can go round and round about this--the physical media still offers its powerful unrealities when seen or heard or experienced. The object has only ever been a pathway to that intangible experience. But it's nice to emphasize those media experiences that feel significant to us, perhaps, with an object that seems a container for the memories of that experience and those feelings.
So yeah, I want to make some books. And I want them to physically exist in the world. I want them to have a digital life or trail too. But to be rooted first in physical reality. From there, the language inside them all takes place in the mind. But it’s nice to feel in some ways that maybe it doesn't.
You have moved through many genres over the years, tell us how your previous writing experiences informed your process in crafting these essays?
It's possible that at some point my brain took a hard and fast break from propping up some of the fictions in my life and my work, and I just started to tell the truth to myself or to write down things that more resembled the truth to me, either about the way I saw the world or just about myself in general. I went back to writing without worrying what I was making or what I was going to do with it if I ever finished making it. At some point I realized I was often thinking about media unreality, so I started writing more directly into that idea. It became a Word document that became a few different iterations of different manuscripts for a few years. Then after a while, I went back to it, cut out a lot of paragraphs I still liked from it, and thought a lot more about how to present these ideas in something that felt more like a crafted essay or literary work and that did the things I tend to like literary work to do. I think my “fiction training” helped a lot with that, but I don’t consider the work fiction. It’s non-fiction, but “staged.”
Which came first: writing autobiographical literature or publishing it?
The answer, I think, is reading it. Then, from there: trying to write it. Reading more of it. Trying to write it more while reading it more. Then reading in progress works by different writers and editing it with them. Then publishing those things. Then trying to write it again while reading more of it and editing more of it and publishing more of it.
Besides Mike Nagel because I know you are going to say him, how have the writers you have worked with at Autofocus influenced your work?
The qualities I've been drawn to in the authors and the works I have published are the same qualities that have influenced me as a writer. I am drawn to a voice, or a content or thematic focus, or a sense of structure and form, or all of those things. Then I'm able to share in those things with the author, and inevitably those things influence how I view other work and my own. I probably absorb those qualities I tend to admire and at times they might become reference points for my own work, or at least thinking about my own work. Collaborating with all these authors with different approaches to the realm of autobiographical literary work has only helped me see my own work more specifically in terms of what I want to do and what I don't need to do, or what I want to do differently than those I've worked with who want to achieve some of the same kind of things.
And yes, I absolutely love Mike Nagel, whose read on my first attempt at Home Movies helped me turn it into a more realized artifact. A nice full circle.
One last question: What’s your favorite Patrick Swayze Movie?
I am tempted to say the adaptation of The Outsiders to tie into the mention of the book earlier, but it’s not really a Swayze movie in the traditional sense, and besides, there is only one answer, and that answer is Point Break.
Alex Gurtis is a poet and critic whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Autofocus, Barrelhouse, Hobart After Dark, Rejection Letters, and The West Trade Review among others. A ruth weiss Foundation Maverick Poet Award Finalist, Alex received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.