Paul Wiebe

An Interview with Paul Wiebe

How did you get started writing?

Back in the seventh grade, my buddies and I were invited to stay after school for committing some petty crime. I pleaded our case by writing a petition and putting it on the teacher's desk. As a result, we won a reprieve. Years later, this teacher told me that she still kept this petition as a treasured memory.

When I got to high school, I spent a year as the sports editor of the school paper. My columns won some kind of prize at the Idaho journalism teacher's association. I also got kudos from my Junior English teacher for a piece I wrote on Ben Franklin. She cited it as an example of how to write brief, tight essays.

My first college essay, "How to Climb Out of a Wet Bathtub without Slipping," became infamous on the Bethel College [Ks.] campus. I soon became the humor columnist for the school paper. While still a freshman, I also wrote the script for our dormitory's entry in the annual Farcity Review; it would have won first place, but one of the judges, who had the reputation of being burdened by an IQ of 165, forgot to fill out his ballot properly. It was about this point in my literary career that I got serious and started reading people like Kierkegaard. And in my senior year I did an independent study on tragedy.

Throughout graduate school and my professorial career, I continued to write serious pieces with titles such as "St. Augustine's Theory of Knowledge and Its Dependence on Plato" and "The Architecture of Religion: A Theoretical Essay."

It was toward the end of this voyage to nowhere that I discovered a little comic gene hidden deep within my Inner Self. This gene came to light while I was co-teaching a course on Autobiography. I'd like to thank Steve Hathaway--my colleague--and our two students (God knows who they were) for pointing out that my attempt to write in a serious vein was foreign to my nature.

After finding my natural métier, I resigned my tenured position and began writing comic fiction.

Which writers influenced your scribblings? Anyone in particular?

When I started to get serious about comedy, I delved into the history of Western comedy, from Aristophanes to Steve Martin.

More particularly, I spent extra time with Chaucer (especially "The Wife of Bath's Tale"), Molière (I like the simplicity of his style), Shakespeare and his many comic characters, Dickens (ditto), Twain (primarily "Huckleberry Finn" and "Letters from the Earth"), Joyce's "Portrait," Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds," Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," Saroyan's "My Name is Aram," Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," V. S. Pritchett's short stories, and Donald Barthelme's minimalist pieces.

What about critics and literary theorists? Have any of them influenced you?

Yes. Aristotle and Nabokov. The Greek guy gives us the categories for thinking about (tragic) plays--though he mistakenly gives pride of place to plot over character. The Russian insists that it is a mistake to require that a novel have characters the reader must "identify with." I like that. It provides an excuse for my "Dead White Male"; both of its central characters are, in their own ways, cretins.

Would you call yourself primarily a satirist?

I suppose so. Yeah. The great satirist Juvenal famously said, "It is difficult not to write satire." I can identify with that. On the other hand, Italo Calvino says, "Anyone who plays the moralist thinks he is better than others, whereas anyone who goes in for mockery thinks he is smarter." That statement strikes me as true, and because I was brought up to be kind, like Jesus, writing comedy in this vein has sometimes bothered me. I am not by nature a mean person. So I try to split the difference between Juvenal and Jesus by keeping my satire gentle.

Which of your novels do you like best?

I don't have any favorites. Like a good parent, I love all my children equally.

You've created many characters. Do you have any favorites, and how did you create them?

Let me take them novel by novel. In "Dead White Male," I'd point to Mildred Budwieser and Carole Digby. Unconsciously, I suppose I was thinking of Edith Bunker and the Wife of Bath. In "Benedict XVI," Benny Good stands out. In creating Benny, I went back and looked closely at how Shakespeare had formed Falstaff. The chief character in "The Church of the Comic Spirit" is God. I enjoyed giving him down-to-earth attributes, as Harold Bloom imagines that J (the first writer of what later became the Bible) did. That leaves "Christian Bride, Muslim Mosque." My narrator, John Reisender, is of course central to the evolving story. I learned how to do him by thinking of other narrators, like Huck Finn and Aram Garoghlanian. There's also Aunt Lena, who isn't involved in many conversations, though is still a commanding presence by way of John's constant reference to her many sarcasms.

This leaves my latest (available only on Kindle), "Dancing Over the Rays of Light." I'm partial to Franz, who plays a mean foil to my Christian Gentleman of the Old School. I learned a lot about doing these two by reading Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds" and lots of 18th and 19th century novels.