Night-Writer: Willie Davis, Nightwolf, and Kentucky in Literature
By Adam Van Winkle
As I read Nightwolf, I felt fully borne to the street grit of Lexington, Kentucky. As I read, I began to find a kindred spirit. An author that lingers on the behaviors I do, whose characters are defined by their ticks and anxieties more than anything, whose violence is so real and so passive it punches you in the gut too—that is a writer truly worth his salt.
Read “Thieves” here and you’ll get what I mean. Hallahan will instantly churn your stomach if you’ve ever tried to learn from or please a naturally violent and bombastic person. Davis nails that persona over and over again in a hopped up urban southern novel, come art commentary…maybe.
As for the rest of Nightwolf of which “Thieves” is excerpted, just order it. Read it. You’ll see.
Who was this writer who’d hit the mark so well for me? He must dig some of the same street art and music and literature as me. I like his writing too much for it not to be. With a name like Willie Davis, I hope he digs the blues too.
I was partly right, though as you’ll see here in what he says about art and music and literature he’s as complicated as Kentucky literature itself.
AV: How'd the story in Nighwolf evolve for you?
WD: The acorn of this book came from when I was killing an afternoon with a friend in a local bar. We saw a sign on the back that said, "YOU ARE BEING FILMED FOR YOUR OWN SECURITY!" Something about that phrase--the faux helpfulness, the casual way they assume they own our interactions, how they want our grattitude for spying on us--cracked us up. It felt like it could be the America's motto (this was maybe 2013, before we all decided to make it worse). My friend works in TV and film and was looking for a project, so we kicked around an idea called "You Are Being Filmed For Your Own Security," about a group of friends searching for fame in increasingly desperate ways. They were performative and self-conscious people, but they wanted to film themselves for their own security. Knowing they were being recorded is the only way they can feel secure they exist. Shortly afterward, my friend lost interest or got busy, but I dove into it. I wrote a short story about these people that eventually found a home. They weren't actively seeking fame at this point, but were still knowingly performing. Like any group of friends, they share stories about themselves that they all remember. The problem was that those stories had a lot more life to them than the main story I was telling about them in their thirties. So I decided to root it when they were kids. At the time, I figured I would use that as prologue and come back to tell the story of them as adults.
Only after I committed to writing about them when they were teenagers did the story of Nightwolf come to me. It wasn't a story about fame, but about obsession. Most people who achieve fame do it through absolute obsession and dedication. That's not Milo's desire--his obsession is with his brother, with having a quest in the first place. Though almost none of the original plot remains, these are people who know they are performing and, if they came of age a few years later, would likely put a lot of that obsessive energy to becoming famous.
AV: I love street art, been teaching a unit on street art a few years. Why'd that become a focus, a motif for your story?
WD: On a practical level, I know nothing about street art. One of the inspirations for the character Nightwolf was the DC tagger Borf. Borf was this absolutely relentless tagger who would write his name on every flat surface in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. When The Washington Post did a story on him, it turned out he was a kid whose friend committed suicide, and this was his way of absorbing that pain. I felt tremendous empathy for him, though, no doubt, he'd tell me to cram my feelings up my urethra. Street art is both showy and anonymous, which is kind of where these characters are.
Also, when I started writing this, I was living in a cramped apartment in Baltimore, sleepless for too many nights in a row. One morning, I walked outside to see someone wrote "Let's Be Friends!" on the sidewalk. For a minute, I thought the city had come alive and was talking to me. I regained sanity soon thereafter, but that feeling stayed with me. I wanted that feeling to animate Milo, so hopefully the closer he gets to Milo, the reader could share my stress and relief in his opinions.
AV: Reading the novel, it felt so many times like I was in a Crews-esque hypermasculine world where any sort of pleasure, accomplishment, belonging to a group involved a kind of physical endurance of pain. In the opening, the narrator is is hurt by Hallhan while Hallahan is helping him. In "The Best Thieves" you write "When I graduated to cars, Egan set Ollie Hallahan up to be my mentor. He pinched my cheeks when I did well and cracked my skull when I fumbled with the locks. Egan told me to follow Hallahan, ape his every move. If I made a mistake or showed up late, Hallahan treated my spine like a kid treats a sheet of bubble-wrap." I recall a question asked early in the novel of how many fingers one can have broken and still play bass. Why so much physical abuse, or nods toward it?
WD: Violence is the young man's performance art, and though the bruises are real, these kids are definitely performing. They talk awfully big about how they're going to stomp each other to death. When they're alone, they can admit these very obvious truths: their bodies aren't made for what they put them through. They're scared, and starting to suspect that mortality is real. But in a crowd, they put on shows, even if it costs them their well-being. There's an awful lot stupid about that mindset, but something beautiful in it as well. Because they are at the age when getting punched in the face feels righteous, and when the body can bounce back from abuse. In the second section, when they're in their early twenties, a lot of them have already started to shy away from it. Maybe it's because they've started to spend more time alone and less time in crowds, so they can be more honest with themselves. Still, even at that age--honestly, at any age--the call to theatrics is pretty irresistible. If you want to cultivate a violent image, you strike a threatening pose and you'll do it. The face calls the tune, and the brain dances.
AV: There's a lot of Biblical and religious language in Nighwolf. The opening claims a miracle. There's a character Thomas the Prophet. I've written two novels with heavy biblical allusion now, and for me it comes from growing up in a heavily Southern Baptist area and is mostly tongue-in-cheek. Where does this come from for you?
WD: I grew up in a bit of a religious hodgepodge. My mother was raised a fairly secular Jew in Pittsburgh. My father was raised Christian in small-town Appalachian Kentucky. They both seemed to half-believe, but they didn't bother with services. I frequently called myself a "Heeb-Billy" and then, later, after I married an Episcopalian and baptized our son in the Episcopalian church, an "Episcopagan." All sides of my family knew the Bible very well as literature, philosophy, and to varying degrees, spiritual truth.
I'm comfortably agnostic, and while I suspect God exists, I neither believe nor disbelieve.
I have no faith in my faith. If anything, I'm a belief maximalist. I think anything we can think of is true in some way. Dreams exist and are therefore real. Humans approach those spiritual truths through stories. These characters care about miracles, spirits, and ghosts because they care about their stories--their Gods are their stories.
AV: Backing up a little bit, we really dig our literary heroes at CJ. Who are some of your literary idols?
WD: While my writing does not resemble his at all, I love, love, love James Joyce. I love the way he experiments with normal forms, but what I find far more rewarding is the way he describes human interactions. People focus too much on the shiny bits, but ignore the grits and gravy of what he actually writes about. It's all about our flawed human interaction. I'm blown away by the stories of Mark Richard, who depicts the world of children better than anyone else I've read. He makes it seem both magical and unsentimental.
AV: Tell me about your experience with Kentucky in literature--how it's been depicted and how that influences you, maybe even depictions you don't care for? We really dig Justified and Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens stories, though our good writing friend Sheldon Lee Compton has assured us the TV show misses the mark some on Eastern Kentucky depictions...
WD: Appalachians get pretty bristly about our depictions in the media. Our accent is often used as shorthand to show how stupid or racist a character is. We're called southerners though Morgantown, West Virginia is closer to Boston than it is Atlanta. I used to date a girl who lived in Boston, and her friends would say "What part of the south are you from?" I'd say, "Oh, I'm not from the south, I'm from Kentucky." And they'd look at me the way a dog looks at television. Actors playing Appalachians (or really anyone from south of Cincinnati and east of San Antonio) do a strange slow accent that no human has ever had (think Foghorn Leghorn after going on a date with Bill Cosby) and everyone calls them brave. I don't begrudge actors doing this, by the way--actors are supposed to act. But if an actor plays a guy from Queens with a Brooklyn accent, they get pilloried by professional wiseacres for years. It's completely explicable (you're more likely to hear nuances of people and places you're familiar with and most of the media is based in large cities) and it's rarely intentionally mean-spirited. But you could very logically decide that poor, Appalachians aren't worth accurate reflection.
I love Elmore Leonard, but I'm unfamiliar with his Raylan Givens stories. I've seen a few sporadic episodes of Justified, and I thought they were pretty good but I felt no real urge to keep going. (Though it's worth noting, I thought the actresses in that show did a good job with the accent. The men were a little too southern). I really like Sheldon Lee Compton. Sometimes the Appalachian literary scene can try to expel one if their own for being insufficiently Appalachian. It's a tiresome process I call "Holler Than Thou", which seems determined to make sure no one gives a shit about us.
All that being said, NIGHTWOLF isn't an Appalachian story. It takes place in Lexington, which is a flatland city, kind of an overgrown college town. The city of Lexington (both the real one and the one in my novel) is full of Appalachians who have left home. They form Appalachian communities as a way of reconnecting with their roots. (Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago have huge Appalachian communities as well). That's what my characters are doing with these big, wild parties. They feel slightly displaced and are searching for home. I grew up with one foot in Lexington and one in Appalachia (my mother and father lived three hours apart from each other and I split up my week in both places).
The best Kentucky literature reflects this complexity. Gurney Norman writes these brilliant stories about Appalachia, and about the (very sizable and almost completely ignored) place where hillbilly and hippie culture overlap. Ed McClanahan has written hilarious books about the Kentucky experience. Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Rebecca Gayle Howell: I love all of their work because it doesn't try to distill all of the Kentucky experience in one flash. And because so much of it is funny. A lot of the literature that tries to prop up the region by showing how virtuous we are is insulting. They create an Appalachia I've seen on PBS of chair-caning and apple-butter, and reading it is a goddamn chore. If you want to show a positive depiction of Appalachians, make us funny. Make it seem like an fun place to live. You don't have to shy away from the poverty and the pill-heads, but it is a fun place in spite of that. I love Appalachia. (Though, to be honest, we vote like assholes).
AV: What's your process for creating? How do you get words on paper, turn and idea into a novel?
WD: I tend to write very late at night and I try to write in noise. So music, news, sports on TV: I want to hear all of it when I first put things down. Then after a long time (sometimes a very long time) the story will start to form, and then I need silence. Almost always, the story ends up wildly different than it was when it started. NIGHTWOLF was originally supposed to be a light comedy. I was a few hundred pages into it before I realized the light comedy plane was headed for the "everybody hurts each other" mountain.
AV: Back to Nightwolf. Art is a big thing in this novel. The graffiti of course. Nightwolf then becomes a comicbookstyle vigilante hero ala Batman (and then not of course). I was thinking while reading as with Wily Vlautin's Motel Life that you were a writer metaaware of the art in your story. We've got a heavily illustrated issue this time, and you can probably see where those influences come from (Shel Silverstein, Kurt Vonnegut, Nate Beaty). What role has art or comics or illustration played for you?
WD: Just this morning, I was reading my son a book called Mars Needs Moms by Berkeley Breathed, the same guy who wrote Bloom County, and I realized I owed him a huge debt for NIGHTWOLF. My narrator, Milo Byers, is not consciously named for Bloom County's Milo Minderbinder or Mars Needs Moms protagonist, but it's not a complete coincidence either. Breathed creates a world that is instantaneously familiar and foreign, and I wanted to be part of it. As a child, I loved comics in the newspaper like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, and really most of them. It went beyond the jokes on the individual days and down to wanting to join their world. The DC and Marvel Comics that have now taken over the world never meant much to me, and I think the dominance of Superhero movies taking over our culture has helped lead us to this political nightmare we find ourselves in. I have nothing against their art, but it never moved me. But something like Bloom County was its own functioning universe.
AV: Covering more of the arts here, what do you listen to? Music like Nighwolf depicts--the Violators, "respectable punk"--I'm thinking? With a name like Willie Davis, surely you listen to the blues...
WD: My favorite singer--really my favorite artist of any stripe--is Bob Dylan. I was in, I think, seventh grade, when my brother came back from the library and said, "Hey Willie, listen to this." And played "Desolation Row." That song just marked a gigantic bright dividing line in my experience. Once I heard it, I couldn't go back. Twenty-five years later, I'm no closer to understanding it, but it feels satisfying and bottomless in a way practically no other song does. I love pretty much all Bob Dylan. Even when he goes down a road I don't understand or I think he's made a misstep, I find myself re-evaluating that same work a few years later, and I love it. In that way, he's always ahead of me on the path.
I tend to like the songwriters in music. I know that that is an unfair genre because Cole Porter, Phil Spector, Hank Williams, and Sam Cooke are incredible songwriters that nobody puts in that genre. But I guess I mean people like Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Otis Redding, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, The Clash, Townes Van Zandt.
I love a band like The Pogues, so steeped in Irish folk tradition that they could have been a straight folk band and had immense success, but they not only had these incredible original songs but this willingness to be a Molotov Cocktail in the face of folk expections. It showed this great punk attitude and their songs were undeniable. Maybe my favorite musical story of the past ten years is that Cadillac used their song "Sunny Side Of The Street" in their commercial. It's a bouncy, catchy, hard-driving song, but it's about being addicted to heroin. In the commercial, this peppy suburban family is loading the kids into their overpriced car, while the lyrics behind them are saying, "As my mother wept, it was then I swore/to take my life as I would a whore" and "With a heart full of hate and a lust for vomit/I'm walking on the sunny side of the street." Sarcasm has become so mainstreamed that no one knows who's subverting who anymore. Those commercials help remind me that the artist still has one up on the marketer. And the song remains undiminished.
As for the blues, I don't want to be a traitor to my name, but a lot of the blues is just lost on me. I like Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, and the folk blues a lot. But that nightclub twelve bar blues feels boring to me. I'm sure part of it is that I'm not an accomplished guitar player who can hear the complexities of the sound. I'm similar with the Coltrane, Miles Davis style of jazz. These are musical geniuses operating at peak power, but, I'm just looking at my watch, waiting for the song to end. Of course, it's more fun to dislike jazz because jazz fans are so pretentious.
AV: What's a reader gonna get from your art, from Nightwolf?
WD: I sincerely hope that just one person, somewhere, gets from this book, a screenplay that turns into a movie that makes a billion dollars, netting me the ability to never work again. Short of that, I'd like for people feel the energy of youth, feel the value of telling stories, to understand there are no villains in life and no real endings, just a bunch of flawed people in the middle of the most important narrative of their life. And that there's tremendous humanity in telling jokes, especially to people you don't like or respect. We all struggle, and we all want to laugh. When we lose ourselves in laughter, we remember we're all on the same road.
By Adam Van Winkle
As I read Nightwolf, I felt fully borne to the street grit of Lexington, Kentucky. As I read, I began to find a kindred spirit. An author that lingers on the behaviors I do, whose characters are defined by their ticks and anxieties more than anything, whose violence is so real and so passive it punches you in the gut too—that is a writer truly worth his salt.
Read “Thieves” here and you’ll get what I mean. Hallahan will instantly churn your stomach if you’ve ever tried to learn from or please a naturally violent and bombastic person. Davis nails that persona over and over again in a hopped up urban southern novel, come art commentary…maybe.
As for the rest of Nightwolf of which “Thieves” is excerpted, just order it. Read it. You’ll see.
Who was this writer who’d hit the mark so well for me? He must dig some of the same street art and music and literature as me. I like his writing too much for it not to be. With a name like Willie Davis, I hope he digs the blues too.
I was partly right, though as you’ll see here in what he says about art and music and literature he’s as complicated as Kentucky literature itself.
AV: How'd the story in Nighwolf evolve for you?
WD: The acorn of this book came from when I was killing an afternoon with a friend in a local bar. We saw a sign on the back that said, "YOU ARE BEING FILMED FOR YOUR OWN SECURITY!" Something about that phrase--the faux helpfulness, the casual way they assume they own our interactions, how they want our grattitude for spying on us--cracked us up. It felt like it could be the America's motto (this was maybe 2013, before we all decided to make it worse). My friend works in TV and film and was looking for a project, so we kicked around an idea called "You Are Being Filmed For Your Own Security," about a group of friends searching for fame in increasingly desperate ways. They were performative and self-conscious people, but they wanted to film themselves for their own security. Knowing they were being recorded is the only way they can feel secure they exist. Shortly afterward, my friend lost interest or got busy, but I dove into it. I wrote a short story about these people that eventually found a home. They weren't actively seeking fame at this point, but were still knowingly performing. Like any group of friends, they share stories about themselves that they all remember. The problem was that those stories had a lot more life to them than the main story I was telling about them in their thirties. So I decided to root it when they were kids. At the time, I figured I would use that as prologue and come back to tell the story of them as adults.
Only after I committed to writing about them when they were teenagers did the story of Nightwolf come to me. It wasn't a story about fame, but about obsession. Most people who achieve fame do it through absolute obsession and dedication. That's not Milo's desire--his obsession is with his brother, with having a quest in the first place. Though almost none of the original plot remains, these are people who know they are performing and, if they came of age a few years later, would likely put a lot of that obsessive energy to becoming famous.
AV: I love street art, been teaching a unit on street art a few years. Why'd that become a focus, a motif for your story?
WD: On a practical level, I know nothing about street art. One of the inspirations for the character Nightwolf was the DC tagger Borf. Borf was this absolutely relentless tagger who would write his name on every flat surface in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. When The Washington Post did a story on him, it turned out he was a kid whose friend committed suicide, and this was his way of absorbing that pain. I felt tremendous empathy for him, though, no doubt, he'd tell me to cram my feelings up my urethra. Street art is both showy and anonymous, which is kind of where these characters are.
Also, when I started writing this, I was living in a cramped apartment in Baltimore, sleepless for too many nights in a row. One morning, I walked outside to see someone wrote "Let's Be Friends!" on the sidewalk. For a minute, I thought the city had come alive and was talking to me. I regained sanity soon thereafter, but that feeling stayed with me. I wanted that feeling to animate Milo, so hopefully the closer he gets to Milo, the reader could share my stress and relief in his opinions.
AV: Reading the novel, it felt so many times like I was in a Crews-esque hypermasculine world where any sort of pleasure, accomplishment, belonging to a group involved a kind of physical endurance of pain. In the opening, the narrator is is hurt by Hallhan while Hallahan is helping him. In "The Best Thieves" you write "When I graduated to cars, Egan set Ollie Hallahan up to be my mentor. He pinched my cheeks when I did well and cracked my skull when I fumbled with the locks. Egan told me to follow Hallahan, ape his every move. If I made a mistake or showed up late, Hallahan treated my spine like a kid treats a sheet of bubble-wrap." I recall a question asked early in the novel of how many fingers one can have broken and still play bass. Why so much physical abuse, or nods toward it?
WD: Violence is the young man's performance art, and though the bruises are real, these kids are definitely performing. They talk awfully big about how they're going to stomp each other to death. When they're alone, they can admit these very obvious truths: their bodies aren't made for what they put them through. They're scared, and starting to suspect that mortality is real. But in a crowd, they put on shows, even if it costs them their well-being. There's an awful lot stupid about that mindset, but something beautiful in it as well. Because they are at the age when getting punched in the face feels righteous, and when the body can bounce back from abuse. In the second section, when they're in their early twenties, a lot of them have already started to shy away from it. Maybe it's because they've started to spend more time alone and less time in crowds, so they can be more honest with themselves. Still, even at that age--honestly, at any age--the call to theatrics is pretty irresistible. If you want to cultivate a violent image, you strike a threatening pose and you'll do it. The face calls the tune, and the brain dances.
AV: There's a lot of Biblical and religious language in Nighwolf. The opening claims a miracle. There's a character Thomas the Prophet. I've written two novels with heavy biblical allusion now, and for me it comes from growing up in a heavily Southern Baptist area and is mostly tongue-in-cheek. Where does this come from for you?
WD: I grew up in a bit of a religious hodgepodge. My mother was raised a fairly secular Jew in Pittsburgh. My father was raised Christian in small-town Appalachian Kentucky. They both seemed to half-believe, but they didn't bother with services. I frequently called myself a "Heeb-Billy" and then, later, after I married an Episcopalian and baptized our son in the Episcopalian church, an "Episcopagan." All sides of my family knew the Bible very well as literature, philosophy, and to varying degrees, spiritual truth.
I'm comfortably agnostic, and while I suspect God exists, I neither believe nor disbelieve.
I have no faith in my faith. If anything, I'm a belief maximalist. I think anything we can think of is true in some way. Dreams exist and are therefore real. Humans approach those spiritual truths through stories. These characters care about miracles, spirits, and ghosts because they care about their stories--their Gods are their stories.
AV: Backing up a little bit, we really dig our literary heroes at CJ. Who are some of your literary idols?
WD: While my writing does not resemble his at all, I love, love, love James Joyce. I love the way he experiments with normal forms, but what I find far more rewarding is the way he describes human interactions. People focus too much on the shiny bits, but ignore the grits and gravy of what he actually writes about. It's all about our flawed human interaction. I'm blown away by the stories of Mark Richard, who depicts the world of children better than anyone else I've read. He makes it seem both magical and unsentimental.
AV: Tell me about your experience with Kentucky in literature--how it's been depicted and how that influences you, maybe even depictions you don't care for? We really dig Justified and Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens stories, though our good writing friend Sheldon Lee Compton has assured us the TV show misses the mark some on Eastern Kentucky depictions...
WD: Appalachians get pretty bristly about our depictions in the media. Our accent is often used as shorthand to show how stupid or racist a character is. We're called southerners though Morgantown, West Virginia is closer to Boston than it is Atlanta. I used to date a girl who lived in Boston, and her friends would say "What part of the south are you from?" I'd say, "Oh, I'm not from the south, I'm from Kentucky." And they'd look at me the way a dog looks at television. Actors playing Appalachians (or really anyone from south of Cincinnati and east of San Antonio) do a strange slow accent that no human has ever had (think Foghorn Leghorn after going on a date with Bill Cosby) and everyone calls them brave. I don't begrudge actors doing this, by the way--actors are supposed to act. But if an actor plays a guy from Queens with a Brooklyn accent, they get pilloried by professional wiseacres for years. It's completely explicable (you're more likely to hear nuances of people and places you're familiar with and most of the media is based in large cities) and it's rarely intentionally mean-spirited. But you could very logically decide that poor, Appalachians aren't worth accurate reflection.
I love Elmore Leonard, but I'm unfamiliar with his Raylan Givens stories. I've seen a few sporadic episodes of Justified, and I thought they were pretty good but I felt no real urge to keep going. (Though it's worth noting, I thought the actresses in that show did a good job with the accent. The men were a little too southern). I really like Sheldon Lee Compton. Sometimes the Appalachian literary scene can try to expel one if their own for being insufficiently Appalachian. It's a tiresome process I call "Holler Than Thou", which seems determined to make sure no one gives a shit about us.
All that being said, NIGHTWOLF isn't an Appalachian story. It takes place in Lexington, which is a flatland city, kind of an overgrown college town. The city of Lexington (both the real one and the one in my novel) is full of Appalachians who have left home. They form Appalachian communities as a way of reconnecting with their roots. (Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago have huge Appalachian communities as well). That's what my characters are doing with these big, wild parties. They feel slightly displaced and are searching for home. I grew up with one foot in Lexington and one in Appalachia (my mother and father lived three hours apart from each other and I split up my week in both places).
The best Kentucky literature reflects this complexity. Gurney Norman writes these brilliant stories about Appalachia, and about the (very sizable and almost completely ignored) place where hillbilly and hippie culture overlap. Ed McClanahan has written hilarious books about the Kentucky experience. Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Rebecca Gayle Howell: I love all of their work because it doesn't try to distill all of the Kentucky experience in one flash. And because so much of it is funny. A lot of the literature that tries to prop up the region by showing how virtuous we are is insulting. They create an Appalachia I've seen on PBS of chair-caning and apple-butter, and reading it is a goddamn chore. If you want to show a positive depiction of Appalachians, make us funny. Make it seem like an fun place to live. You don't have to shy away from the poverty and the pill-heads, but it is a fun place in spite of that. I love Appalachia. (Though, to be honest, we vote like assholes).
AV: What's your process for creating? How do you get words on paper, turn and idea into a novel?
WD: I tend to write very late at night and I try to write in noise. So music, news, sports on TV: I want to hear all of it when I first put things down. Then after a long time (sometimes a very long time) the story will start to form, and then I need silence. Almost always, the story ends up wildly different than it was when it started. NIGHTWOLF was originally supposed to be a light comedy. I was a few hundred pages into it before I realized the light comedy plane was headed for the "everybody hurts each other" mountain.
AV: Back to Nightwolf. Art is a big thing in this novel. The graffiti of course. Nightwolf then becomes a comicbookstyle vigilante hero ala Batman (and then not of course). I was thinking while reading as with Wily Vlautin's Motel Life that you were a writer metaaware of the art in your story. We've got a heavily illustrated issue this time, and you can probably see where those influences come from (Shel Silverstein, Kurt Vonnegut, Nate Beaty). What role has art or comics or illustration played for you?
WD: Just this morning, I was reading my son a book called Mars Needs Moms by Berkeley Breathed, the same guy who wrote Bloom County, and I realized I owed him a huge debt for NIGHTWOLF. My narrator, Milo Byers, is not consciously named for Bloom County's Milo Minderbinder or Mars Needs Moms protagonist, but it's not a complete coincidence either. Breathed creates a world that is instantaneously familiar and foreign, and I wanted to be part of it. As a child, I loved comics in the newspaper like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, and really most of them. It went beyond the jokes on the individual days and down to wanting to join their world. The DC and Marvel Comics that have now taken over the world never meant much to me, and I think the dominance of Superhero movies taking over our culture has helped lead us to this political nightmare we find ourselves in. I have nothing against their art, but it never moved me. But something like Bloom County was its own functioning universe.
AV: Covering more of the arts here, what do you listen to? Music like Nighwolf depicts--the Violators, "respectable punk"--I'm thinking? With a name like Willie Davis, surely you listen to the blues...
WD: My favorite singer--really my favorite artist of any stripe--is Bob Dylan. I was in, I think, seventh grade, when my brother came back from the library and said, "Hey Willie, listen to this." And played "Desolation Row." That song just marked a gigantic bright dividing line in my experience. Once I heard it, I couldn't go back. Twenty-five years later, I'm no closer to understanding it, but it feels satisfying and bottomless in a way practically no other song does. I love pretty much all Bob Dylan. Even when he goes down a road I don't understand or I think he's made a misstep, I find myself re-evaluating that same work a few years later, and I love it. In that way, he's always ahead of me on the path.
I tend to like the songwriters in music. I know that that is an unfair genre because Cole Porter, Phil Spector, Hank Williams, and Sam Cooke are incredible songwriters that nobody puts in that genre. But I guess I mean people like Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Otis Redding, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, The Clash, Townes Van Zandt.
I love a band like The Pogues, so steeped in Irish folk tradition that they could have been a straight folk band and had immense success, but they not only had these incredible original songs but this willingness to be a Molotov Cocktail in the face of folk expections. It showed this great punk attitude and their songs were undeniable. Maybe my favorite musical story of the past ten years is that Cadillac used their song "Sunny Side Of The Street" in their commercial. It's a bouncy, catchy, hard-driving song, but it's about being addicted to heroin. In the commercial, this peppy suburban family is loading the kids into their overpriced car, while the lyrics behind them are saying, "As my mother wept, it was then I swore/to take my life as I would a whore" and "With a heart full of hate and a lust for vomit/I'm walking on the sunny side of the street." Sarcasm has become so mainstreamed that no one knows who's subverting who anymore. Those commercials help remind me that the artist still has one up on the marketer. And the song remains undiminished.
As for the blues, I don't want to be a traitor to my name, but a lot of the blues is just lost on me. I like Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, and the folk blues a lot. But that nightclub twelve bar blues feels boring to me. I'm sure part of it is that I'm not an accomplished guitar player who can hear the complexities of the sound. I'm similar with the Coltrane, Miles Davis style of jazz. These are musical geniuses operating at peak power, but, I'm just looking at my watch, waiting for the song to end. Of course, it's more fun to dislike jazz because jazz fans are so pretentious.
AV: What's a reader gonna get from your art, from Nightwolf?
WD: I sincerely hope that just one person, somewhere, gets from this book, a screenplay that turns into a movie that makes a billion dollars, netting me the ability to never work again. Short of that, I'd like for people feel the energy of youth, feel the value of telling stories, to understand there are no villains in life and no real endings, just a bunch of flawed people in the middle of the most important narrative of their life. And that there's tremendous humanity in telling jokes, especially to people you don't like or respect. We all struggle, and we all want to laugh. When we lose ourselves in laughter, we remember we're all on the same road.