Paul Enns Wiebe
Komos Books
  • Home
  • Novels
  • Biography
  • Reviews
  • Contact
  • Blog

About Just Another Dead White Male

4/16/2020

0 Comments

 
After finishing the first edition of Crazy, I descended into the black waters of a male version of postpartum depression. This lasted about a week. Then, while casting about for a cordial rope to save myself, I thought of Ed and Mildred Budwieser (pronounced Bud-wheezer) and wrote the first chapter.
 
I must have been thinking about gender issues, because Dead White Male (the initial title) turned out to be a male version of feminism. At least that’s how I construe the reaction of the first editor I sent the first thirty pages to, a woman from the old publishing house, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. She immediately wrote back wanting to see the full manuscript. I complied, but sometime afterwards, she sent me a fine rejection letter, which I seem to have misplaced. She followed up with a phone call—this was long before the Zoom phenomenon—telling me that my novel was “outstanding” and better than most books HBJ were then publishing. She also suggested that I send it to another publisher, a small house in Denver, and that if they published it in hardcover, she’d be in a better position to bring it out in paperback. (It might have been the other way around.) This I did, but apparently the gentleman running the outfit was not a fan of my take on the gender wars.
 
So I ended up self-publishing it with Amazon. In preparation for this venture, I got a review from Kirkus. The reviewer, however, found that I hadn’t prepared the reader for the novel’s resolution. I think I had, but in a way that only a subtle reader would understand and appreciate.
 
I ended up not making the changes he or she had requested. Instead, I merely changed the title, adding “Just Another” to “Dead White Male.”
 
For whom is this novel written? For the subtle reader, one who can recognize that the book is moving in the direction of the experimental.
 
A book for the veteran reader.

0 Comments

About Crazy Were We in the Head

4/13/2020

0 Comments

 
Crazy is a coming-of-age novel consisting of twelve interlocking short stories. It depicts the life of a boy in a small Idaho town much like the one I inhabited until I left for college. 
 
This is a novel for the general reader. It isn’t just for Mennonites, a few of whom would probably find it sacrilegious; it has gotten good, sometimes rave, reviews from others who have read it. When asked which of my novels to read, I invariably recommend it. It’s not necessarily my best work—I’m partial to others, such as The Church of the Comic Spirit, which is my wife’s favorite.
 
Its point of view is first person. The narrator is a kid who grows up experiencing the world from within a fictional little town in Idaho. He’s something of a rascal—not a bad guy, but not the kind you’d want your daughter to marry. The trick was to think myself back into each stage in the life of a typical young boy; Penrod and Huckleberry and Holden Caulfield were always in the back of my mind.
 
Crazy is also my first endeavor—or so I thought until I happened on a box containing a short novel I’d written as kind of a catharsis during a dark stretch. This misremembered piece contains bits of subtle humor, but it would be a lie to say it is a comic novel, which all the other of my endeavors can claim.
 
The novel was first published as Christian Bride, Muslim Mosque. When it came time to present it in a second edition, I happened to remember a line from Shakespeare’s Othello (“Rude am I in my speech”) and immediately imagined the present title.

0 Comments

About the Author

4/10/2020

0 Comments

 
Before commenting on my novels, I should say something about myself as their composer.
 
I spent much of my career as a professor of comparative religion. My graduate work had been in the Christian Theology department of a major Protestant divinity school, where I grew more and more skeptical of that enterprise and its major proponents. When I began teaching, I enjoyed the freedom of being able to give that skepticism free reign. For example, I taught a course called Modern Critiques of Religion. I also started to mix literature with my standard fare. And when I took very early retirement from my tenured position, I gave in to an itch to spending full time writing novels, almost always of the comic, i.e. humorous, genre.
 
As for my influences, I’d say that my fascination with Charles Dickens is life-long. To me, he is the greatest English-speaking novelist. As for American novelists, the election falls on Mark Twain, especially Huckleberry Finn. As for writers in general, I try to read a Shakespeare play at least once a year. As for cinema, I’ve always been a fan of the Monte Python lads. And in classical music, I am enthralled by Beethoven’s symphonies, which, beginning with the Third, the Eroica, are endlessly inventive.
 
When I consider my novels as a whole, I’ve come to recognize that they tend to be of the experimental stripe. This is the strand of novels that runs from Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and beyond. Many readers and critics seem to think that a novel should follow certain rules. For example, a writer should “show, not tell.” To me, this is a cookie-cutter view of the novelistic enterprise. Said John Gardner in his 1985 book, The Art of Fiction, “Every true work of art . . . must be judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws.”

0 Comments
    Picture

    Paul Enns Wiebe perpetually asks himself, "What do I want to write when I grow up?"

    Archives

    March 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed