Mark Wisniewski's new novel is Watch Me Go.From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
What sparked the writing of Watch Me Go? What idea was haunting you that pushed you forwards?--Marshal Zeringue
The notion that someone like Deesh could simply be trying to survive economically--then become imprisoned and hated because his friendships and efforts to merely earn rent backfired--struck me as the underpinning of a potentially tense, suspenseful, and even horror-laden novel. Back when I was in academia, I experienced a chain of events along those lines. A situation like that can, despite your best intentions, keep getting worse, and the number of wise choices available to you keeps diminishing while the stress keeps building. And at some point you know you're in for hell yet you still hope--but trying to fight back or leave simply makes matters worse. In Deesh's case, he is black, and some people out there will always hate him because he's black, and that's an imprisonment he'll never escape--and that horrifies me.
The novel is just gorgeously written, and is being called a literary crime novel--which I love, because it elevates the genre, or perhaps, creates a brand new one. Can you talk about this?
Watch Me Go took twenty-five years to write and publish, so there were countless drafts and revisions, so in theory...[read on]