Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: We Eat Our Own
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: St. Louis
STATE: MO
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keawilson * http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Kea-Wilson/550810212 * http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/rising-star-kea-wilson-s-first-novel-combines-literary-with/article_ea3b29b5-f80b-5eb4-b126-e66e4a6046fd.html * http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2774#m32786
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:St. John’s College, B.A., 2009; Washington University (St. Louis, MO), M.F.A., 2013.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, and bookseller. Hastings, Santa Fe, NM, bookseller; St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, community relations officer, 2009-11; Washington University, St. Louis, MO, adjunct instructor and junior writer in residence, 2012–; Left Bank Books, St. Louis, MO, bookseller and events coordinator, 2013-16; Strong Towns, St. Louis, MO, director of community engagement, 2017–.
AVOCATIONS:Cycling, running, reading.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kea Wilson is a writer, educator, and former bookseller based in St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she has also served as an adjunct instructor and junior writer in residence. Wilson has worked at bookstores, including Hastings and Left Bank Books, and has served as the director of community engagement at a St. Louis nonprofit organization called Strong Towns.
In 2016 Wilson released We Eat Our Own: A Novel. The volume was inspired in part by an Italian cult horror film called Cannibal Holocaust, which Wilson saw as a teenager. She told a contributor to the Shelf Awareness Web site: “I remember feeling like I’d never seen anything quite like it. … It makes you question, why, exactly, you signed up to watch a bunch of twenty-somethings in safari outfits get eaten alive, whether the cannibalism is simulated or not.” Wilson added: “I found myself wanting to make the story mind, to add characters and plot lines and to go down paths that had nothing to do with the original movie.” In an interview with Sarah Seltzer, a writer on the Flavorwire Web site, Wilson remarked: “The whole book is loosely based on the making of Cannibal Holocaust, but I also spent a ton of time with the work of other horror directors in the 70s and 80s—particularly Italian directors like Pupi Avati, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci—as well as visual artists from that period whose work messed with ideas of film and what it means to be a spectator—Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Walter De Maria.” Wilson continued: “All of them were superpresent in early drafts as I was figuring out the landscape, and their influence is still in there, in subtle ways. I also reread Heart of Darkness a whole bunch.”
We Eat Our Own is set during the 1970s. It features an unnamed actor as its protagonist and is written in second person. The actor agrees to play the lead role in a horror film called Jungle Bloodbath that is being shot in South America. He will be replacing another actor who has dropped out of the film at the last minute. The actor quickly gathers his things to travel from his home in New York to a jungle in Colombia, leaving his girlfriend behind. There, he is introduced to the director of the film, Ugo Velluto, a mysterious Italian man who is determined to make his film feel authentic. The actor and the crew begin shooting at a remote location in the Amazon where they do not have access to a telephone. Nearby, there are members of a guerrilla army interacting with drug traffickers. On set, the actor is finding it difficult to perform in this film, as it does not have a script. The director also seems to become increasingly unhinged and impulsive. Over time, barbaric acts begin to occur, including animal mutilation and the destruction of a village where an indigenous tribe lived. The book culminates in a dramatically brutal act. Interspersed throughout the narrative are excerpts from a court trial in Italy where Ugo defends himself against serious charges that occurred while he was directing the film in Colombia. Among the charges he faces are murder, abuse, and negligence.
“This is an exciting debut that reads like a perfectly paced horror novel,” asserted Jennifer B. Stidham in Library Journal. Booklist critic Daniel Kraus remarked: “This is the smartest kind of horror.” Kraus also described the book as “a highly unusual breath of fetid air.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly suggested: “The story never flags thanks to the ferocious momentum of her prose. This is a vivid, scary novel.” Catherine Grant, a contributor to the New York Journal of Books Web site, commented: “In the hands of a less skilled writer, this novel would have been a pretentious mess, but Wilson executes it perfectly. We Eat Our Own is lyrical, engrossing, and emotionally compelling. This level of skill for a debut novel is, to say the least, impressive and shows promise for Kea Wilson as an emerging literary talent.” “Wilson’s writing style is hypnotic, tightly wound, and harrowingly evocative of the story’s stifling, bug-heavy atmosphere,” stated a writer in Kirkus Reviews. A critic on the Spectacular Optical Web site called the book “a multi-layered and darkly humorous work that uses the filming of a 70s Italian horror film as a framework to explore the blurry lines between art, reality, politics, and horror.” The same critic added: “Like the films at the heart of its narrative, Kea Wilson’s book blends reality and fiction to provoke and challenge the audience. We Eat Our Own achieves this in ways that most of the films upon which it evokes never came close to achieving.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2016, Daniel Kraus, review of We Eat Our Own: A Novel, p. 48.
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, Jennifer B. Stidham, review of We Eat Our Own, p. 89.
Publishers Weekly, June 20, 2016, review of We Eat Our Own, p. 126.
ONLINE
Flavorwire, http://flavorwire.com/ (September 1, 2016), Sarah Seltzer, author interview.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (June 22, 2016), review of We Eat Our Own.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (April 9, 2017), Catherine Grant, review of We Eat Our Own.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (March 13, 2017), Ryan Krull, interview with author.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (April 9, 2017), Alex Mutter, author interview.
Simon & Schuster Web site, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (April 9, 2017), author profile.
Spectacular Optical, http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/ (December 6, 2016), review of We Eat Our Own.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Online, http://www.stltoday.com/ (August 25, 2016), Jane Henderson, author interview.
QUOTED: "I remember feeling like I'd never seen anything quite like it. ... It makes you question, why, exactly, you signed up to watch a bunch of 20-somethings in safari outfits get eaten alive, whether the cannibalism is simulated or not."
"I found myself wanting to make the story mind, to add characters and plot lines and to go down paths that had nothing to do with the original movie."
Quotation of the Day
'First Thing I Do Is Find a Quirky Bookshop'
"When I visit a city, the first thing I do is find a quirky bookshop. They don't have to be small--Strand in New York has four floors of books with an amazing rare book section! Bestsellers in Budapest is wonderful, and I love Word on the Water in London, which is on a canal barge in King's Cross.
"When I was in Paris filming Versailles, I spent so much downtime in Shakespeare and Co., overlooking the Seine. It's warped and creaky, like a museum to books, but not fusty or old-fashioned.... It is great that books are so accessible online. But you will never feel so fondly about the moment you click on Standard Delivery as when you are hanging off a ladder to grab an old hardback from the top shelf."
--Actress Sarah Winter of BBC2's series Versailles, speaking to the Big Issue about "why she always plots her travel plans around independent bookshops"
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Marian Wood Books/Putnam: Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr
News
Womrath's in Tenafly, N.J., Closing
Sad news: Womrath's Bookstore, Tenafly, N.J., is closing at the end of June. Owner Bob Kutik wrote to customers that he will be retiring "after 43 years in the book business." He called the decision "bittersweet," adding, "I will miss all of our customers, but I will enjoy more time with my family and improving my tennis game."
In 1949, Kutik's father, Harry Kutik, who was disabled from wounds in World War II and who died in 1998, founded a Womrath's--when it was a bookstore franchise operation--in Hackensack, N.J. In 2001, Bob Kutik closed the Hackensack store. A year later, he bought the Womrath's in Tenafly.
Earlier this year, Kutik indicated that he wanted to retire and hoped to find a bookstore to take the Womrath's space, which is in a building he owns.
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KidsBuzz for the Week of 03.06.17
Book Industry Figures Earn Queen's Birthday Honors
Author Stella Duffy and Johanna Basford, whose Secret Garden launched the adult coloring book craze, received OBEs (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), and literary agent Peter Straus--managing director at Rogers, Coleridge and White--was honored with a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) during the 2016 Queen's Birthday Honors, the Bookseller reported.
This year's honorees also included Ann Rennie, library services manager for the London Borough of Havering and the London Library Consortium; Sir Rod Stewart, who was made a knight; and astronaut Tim Peake, who published the picture book Goodnight Spaceman.
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Crooked Lane Books: No Turning Back by Tracy Buchanan
Obituary Notes: Aileen Ward; Steve Wolfe
Aileen Ward, the author and scholar "whose sympathetic, insightful biography of the Romantic poet John Keats won a National Book Award in 1964," died May 31, the New York Times reported. She was 97. Ward spent nine years researching John Keats: The Making of a Poet, which was praised by the NBA administrators as a "searching and perceptive reappraisal of a major literary figure" and an "honest, moving, and beautifully balanced work--a truly distinguished portrait." Her book also won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in Britain, making her both the first American and the first woman to win that prize. The Times noted that at her death, Ward "had been at work for a half-century on a biography of Blake."
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Artist Steve Wolfe, whose "preferred subject matter was books, singly and by the boxful, their creased, age-stained, sometimes Scotch-taped covers exuding companionable familiarity," died last month, the New York Times reported. He was 60. Although Wolfe's "screened-printed jacket designs and typefaces impeccably recreated those of the original volumes, his books were not books but paintings--playful, thoughtful one-offs designed to be hung on gallery walls. As such, they became potent emblems of nostalgia, binding up (although they had no bindings) wistful longing for the beloved bibliographic companions of years gone by," the Times wrote.
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Penn State University Press: Taking Turns by MK Czerwiec / The Facts of Life by Paula Knight
Bookseller-Novelist Kea Wilson and We Eat Our Own
"This book was in my brain for a good 10 years before I started writing it, long before I ever thought I would write a book," said Kea Wilson, bookseller and events coordinator at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Mo. Wilson's debut novel, We Eat Our Own, is scheduled for publication on September 6 by Scribner. Set in the 1970s, We Eat Our Own follows a struggling, unnamed actor as he travels from New York City to a remote village in the Amazon rain forest, where he joins the cast of a pulp Italian horror film. The actor quickly realizes that he's in over his head--not only is the production over budget and the team on the verge of a breakdown, but this part of the South American wilderness is home to drug traffickers, multinational corporations and armed guerilla groups.
Kea Wilson
The book is loosely based on Ruggero Deodato's notorious cult classic horror film Cannibal Holocaust, about a documentary film crew that goes missing in the Amazon rain forest and the rescue mission that finds and views its lost footage. Cannibal Holocaust proved so shocking and controversial on its release in 1980 that the director was arrested in Italy under suspicion of creating a snuff film. Although those charges were dropped once the film's four lead actors appeared on an Italian television show, Deodato still faced obscenity and violence charges.
"I've been toying with the vague idea for this book for 13 years, though only subconsciously for some of them," recalled Wilson, who by her own estimation has been a huge horror movie fan since an "inappropriately young age." She first saw a bootleg copy of Cannibal Holocaust when she was 16, and said that she's probably watched the movie at least a dozen more times in the years since. More interesting to her than the sordid aftermath of the film's release, though, was its subject matter, and the way the movie seemed to indict the viewer.
"I remember feeling like I'd never seen anything quite like it," Wilson recalled. "It makes you question, why, exactly, you signed up to watch a bunch of 20-somethings in safari outfits get eaten alive, whether the cannibalism is simulated or not."
It wasn't until she began seriously researching the making of the film, however, that she wanted to turn that story into fiction. "The story was so much more complex than the urban legend that's usually told about it," explained Wilson. "I found myself wanting to make the story mind, to add characters and plot lines and to go down paths that had nothing to do with the original movie."
In broader terms, Wilson added, the book is about violence, and how "we try to separate ourselves from violent things we do, whether because we have a political justification, or an artistic one, or an emotional one, or because we're just not equipped to own up to who we've become."
Wilson completed her first draft of We Eat Our Own while earning her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, and she's been a bookseller at Left Bank Books for nearly three years. Her first experience with bookselling came shortly after she graduated college, when she worked for a year as a bookseller at a Hastings in Santa Fe, N.Mex. She got a job there, she admitted, in large part because she'd heard that Cormac McCarthy shopped there and she hoped to meet him. The ploy worked--she sold him three model airplane magazines--and meanwhile she was spending most of her money at indie bookstores in the Santa Fe area.
Juggling bookselling and writing, Wilson said, has not been difficult over the past few years. In fact, she continued, it's been one one of the best things to ever happen for her writing. In part, that's simply practical--she said she prefers to write first thing in the morning, and it helps to have a retail schedule that starts no earlier than 10 a.m.--but another part of that has to do with being completely immersed in books.
"I'm constantly surrounded by books and people who love books and people who write books and want to talk about them in a really earnest, generous way all the time," she said. "And that makes it a whole lot easier to think that typing little words by yourself every morning is meaningful and that you should keep doing it."
Wilson plans to have a launch party for We Eat Our Own at Left Bank Books on September 6. And though she's the events coordinator at Left Bank, she's leaving some of the planning to her coworkers. Said Wilson: "I'm not totally planning my own birthday party here." --Alex Mutter
Rising Star: Kea Wilson's first novel combines literary with horror
By Jane Henderson St. Louis Post-Dispatch Aug 25, 2016 (0)
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Kea Wilson
Kea Wilson (Photo by Chris Bowman)
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'We Eat Our Own'
"We Eat Our Own"
A novel by Kea Wilson
Published by Scribner, 310 pages, $26
On sale Sept. 6
Kea Wilson’s first novel is probably one of the only literary debuts indebted to “Cannibal Holocaust.”
For a perplexed interviewer, Wilson explains that “Cannibal” is worse than a B-movie: more like a “D,” but a shock classic that used “found” documentary footage long before “The Blair Witch Project.”
In 1980, the movie was convincing enough that its Italian director was interrogated about whether cast members were actually killed or tortured.
Often haunting the Moolah Theatre’s midnight schlock shows, Wilson, 29, says she’s “always been a huge horror fan.”
By day, though, she’s Left Bank Books’ events coordinator and the first of her 2013 MFA class to publish a novel.
With “We Eat Our Own,” Wilson incorporates some of the real-life story and issues concerning “Cannibal Holocaust,” including official questioning of the director and nervous, mediocre actors making a mysterious film in the thick, isolated Amazon jungle. Local tribesmen are used as unlucky extras, and the one American, who has no way to call home, is kept in the dark about his role.
And as one actor notices, “The road to the town has fences, but they’re low enough for something well muscled and wild to leap right over.”
The novel, though, takes a literary approach to fear and violence. An unnamed main character’s sections are written in second person (“the back of your throat tastes briny and dry”), and Wilson clearly wants to explore themes of violence and colonialism. She’ll even argue that horror films can delve into some of the same territory.
“The boundaries between drama and horror aren’t always clear,” she says. Horror films can “speak to societal anxieties in a way we’re not allow to say out loud.”
But the blood volume is much lower in her novel, intended to draw more than genre readers. Picked up by Scribner, “We Eat Our Own” goes on sale Sept. 6. She’ll talk about it that night at Left Bank Books.
Wilson counts as a strong influence novelist Kathryn Davis, a mentor while she worked toward her master of fine arts degree at Washington University. Wilson, who grew up in Michigan and Ohio, felt honored to be admitted to the St. Louis program, which, she says, is like getting into Harvard’s law school.
She and her boyfriend have settled in the area, and she likes writing in the morning before work, finding “the environment of a bookstore a great complement to writing.” Wilson also teaches classes as an instructor at her alma mater.
Although the book hasn’t yet gone on sale, film rights are being negotiated. If made, it would be a film based on a book based on a film that pretended to be a documentary. Or something like that.
Kea Wilson
Kea Wilson received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where lives and works as a bookseller. We Eat Our Own is her first novel.
Kea Wilson
Director of Community Engagement for Strong Towns
Strong Towns Washington University in St. Louis
Saint Louis, Missouri 106 106 connections
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As a citizen and in my career, I'm passionate about finding ways to unite people and change communities from the ground up--often literally. I'm proud to work for Strong Towns, a non-profit devoted to helping citizens, leaders and change agents of all kinds have a voice in making their communities stronger forever.
In my spare time, I'm an avid cyclist, a very slow runner, and a voracious reader. I'm also a novelist, teaching artist, and writer.
Experience
Strong Towns
Director of Community Engagement
Company NameStrong Towns
Dates EmployedJan 2017 – Present Employment Duration3 mos
Strong Towns is a nationally-recognized non-profit shaping the conversation on growth, development and the future of cities. We support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods to grow financially strong and resilient. Our worldwide membership includes individuals and organizations in each U.S. state as well as in Canada, Europe and Australia. I coordinate our membership efforts; contact me today at kea@strongtowns.org.
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Washington University in St. Louis
Junior Writer in Residence, Adjunct Faculty
Company NameWashington University in St. Louis
Dates EmployedAug 2012 – Present Employment Duration4 yrs 8 mos LocationDanforth Campus
See description See more about Junior Writer in Residence, Adjunct Faculty, Washington University in St. Louis
Various
Freelance Writer and Editor
Company NameVarious
Dates EmployedJan 2006 – Present Employment Duration11 yrs 3 mos
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Left Bank Books
Events Coordinator
Company NameLeft Bank Books
Dates EmployedAug 2013 – Dec 2016 Employment Duration3 yrs 5 mos LocationGreater St. Louis Area
See description See more about Events Coordinator, Left Bank Books
St. John's College
Community Relations Officer
Company NameSt. John's College
Dates EmployedMay 2009 – Aug 2011 Employment Duration2 yrs 4 mos LocationSanta Fe, New Mexico Area
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Education
Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis
Degree Name Master's Degree Field Of Study Creative Writing
Dates attended or expected graduation 2011 – 2013
Specialization in fiction with coursework in book arts, design, and comparative literature. My thesis, Cannibals, included a collection of short stories and an excerpt of the novel that became my first book, We Eat Our Own (Scribner 2016).
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St. John's College
St. John's College
Degree Name Bachelor’s Degree Field Of Study Liberal Arts
Dates attended or expected graduation 2006 – 2009
Activities and Societies: Editor of campus literary magazine, president of theater society, assistant editor of campus newspaper, representative to student government, active in campus social planning.
See description See more about St. John's College, Bachelor’s Degree
Volunteering Experience & Causes
dorothy, a publishing project.
Advisory Board
Company Namedorothy, a publishing project.
Dates volunteeredSep 2015 Volunteer duration1 mo
Cause Arts and Culture
I serve on the advisory board for a small independent press publishing works of fiction or near-fiction, mostly by women, including SPD bestsellers and New York Times reviewed titles like The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink and Vertigo by Joanna Walsh.
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Chainbreaker Collective
Volunteer
Company NameChainbreaker Collective
Dates volunteeredJan 2006 Volunteer duration1 mo
Cause Economic Empowerment
Accomplishments
Kea has 3 languages3
Languages
Language nameEnglish
Native or bilingual proficiency
Language nameSpanish
Professional working proficiency
Language nameFrench
Limited working proficiency
Publication
publication titleWe Eat Our Own
QUOTED: "The whole book is loosely based on the making of Cannibal Holocaust, but I also spent a ton of time with the work of other horror directors in the 70’s and 80’s—particularly Italian directors like Pupi Avati, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci—as well as visual artists from that period whose work messed with ideas of film and what it means to be a spectator—Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Walter De Maria."
"All of them were super present in early drafts as I was figuring out the landscape, and their influence is still in there, in subtle ways. I also re-read Heart of Darkness a whole bunch."
The Sweetest Debut: Kea Wilson on Bookselling and Italian Horror Films
"I think it’d be fun to write about Freddy Krueger in his off hours, when the Elm Street kids are all awake."
Books | By Sarah Seltzer | September 1, 2016
Welcome to The Sweetest Debut, a new and regular installment in which we reach out to debut (or near-debut, we’re flexible!) fiction, poetry and nonfiction authors working with presses of all sizes and find out about their pop culture diets, their writing habits, and their fan-fiction fantasies.
Kea Wilson’s We Eat Our Own, on shelves next week, is a scary novel about the filming of a horror movie deep in the jungle. She filled Flavorwire in on the films she watched to get inspiration, reading Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy, and wondering what Freddy Krueger gets up to during the daytime hours.
What is your elevator pitch to folks in the industry describing your book? Kea Wilson by Chris Bowman
We Eat Our Own is about the making of a horror film in the Amazon rainforest in the late seventies, loosely based on true events. (I have said this exact sentence more times than I can count).
What do you tell your relatives it’s about?
Pretty much the same thing, though I maybe don’t add that the original film co-starred a male porn star. (He’s not in the book, I promise.)
How long was this project marinating in a draft or in your head before it became a book deal?
I watched the film my book was based on when I was sixteen or so, so I guess about thirteen years? Though I didn’t give myself permission to write about it until a good eight years later, and it took me a couple of years to get a draft together after that, and another 9 months or so of revisions with an agent after that, and then my editor and I worked on it a lot too…it took a lot of forms, and it’s still hard for me to pin down a concrete beginning and end point.
Is there a canonical book you think is overrated?
I went to (and loved!) a school where everyone studies the Great Books in neurotic chronological order starting with Homer and ending with Virginia Woolf, so I have a hard time calling anything from the canon overrated—even if I hated a certain text (Kant, I’m sorry), I ultimately got more out of engaging with that book and having conversations about it than I did many of the books that went down easier.
What’s a book you’ve read more than two times?
I’m a chronic re-reader, but I’ve probably read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy the most—probably about seven times over the years.
Is there a book or other piece of art that influenced your writing for this particular project?
The whole book is loosely based on the making of Cannibal Holocaust, but I also spent a ton of time with the work of other horror directors in the 70’s and 80’s—particularly Italian directors like Pupi Avati, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci—as well as visual artists from that period whose work messed with ideas of film and what it means to be a spectator—Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Walter De Maria. All of them were super present in early drafts as I was figuring out the landscape, and their influence is still in there, in subtle ways. I also re-read Heart of Darkness a whole bunch, watched Fitzcarraldo with Herzog’s director’s commentary on it about a million times; I could write a long, long bibliography for this book.
Do you have a favorite show to binge watch when you’re not writing?
I would be lying if I didn’t say I watch a ton of TV, from the scripted dramas that every critic loves down to the most numbingly boring competitive cooking shows. I’ve been on a Rick Steves’ Europe kick lately; I really strongly recommend the inadvertently hilarious episode where he goes to a spa in Baden-Baden.
What’s the last movie you saw in theaters?
My favorite movie theater in St. Louis does a free bi-weekly horror double feature thing that I go to pretty religiously; last week was David Cronenberg’s Shivers and It Follows, so sort of an STD theme.
Do you listen to music while you’re writing? If so, what kind?
I actually don’t listen to a ton of music, period—I usually prefer having TV or movies on in the background to pretty much everything I do, ha — but I did listen to Gang of Four’s Entertainment on repeat while I worked through a specific chapter.
Do you prefer working in a buzzing coffee shop or silent library?
I don’t really write in public, but if you’re asking, generally: bookstore, which I guess is sort of the midpoint between those two things.
Do you write at your desk, in bed or on a couch?
Couch. I used to have a really nice office with a desk and a lot of carefully curated knick-knacks placed artfully around, but I never used it, so when we moved I gave it up.
Is morning writing or late-night writing more your style??
Morning. I go to bed grandma-early.
Do you work best writing it all out in one big messy draft and then editing, or perfecting as you go (or something in between)?
Editing, editing, editing. If I don’t re-write a scene at least four times I don’t trust what I’ve done.
How do you pay the bills, if not solely by your pen and your wit?
I work full time in an independent bookstore, which is a great job for a writer; my day doesn’t start until 10am, so you have that extra hour to work before you have to go out and be a real person, and you get a ton of free books and good people to talk about them with. I also really love teaching fiction writing, so I usually pick up a section a semester at the university where I got my MFA.
What is your trick to finding time to write your book while also doing the above?
Honestly, making it the center of most of my life choices, ha. If I don’t make it a number one priority, I know it won’t happen; not-writing is too easy and fun. Working right after I wake up before I’ve eaten breakfast or had any caffeine or time to question myself helps, too.
If you could write fanfiction about any pop culture character, real or imagined, who would it be?
I think it’d be fun to write about Freddy Krueger in his off hours, when the Elm Street kids are all awake and he’s just doing whatever banal, chores-and-Netflix kind of stuff a hideous nightmare-demon gets up to.
QUOTED: "This is an exciting debut that reads like a perfectly paced horror novel."
Wilson, Kea: We Eat Our Own
Jennifer B. Stidham
Library Journal. 141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Wilson, Kea. We Eat Our Own. Scribner. Sept. 2016. 320p. ISBN 9781501128318. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781501128332. F
In 1979, struggling New York City actor Adrian White flies to Colombia on six hours' notice, thrilled to be offered a part in what his agent describes as an "Italian art film." Upon arrival on set near the Amazon, he meets the volatile director, Ugo Velluto, and the rest of the cast and crew. No one seems to have a definite script to give him and scenes he witnesses featuring indigenous people seem more horror than art. Throw in drug trafficking, guerrilla fighters, and harsh jungle conditions and lines begin to blur between fantasy and reality. Told from multiple characters' perspectives, interspersed with transcripts from a postfilming trial, this is a taut, entertaining thriller from first-time novelist and St. Louis bookseller Wilson. VERDICT At once an almost-anthropological treatise on the consequences of forced contact with indigenous rain forest peoples, an ode to the bloody exploitation horror films of the 1970s and 1980s (Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust), and a skillfully interwoven political thriller, this is an exciting debut that reads like a perfectly paced horror novel but offers an unusually close and multilayered examination of violence and art that should interest diverse audiences.--Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast
Stidham, Jennifer B.
QUOTED: "This is the smartest kind of horror."
"a highly unusual breath of fetid air."
We Eat Our Own
Daniel Kraus
Booklist. 112.21 (July 1, 2016): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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* We Eat Our Own. By Kea Wilson. Aug. 2016. 320p. Scribner, $26 (9781501128318).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Here (at last?) is the cutting literary deconstruction of the 1980 exploitation film Cannibal Holocaust that, it is fair to say, we didn't know we needed. In Wilson's sweaty, scuzzy, late-'70s take, it's called Jungle Bloodbath, the latest mondo screamer from Italian grindhouser Ugo Velluto--and that's the only info that Richard, a desperate New York City actor, has before accepting the gig and flying down to a Colombia teetering on revolution, where Velluto is experimenting with a new kind of raw, scriptless realism. Like the film shoot, Wilson's story is presented out of order, intercutting among such points of view as the film's costars, its special-effects team, an M-19 guerrilla, and a future Italian trial at which Velluto stands accused of murder. Richard's chapters, the closest thing we have to a (ripped-out) spine, are told in omniscient second-person ("Here is something you don't know"), which vividly, viscerally, almost sickeningly drives home his utter disorientation among staring natives and madmen filmmakers. Like Cannibal Holocaust, Wilson's debut wresdes with real versus simulated violence, with Velluto getting the punchline: "There's no such thing as murder in the jungle." This is the smartest kind of horror, one that understands and employs the trappings while making us squirmingly aware of the moral contortions required to enjoy them. A highly unusual breath of fetid air.--Daniel Kraus
Kraus, Daniel
QUOTED: "The story never flags thanks to the ferocious momentum of her prose. This is a vivid, scary novel."
We Eat Our Own
Publishers Weekly. 263.25 (June 20, 2016): p126.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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We Eat Our Own
Kea Wilson. Scribner, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-15011-2831-8
In Wilson's gripping, ambitious debut novel, a struggling actor flies to the rain forests of Colombia to star in Jungle Bloodbath, a grind house horror film directed by an eccentric Italian auteur. Roughly based on the infamously brutal production of Cannibal Holocaust, the novel tracks a wide cast of characters, including guerilla rebels, effects artists, and the director himself, as they slowly descend into barbarism. Interspersed with the alternating perspectives are transcripts from an Italian court, where the director stands accused of abuse, negligence, and murder, most of which seem to have occurred during the grueling shoot. In the name of supposed verisimilitude, the crew sets fire to an indigenous village and mutilates animals at whim, all without seeing a script. The drama builds palpably and haphazardly, drawing the invading crew and invaded population together until, in a moment of cathartic bloodshed, reality and fiction collide. Though Wilson novel's reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, the story never flags thanks to the ferocious momentum of her prose. This is a vivid, scary novel. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)
QUOTED: "In the hands of a less skilled writer, this novel would have been a pretentious mess, but Wilson executes it perfectly. We Eat Our Own is lyrical, engrossing, and emotionally compelling. This level of skill for a debut novel is, to say the least, impressive and shows promise for Kea Wilson as an emerging literary talent."
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We Eat Our Own: A Novel
Image of We Eat Our Own: A Novel
Author(s):
Kea Wilson
Release Date:
September 5, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
Scribner
Pages:
320
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Reviewed by:
Catherine Grant
“We Eat Our Own is lyrical, engrossing, and emotionally compelling.”
Inspired by the 1980 Italian cannibal exploitation film, Cannibal Holocaust, Kea Wilson has created a literary novel that manages to maintain tension and evoke a sense of dread that hangs in the air like humidity, all while exploring the obsessive passions of the numerous characters. We Eat Our Own is a tapestry of character studies, the personal lives and internal struggles just as interesting, if not more so, than the threat of guerilla warfare, cartel gangs, and the constant danger of death in the Amazon.
Adrian White is a struggling actor with a habit of bailing on his girlfriend to accept roles that never seem pan out or pay. Against his instincts, he agrees to shoot a film in the Amazon with enigmatic Italian filmmaker Ugo Velluto. There is no script, and as Velluto’s manic vision for his pièce de résistance begins to demand more from the crew and extras, accidents begin to plague the set and tension builds to a fever pitch. Meanwhile, in the jungle surrounding the town, a guerilla faction known as M-19 builds a fragile and dangerous alliance with the local cartel.
We Eat Our Own is a concept novel that manages to avoid feeling like an ill-conceived gimmick, pulled off with precision due to Kea Wilson’s extreme skill with language, description, and character development. Her ability to create three-dimensional, sympathetic characters shines thorough and keeps the reader engrossed, despite the lack of plot cohesion between the different character threads.
The prose jumps between different points of view and different tenses, giving each character their own background and story, while highlighting the main protagonist with much more emotional depth. Each character is fully fleshed out, his or her story independent of the novel, yet a part of the events that culminate in an ending that is slightly anticlimactic, but powerful and satisfying to the character arc.
In chapters where Adrian White’s character is present, the prose is in the second person. The point of view adds a layer of proximity to Adrian’s character that could so easily come off as false if not written so well. The bulk of the novel is also told in the present tense, which usually creates distance between the reader and the characters. In We Eat Our Own, the interaction becomes even more intimate by getting into Adrian’s head and highlighting his interactions with other characters, not just the action in the scene. In other words, this is a present tense novel done right.
Through well-placed description and exemplary use of language, Wilson has made the Amazon jungle itself a character that, in the end, seems to be the real antagonist of the novel.
Wilson creates a backdrop that gives the reader a sense of culture shock through liberal use of foreign language and setting, and adds a well-placed dose of history and politics. Wilson then drops the protagonist in an isolated jungle where culture doesn’t matter and everything can kill. Mother Nature is the great equalizer.
Adrian White, Ugo Velluto, or any of the crew, are at risk of falling victim to the savagery of the cartel or guerilla soldiers in the neighboring town. Or any chracter might fall out of their boat and get eaten by sharks, or simply get an infection from the water and die.
The film crew’s isolation in the jungle reflexively causes tension and anxiety in the reader as the film director becomes lost in his vision and endangers the crew, obsessed with creating cinema that transcends “exploitation” and becomes art. Adrian is obsessed with becoming an established actor, his feelings of inadequacy smothering him. Marina and Juan Carlos, the two M-19 guerillas, are lost in the passions of their revolution and their maturation from students to murderers. Each character becomes consumed by himself or herself, and then gets immersed in a jungle that can literally devour them.
Among the many interesting stylistic choices, Wilson has reinvented the dialogue wheel, opting to not use quotation marks and only sparsely utilize dialogue tags. At times it could be jarring. However, the unique formatting flows well and creates a more seamless read that further immerses the reader.
In the hands of a less skilled writer, this novel would have been a pretentious mess, but Wilson executes it perfectly. We Eat Our Own is lyrical, engrossing, and emotionally compelling. This level of skill for a debut novel is, to say the least, impressive and shows promise for Kea Wilson as an emerging literary talent.
QUOTED: "Wilson’s writing style is hypnotic, tightly wound, and harrowingly evocative of the story’s stifling, bug-heavy atmosphere."
WE EAT OUR OWN
by Kea Wilson
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KIRKUS REVIEW
This impressive debut novel chronicles the making of a shlock-schock movie in a South American jungle imbued with all-too-real late-20th-century horrors.
One would have to be a pretty desperate actor to pursue a movie role like the one our nameless young protagonist, referred to throughout in the second person, snatches like an overripe, low-hanging mango sometime in 1979. Leaving his bewildered girlfriend behind in New York, this actor hops a plane to Colombia as a last-minute lead replacement in a jungle cannibalism chiller being slapped together by an enigmatic Italian filmmaker named Ugo Velluto, who's inflamed with the idea of making something more authentically scary than usual. And real life seems to be cooperating with Ugo’s obsession: near an Amazonian shooting locale so remote that it doesn’t have a phone line, there's a cadre of revolutionary guerillas who have entered a Faustian bargain with international drug traffickers. Some of this off-screen nastiness begins to gradually overlap with the graphic grossness being orchestrated by Ugo and his crew. Meanwhile, the actor struggles to find his way—and his character—in a project that's without a script and, seemingly, without clear direction beyond whatever comes to its increasingly erratic director’s mind. Inspired by actual events, Wilson shows impressive command of a narrative that weaves back and forth and back again in both time and locale; much like the viewer of a pseudo-documentary horror movie (ever seen The Blair Witch Project?), you wonder throughout whether you should trust whatever it is you’re told—and jumping to the end won’t help at all. You shouldn’t anyway, because Wilson’s writing style is hypnotic, tightly wound, and harrowingly evocative of the story’s stifling, bug-heavy atmosphere. Even the sunniest skies of this ill-starred shoot are thick with menace and portent.
Keep telling yourself, "It's only a novel, it's only a novel" ... except an author's note at the end says it's inspired by actual events.
Pub Date: Sept. 6th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2831-8
Page count: 320pp
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 22nd, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016
QUOTED: "a multi-layered and darkly humorous work that uses the filming of a 70′s Italian horror film as a framework to explore the blurry lines between art, reality, politics and horror."
"Like the films at the heart of its narrative, Kea Wilson’s book blends reality and fiction to provoke and challenge the audience. WE EAT OUR OWN achieves this in ways that most of the films upon which it evokes never came close to achieving."
I Wonder Who the Real Cannibals Are? Kea Wilson's "We Eat Our Own"
December 6, 2016 No Comments Categories: Books
WE EAT OUR OWN
WE EAT OUR OWN
by Kea Wilson
Scribner Publishing
September 6, 2016
320 Pages
Buy HERE
You can draw a direct line from the Mondo films of Jacopetti and Prosperi to Italian cannibal horror films like Ruggero Deodato’s CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980). First, the subject matter overlaps. Second, both styles of film boast a morally queasy blending of the real and fake violence. Third, there is even continuity in personnel: Antonio Climati– DP on films like AFRICA ADDIO and FAREWELL UNCLE TOM–directed a jungle horror film called GREEN INFERNO (1979). Finally, and perhaps most controversially, you can extend this argument further by saying that these movies begat the contemporary phenomenon of reality television, found footage shaky cam horror and even viral ISIS murder propaganda. Whether you agree with this hypothesis or not, there is one thing that is fairly certain: visceral cinéma vérité and quasi-documentary horror films have been beaten into the ground. Thus, it is always a surprise when someone emerges with something genuinely interesting to say about these genres. This is the case with Kea Wilson, whose debut novel WE EAT OUR OWN (Scribner, 2016) is a multi-layered and darkly humorous work that uses the filming of a 70′s Italian horror film as a framework to explore the blurry lines between art, reality, politics and horror.
The year is 1979. A nameless actor leaves New York City for Bogota to replace the lead on an Italian cannibal movie. Upon his arrival, he is transported to a small village. He is lodged in a cheap hotel with few amenities. He has very little information about his role. There is no script. He doesn’t even know the name of the director. After a few days of nervous waiting, the protagonist is finally brought to a jungle set where he meets the mercurial director Ugo, whose works includes titles that one crew member sarcastically calls JUNGLE SOMETHING, SOMETHING MASSACRE and REVENGE OF WHATEVER THE FUCKS. Ugo’s current film production–JUNGLE HOLOCAUST–isn’t the only thing happening in this far away location. The thick maze of trees is teeming with animals, insects, coke dealers and Colombian guerillas fighting to topple the government. It’s an unstable mix of elements that pushes all involved to their physical and psychological limits.
If what’s been described so far sounds like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, it is because WE EAT OUR OWN is. The book is explicitly based on CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and the real events surrounding the film’s production. Knowing the novel’s source of inspiration as well as the facts related to the film probably sets the reader’s expectations for a certain kind of narrative and a certain kind of tone. WE EAT OUR OWN defies these expectations. A common strategy in Mondo and cannibal films is to wrap up the depiction of atrocities and grotesqueries with a trite self-serving justification: “I wonder who the real cannibals are?” Kea Wilson actually takes this idea seriously and expands what could have easily been an exploitative genre exercise into a HEARTS OF DARKNESS style journey through the Colombian jungle.
Wilson thrusts the reader directly into the characters’ heads; the narrative shifts between the perspectives of numerous people, including other actors, guerillas and crew members. What would an actor think as they are being pushed away from performance into verboten acts? The director sees himself as some kind of aesthetical radical in the mold of M19 and the Red Brigades. Are the two roles even close to being equivalent or is he simple deluded? What motivates the Colombian M19 guerillas? Of particular significance are the female characters. Women in Italian horror usually serve as solely as window dressing and hysterical cannibal fodder, but Wilson gives significant weight to these characters and their points of view. None of these perspectives really exist in the cinematic universe of Italian horror and none of these issues are really addressed with any depth. WE EAT OUR OWN brings the hypocrisy, racism and misogyny that lurks deep with these films to the surface.
Lest one think that WE EAT OUR OWN is a dire morality exercise, it is not. The book is infused with sardonic sense of humor and displays a reverent–and critical–eye towards the art and culture it explores. Conversations shift between English, Spanish and Italian. References to horror movies, radical political movements, acting, and theater are cleverly woven into the narrative, including references to the work of Antonin Artaud, Sanford Meisner, Dario Argento, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, and Constantin Stanislavski.
A writer who roots her work in reality can live or die by the details. Indeed, there are details in WE EAT OUR OWN that seem weird and anachronistic (e.g., a horror-loving American expat living in the Colombian jungle, DAT technology in 1979). This is a fictional work so factual anomalies like this don’t seriously diminish the impact of this text or its themes. Like the films at the heart of its narrative, Kea Wilson’s book blends reality and fiction to provoke and challenge the audience. WE EAT OUR OWN achieves this in ways that most of the films upon which it evokes never came close to achieving.