A writer

The landscape of David Harlan Wilson's stories is more a dreamscape. It's a place where things don't happen for the usual reasons or for any particular reason. It's a place where you'll find the sort of creatures your subconscious might spit up while you slept: bizarre, unsettling, slyly symbolic.

There is, for instance, the violent suburban housewife who slaughters miniature elephants on her front lawn with the family shotgun. There's the subdivision-dwelling father who fights an ineffectual battle against an encroaching glacier and kills several of his children in the process. There are the firemen who glue a yak to their fire engine, the drunken bully with a compulsion to kill any man better looking than he is, the boy with Achilles tendons made of steel.

Wilson, 32, is tall, played basketball as an undergraduate for Wittenberg University in Ohio. He's good looking, says he's worked as a model. He comes across very Middle America. To look at him after reading what he writes, you wouldn't think he had it in him.

"Sometimes I run into people who have read my stuff and they expect some sort of goth goblin," he said. "When they talk to me for a while and realize that I'm normal, or at least I convey a sense of normalcy, it kind of turns them off."

Wilson, who writes as D. Harlan Wilson, is a doctoral student studying 20th century American literature at Michigan State University. He traffics in "irreal fiction," a term coined to describe that literary subgenre that takes in the wilder flights of the fictional imagination. It was dreaming that got him started. Because Wilson might be normal, but his dreams apparently are not.

"I had a good upbringing," Wilson said. "I had a good relationship with my parents and my sister. I had a fairly pleasant life, but I always had nightmares. And I dreamt rabidly when I was a kid.

"In some ways, this was and still is a way to represent those dreams in more structured forms."

Irreal fiction offers expanded narrative possibilities. As Wilson puts it, "You don't have to worry about things like character development, plot, all these things that are essential to mainstream consumer consumptive fiction."

Not that the transition from manic dreamer to maniac writer was all so cut and dried. Wilson said he was an indifferent undergraduate with an offhanded interest in literature and an active interest in hitting the bars. He wrote poetry, bad poetry, and that was about the size of it.

When he finished school, he went to work for his father's export company, Harmony International Corp. in Grand Rapids. He sold household and commercial appliances.

"Then I realized I was artsy-fartsy."

So he went to one graduate school (Western Michigan University), then another (University of Massachusetts in Boston). He wrote three novels, bad novels. One was a sequel to Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" called "I, Alex." Another was "some kind of weird science fiction thing. I forgot the name. I try to forget these things."

See Him Live

• David Harlan Wilson will be signing books from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27.
  
• He will be speaking to the Writer's Guild from
  2 to 4 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28.
  
• Both events are at
  Way Station Books & Stuff, 223 S. Washington Square, Lansing.
  
• Call 853-1336 for more information.

Wilson began to realize he "didn't have the intellectual and creative savvy to write novels. I just wasn't there."

But he found another model. He started reading Franz Kafka, shorter works like "The Bridge," "The Vulture," "Hands." He began writing short stories, very short stories, flash fiction, really. And he started getting them published in small journals and Web 'zines.

His first book, a collection of 44 short pieces published by Eraserhead Press in 2001, was called the "The Kafka Effekt ." Appropriately enough.

Wilson does more than set his dreams down on paper. Dreams often form his starting points, though. He keeps a dream journal that he turns to when ideas run short. He's working on his dissertation these days -- it's on postmodernism in science fiction -- and it makes other sorts of writing more difficult.

But the project of setting dreams down is, in part, an effort to "subvert reality," he says.

"My stories treat these freaky worlds seriously, as if they exist, and why should you question their existence."

But there's more. Wilson's stories function occasionally as wild and broad satires, taking the way we live, the absurdities of the modern (suburban, middle-class, mostly white) condition and magnifying them almost to the point of nonsense. His second book, "Stranger on the Loose," which was published last year, spends a good deal of its time with dystopic visions of urban and suburban life.

"I'm very interested in suburban life and urban life, both of which I've experienced pretty profoundly," said Wilson, who grew up in Cascade Township near Grand Rapids. "One of my interests is representing, in an absurdist exaggerated light, the way in which I've been affected and I've seen other people affected by these exterior forces."

And then there's the theoretical side. Like any doctoral student, Wilson has spent time with the critical literature and come to know thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Jaques Lacan, Michel Foucault. Anyone familiar with these authors' works can find something of it in his narratives.

Further, the simple fact that Wilson pushes irreality can be read as a theoretical argument of sorts.

"I think (the stories' irreality) is a kind of reflection of reality," he said. "I strongly believe that the things people do and the desires that people have and the way that people behave are produced by fiction, by media forces in other words."

Wilson says he would like to write a best-seller. He doesn't think he can, not because he doubts his skill, but because he knows his temperament.

"I'd certainly like to make more money from my writing," he said, "but it doesn't give me any pleasure at all to write formulaically. Eventually, I think I'll sell out. I don't know how good I'd be at writing formula, but I'll certainly try."

His publisher

Carlton Mellick III met David Wilson in 1999. He was running a Web 'zine called The Dream People. Wilson was a contributor.

"The first story I read of David's was good, the next was great, the next was phenomenal, and they seemed to get even better from there," he said. "I knew he was somebody who was going places. He has an extremely vast imagination, to say the least."

And Mellick, 26, has tried to harness some of that imagination. He is founder of Eraserhead Press, a small Portland, Ore. publishing house that puts out what he calls "bizarre fiction." He published Wilson's two books of short stories.

Bizarre fiction "modernizes post-modernism," he said.

"All the post-modernists of the past -- the surrealists, beats, absurdists -- all of those authors were ahead of their time. But these days the surreal/absurd is becoming much more acceptable. A lot of people are looking for it, and the majority of the publishing industry pretends it doesn't exist."

And the point of it all?

"Authors have many different reasons for writing this style of work," he said. "Some are calling the assumed world into question. Some are rebelling against reality. Some are just trying to explore the boundlessness of imagination. Some are trying to entertain. Some are just on drugs and don't know what the hell they're doing. Is there common ground? Yes. The easy one is: convention is boring."

A reader...

Kyle Stine was one of David Wilson's students at Michigan State University. The class was English 310E, a media studies course.

Stine, 23, is also one of Wilson's readers, and one with something of an insider perspective.

"He definitely draws a lot on the media theories that he teaches," Stine said. "His writing is highly metaphoric, very symbolic, kind of wacky, zany, creative, out there. You never really know what's coming."

Wilson's biggest ideological point, as far as he can see, has to do with image culture and "the way that people will guide their lives in the Baudelairean hyper-realist way, that you guide your life by the images you seen on the screen."

Stine said he sees in Wilson's work a world where "the environment we live in becomes overrun by the commodities we produce to the point where human emotions become commodities, like the commoditization of death or the commoditization of love.

"It forces you," he said, "to take a more metaphorical view of the world."