Tony Wirt
Just Stay Away
DOSSIER: After spending so much time working toward getting A NECESSARY ACT published (your big debut) what was it that really got you noticed? Was it your relentless pursuit to move your career forward, finding a good editor, getting the right cover, or was it the “Novel of the Year” selection from Underground Book Reviews that pushed things over the top?
WIRT: As anyone who has self-published a book knows, you’ve got to be relentless to find any sort of traction. I queried A NECESSARY ACT for at least a year, got close many times, but never got there with it. But I believed in the book and didn’t want to put it in a drawer and potentially never see the light, so I decided to self-publish. But if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. I know my limitations, so I made sure to hire a good editor and good cover designer, and that was by far the best investment I made. I also feel my self-pub experience has helped a lot with the launch of JUST STAY AWAY. In traditional publication, you’ve still got to do a lot of the work yourself if you want to break through, because there are a lot of good books out there. Lucky for me, I was used to the hustle.
DOSSIER: You grew up in and spent many adult years in Iowa, then moved to Minnesota. After we met, The Dossier’s clandestine recording of our conversation revealed that you didn’t sound anything like William H. Macy in Fargo. Now, how the heck do ya think that happened?
WIRT: Oh, ya know, sometimes it’ll just slip right back in there without me even noticing it and I’ll be like ‘Ope, there it is’. But for real, I grew up right on the Iowa-Minnesota border with most of my family on the Northern side, and there’s a WHOLE LOT of ‘You Betcha’ on that side. When I went to college at the University of Iowa, I’d get made fun of whenever that accent slipped out so I did my best to stamp that out. I’m not saying it hasn’t creeped back a little since we moved back North, though.
DOSSIER: Since you don’t write from home and instead choose mainly to work from a coffee shop, The Dossier is curious about two things: has your generous coffee budget allowed you a permanent home there, and since you listen to Lazerbeak to drown out the constant whirl of the milk frother, what are your hard-felt convictions about the differences in their first album, Lava Bangers I, vs the artistic tones offered in Lava Bangers II?
WIRT: Yeah, I can’t write from home. Way too many distractions. Luckily I tip well enough that the wonderful staff at Aqui Coffee in Rochester lets me occupy a seat for hours on a single latte. As for my writing music, I take that EXTREMELY seriously. It needs to be loud, upbeat and good, which is why Lazerbeak is one of my go-tos. He’s the one of the DJs for Minneapolis rap collective Doomtree and one of the top producers out there. LAVABANGERS is basically 40 minutes of phemenal beats (some of which you may recognize from Lizzo’s first album LIZZOBANGERS, which Beak produced), and I wrote a LOT of A NECESSARY ACT with that as my soundtrack. Then, years later as I’m finishing up edits on JUST STAY AWAY, he drops LAVABANGERS II and it just felt like it was preordained.
DOSSIER: Given your route to publishing of going from a press like Broken Bricks Publishing to now Thomas & Mercer, are you glad you chose the path you did to get where you are today, or would you have rather continued slogging it out in the glorious query trenches until someone finally decided to take a chance on you?
WIRT: So Broken Bricks Publishing is just me. I took the name from a song off The White Stripes first album. Like I said before, I think self-pubbing my first one gave me a lot of good experience and skills that have absolutely helped me down the road. As for my time in the query trenches, I feel like that can make you as writer. I queried A NECESSARY ACT for a year before self-pubbing. Then I wrote PIKE ISLAND, queried that for almost another year before getting an offer from my agent. Then it’s off to submission, which is like querying on steroids, and it didn’t sell. So I wrote another book that we never even subbed because it got kinda weird, and then I wrote JUST STAY AWAY. After being on sub for 8 months, we got an offer from Thomas & Mercer, who will also be publishing PIKE ISLAND next September. So, yeah, LOTS of rejection. It sucks, but if you can make it through to the other side, you’ll be stronger and much more prepared for a career in an industry where rejection is the norm.
DOSSIER: What do you think it is about writing (and falling in literary love with) deeply flawed characters that make them so fun to write? Is this where you break news and let us know a bit part of your work is autobiographical, Tony? There probably isn’t anyone reading this, so it’s OK to open up.
WIRT: So I wrote JUST STAY AWAY…a book about a stay-at-home dad struggling to write at home with his kid…during the COVID lockdown when I was a stay-at-home dad struggling to write at home with my kids. Obviously the whole thing is fiction, but I did tap into a lot of the emotions I was going through–enough that when I was re-reading it during the editing process I was kinda like “damn I was going through a little something, eh?”.
But you know what they say, a man will literally write an entire novel to avoid going to therapy. I kind of started with a guy in my own situation and had him make the absolute worst decision at every turn. And then threw in a psychotic 9-year-old boy.
Website: TonyWirt.com
Jeff Circle 