Steven Wingate

My L.A. in Four Locations is a running feature in which Angelenos share the story of their city through four specific places. This week, Steven Wingate considers the tough lessons L.A. taught him in the early 1990s. My Los Angeles has been eaten by time. It existed from spring 1991 to late fall 1993 and now lives on only in my body, where I store the lessons L.A. taught me — mostly lessons about who I wasn’t and who I’d never be. I’m grateful to L.A. for clarifying these truths, though at first

“All these distractions and barriers have softened my writing discipline and made it less like bone, more like water—it flows into any shape it’s given.” Steven Wingate talks about how parenthood, contrary to popular wisdom, can be the best thing for your creativity. They say that not all those who wander are lost, but for most of my life as a would-be writer, that was bullshit. I got the writing bug at sixteen and spent the next quarter century screwing around– wandering lost from genre to gen

The August 2020 publication of Margot Livesey’s The Boy in the Field comes 30 years after her first novel, Homework. In that time Livesey has earned a wide range of honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment from the arts, a New York Times bestseller (The Flight of Gemma Hardy, 2012) as well as a prized teaching position at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her career, at the 30-year mark, can’t be considered anything short of substantial. The Bo

“I wish I had a great answer to the question of finding the right mix of pursuing activism and art, but it comes down to simply using one’s time as effectively as possible.” Steven Wingate talks with David Heska Wanbli Weiden about his novel Winter Counts. When I heard about David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts (Ecco/Harper Collins), I knew I had to get hold of it. The novel unfolds in two geographies that are closest to me: Colorado, where I’ve spent more time than anywhere and which is h

Somewhere on Interstate 80 in Nebraska, between my true home in Colorado and my current one in South Dakota, I saw a sign painted on the back of an 18-wheeler: Uncle Sam wagging a scolding index finger at me and asking DID YOU PRAY TODAY? In fact I had prayed that morning, as I do most mornings before I get out of bed, though I couldn’t remember what for. Probably something simple, like me not dying on the road or my country not destroying itself. But I didn’t like Uncle Sam telling me I was su

“Preparatory notes are like the pre-draft visualizations athletes use to prepare themselves for a difficult competitive task. If we want rich first drafts that will throw us into robust revisions, then it’s in our best interest to be free—even profligate—with our preparatory notes.” Steven Wingate talks about managing the work we do on our tales when we’re not actually writing them. The spectrum of writers’ relationships with our notes is as broad as our relationships with our raw emotional mat

“The strongest characters in this book are the ones who are most adrift, most ready to latch onto whatever comes next, and this makes them both tragic and dangerous": Steve Wingate on Maxim Loskutoff's debut collection. America is a nation full of people who don’t feel like they belong to a nation. Maxim Loskutoff’s debut short story collection, Come West and See (W.W. Norton), explores precisely this phenomenon. Nestled in a pocket of the country largely ignored by the cultural powerhouses on

William Lychack’s Cargill Falls (Braddock Avenue Books) is an exquisite novel, and I don’t use that word lightly. His language is a finely tuned and sensitive instrument, capable of expressing subtle gradations of human emotion and almost indiscernible turnings in the inner emotional lives of his characters. Highly imagistic and almost elegiac in its rumination of the past, it paints a detailed, nuanced portrait of a community, a group of friends, and an era. The book’s story is not complex. A