Kellie Wells - He wanted to feel those feathers, to feel them brush his knees and open the closed places in his body, pass through him like hot nails

Kellie Wells, Skin :A Novel, University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

“From within the deceptively commonplace bodies of the inhabitants of a small Kansas town with the deceptively homespun name of What Cheer, Kellie Wells unleashes the clamorous, resistless, marvelous voice of our world's collective unconscious, the language of ecstasy and despair in all its manifold registers. Reading Skin is like finding yourself inside one of the great medieval paintings, every last detail (a sycamore tree, a TV, a firefly, a set of dentures in a glass, a meadowlark) perfectly rendered, and exploding with celestial meaning.”— Kathryn Davis

"In her first novel, Skin, Kellie Wells tackles theological questions of eschatological proportions within the complicated web of What Cheer, a small town in Kansas. God peeks through the clouds with ominous and alarming force, knocking men to their knees and demanding nourishment with insatiable hunger. What Cheer's residents live in a violent, premillennial reality where the only spiritual peace is inside your skin, below the veins and obscured by body tissue.
Wells eschews chronological narrative form, jumping through her characters' lives with a different kind of arc. Their futures mix with their pasts, creating a chaotic present without a clear protagonist. Instead, a cast of interconnected sinners trapped in various physical, philosophical, and emotional purgatories trades leads. Degrees of pain flirt with pleasure in a way that is just barely tolerable yet undeniably compelling.
The prologue sets the tenor for the body of the novel. Wells begins by describing the intoxicating scent of gardenia hanging in the air. The smell is so powerful it makes her characters forget what the body is reasonably capable of and the language so crisp it makes readers forget to question rationally impossible plot twists. Within the first two pages Rachel wills herself to shrink, her daughter Ruby dreams of the day she will let her mother relax in the safety of a pocket, and Zero floats into the sky until his body becomes merely a "matter of faith." Miracles are commonplace, theophany is never ruled out, and penitence is relished. Wells closes the prologue with guilty people ready to be consumed by their creator - "Thin clouds prowl across the sky like cats stalking sparrows, and all the residents of What Cheer who stand in their greening yards, hands reaching toward a trickle of sun, look above to see the sky eddy with the ylem of imminent consequences, kneel beneath the heft of sins they've yet to commit."
Throughout the novel, Wells uses Christian imagery to flirt with existential questions. God feeds us himself in the form of the Eucharist, but who feeds God? What is life? "Who's to say we are not floaters in God's eyes, making him a little less lonely behind his dimming vision?" What is heaven? Is it real? Could it be a place where "blood means the same as milk or rain or wine?" In What Cheer, God's name is Harold and he consumes whatever he chooses, answering these questions with swift blows. Abuse is divinely sanctioned and even envied. Masochism is the path to happiness and divinity. "It's a balled-up fist you hit yourself with, but you like it that way 'cause the beauty of contusions is that they disappear."
The world Wells creates is complex. At times the pain is so beautiful it invokes guilt. Wells succeeds in getting the reader to acquiesce to abuse, describing it with language so romantic that only later does reality catch up. She plows through issues that don't bring joy - domestic abuse, death, and self-mutilation - yet somehow leaves the reader with a smile. The book is not funny, but the prose so pleasurable it lulls the reader into seeing God in every bit of pain and loving him anyway. Wells manages to weave layers of storyline into each other from generations past and present without faltering, and she makes miracles rational, vigilantly retaining her audience in that heady, intoxicating cloud of What Cheer gardenias." - Rebecca Turnbull

"In Skin, Kellie Wells' novel-in-stories, scars are sites of healing as much as they are repositories for suffering. The motifs of skin and scar appear repeatedly throughout the book, and the structure of the novel itself forms a tissue of interrelated, almost symbiotic smaller narratives. For Wells, skin is not just the vast organ that protects the human body; it is also the narrative fabric that connects the human community, and the membrane that separates the otherworldly from the all-too earthly.
Skin follows the lives of the residents of What Cheer, Kansas, where the "gardenia-scented air fills them to their gasping gills with a barren hunger no fecundity could ever answer." This hunger winds throughout the novel and highlights the longing that each of its characters experiences in different ways. Evangelical Ansel Dorsett, for example, hungers for word from God, while his neighbor, the elderly Charlotte McCorkle wishes for an end to her physical presence on earth and a reunion with her husband. As the "sporadic seer" of What Cheer, McCorkle has the ability to imagine the lives of even unfamiliar residents, and her prophetic voice helps to draw all the other voices together. Like most of the residents of What Cheer, McCorkle is independent and pulsing with life. She underscores the importance the novel places on how humans differ from all other beings in their ability to experience through their sense of touch. "Touch is an underrated sense," she says. "We are tyrannized by the visual, and nearly as often led around by the ears, but what if we lost tactility, what lesser creeping creatures would we be could we not feel?"
Wells is at her best when in the realm of the body. One does not read her words as much as sense them through the fingertips. A sensual writer, her prose is both fleshy and often blurrily erotic, especially when she conjures angels: "He wanted to feel those feathers. He wanted to feel them brush his knees and open the closed places in his body, pass through him, tearing like hot nails, feel them die violently, all blood and sun, then feel them light as nucleolus rise up inside him like resurrection, scattering on the wind, the pollination of a restive demi-divinity."
In Skin, angels signify the tension between the body and the spirit, and the general sense of abandonment that permeates the novel. Wells' angels do not have perfect, white wings or receive messages from God. Instead, they can be seen feasting on the carcasses of animals in a field or visiting their human companions for a game of Triple Yahtzee. They age and grow sickly, are at once too corporeal and disembodied. Gabriel, Charlotte McCorkle's nephew, is one such angel. After several operations to remove his wings, they "came in all cockeyed and sickly, curling out to the sides like corkscrews with shriveled, musty feathers, and each time they grew back they came in more gnarled and in less and less likely places." In What Cheer, angels suffer, perhaps even more than their human counterparts. As Mrs. McCorkle explains, "When we are in the midst of a celestial burgeoning that walks among us, we tend to look the other way, hope we'll be spared."
Angels are not the only supernatural elements in Skin. Zero Loomis floats, and his eight-year-old niece Ruby Tuesday grows lemons in her abdomen. There are encounters with skin-stealing aliens and talking animals. Wells' brand of magical realism is reminiscent of Garcia Marquez, but also distinctly American. Her descriptions of the supernatural are as humorous as they are incantational: "You will wamble and flap at your own limitations, and molting feathers will twist to the floor. She will gather them and make a picture to comfort you. She will trace her hand on construction paper, a sweet hand small enough to fit comfortably inside your mouth, and she will glue your fallen feathers to the outlined fingers. She will fashion the body and head and wattle of a turkey out of brightly colored kernels of Jolly Time popcorn.
The impetus for Skin grew out of the author's short story, "Compression Scars," featured in her collection of the same name, which won a Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. That story is, like Skin, both tragic and comical. In a lesser writer's hands, the metaphor of scarring might come across heavy-handed, but Wells treats misfortune with tenderness and levity. Much is accomplished through the lively voices of her characters, but one senses the author's voice too, just below the surface, reminding the reader that there is a fine line between "grace and desolation," and it is through the skin that we negotiate that line, that we are reminded not only of how alone we are, but also of how connected we are to each other in our shared experience of aloneness." - Rachel Swearingen

"Wells gives us a series of linked stories with a prologue and epilogue. Although the setting is the small town of What Cheer, Kansas, the citizens of that town not only do the usual chores—cut the grass, watch television, search the sky for weather signs—they are also obsessed with divinity. Does skin reign? Or does divinity in some form or creed enter the skin, hinting that there are angels? What Cheer is, indeed, a very strange place. I need only quote some passages: Rachel Loomis "imagines soon she'll be able to see her soul showing through, a faint glimmer near the hipbone, between her ribs...." Ivy Engel, a teenager, gets "a little spooked, thinking maybe [the bats] had gotten their coloring from blood feasts, like maybe steady blood plasma transfusions had begun to redden their skin and fur...." Martin LeFavor sees angels: "Clearly great mysteries coursed between the extraterrestrial skin, drooping from their bones like melting wax." Are the people who live in the heartland crazy? Wells doesn't bother with simple terms because she writes of experiences beyond words. And her special gifts of metaphor and image gradually draw us into uncommon - to say the least! - states of mind or being. We begin to think that "skin" is haunted, enchanted, spooky. And Wells puts us in a mood of "continuing speculation." We will no longer see the natural world - flowers, crocodiles - as it "is." I cannot think of many novels that alter our perceptions, that make us think as old Rachel does: "The world is ending, the world is ending. I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it." - Irving Malin

"The residents of What Cheer, Kansas, are a fractured and tortured lot, wrangling with questions of personal responsibility, spiritual absolution, and cosmic uncertainty. What cheer, indeed? There's Ivy Engel, contemplating her mysterious tree filled with bats, and her boyfriend, Duncan, dressing all in blue to hide the scars ambushing his body. Next door lives evangelical Ansel Dorsett, whose piety is too much for the infirm Charlotte McCorkle to bear, laboring as she does under the delusion that she killed her husband, while in reality, he languishes in a nursing home across town. Ansel's savior may be the precocious child, Ruby Tuesday Loomis, who sees possibility in words written on cows, and dreams of fruit springing from her body, though such otherworldly skills confound Ruby's mother, Rachel, who still bears the childhood scars wrought upon her by her father's violence. In this surrealistic phantasmagoria, Wells writes with an intoxicating lyricism of the magic and mystery that lurk within and without the frailest and finest among us." - Carol Haggas

Prologue: Spiritus Monday

Kellie Wells, Compression Scars, UGA Press, 2002.

“By turns achingly poignant and downright hilarious, rendered in prose as supple and surprising as it is consistently brilliant, these stories take us into a world of angels and grotesques, of grace notes and grave truths, of the lost and, finally, the found.” — Ellen Akins

“Distinguished by a compressive force born from invention and intensity rather than economy, Kellie Wells's aptly titled Compression Scars is a memorable debut. The writing is consistently fresh and often beautiful, though for Wells beauty is a by-product. The primary function of her language is incantation—necessary to effect the alchemical transformations that inform each story.” — Stuart Dybek

“Slyly comic yet deeply felt, Kellie Wells's marvelous fiction embraces the sacred weirdness of everyday life. These are magical stories, in every sense of the word, by a writer with a conjurer's feel for the hidden compartments, death-defying escapes, and lighter-than-air levitations of language.” — Peter Ho Davies

“Even in a crowded field, it is a rare pleasure to come across a prose stylist like Kellie Wells, whose intellect and language bid one another beautifully to a dance. A thrilling debut from a writer so agile and subtle in her terms that, like Walter Abish and Kathryn Davis, she dares to be at play in the most unsettling questions of her day. Surely when the present generation of writers shakes down to its unique and irreplaceable voices, Kellie Wells will be one of them.” — Jaimy Gordon

"In Kellie Wells’ Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection, Compression Scars, the body is a problem. The bodies in these stories are blind, deaf, pierced, headless, scarred, ridden by tumors and shingles and leukemia, plagued with heart palpitations, ugly, and, more often than you’d expect, dead. They suffer from what the fatherless narrator of “Star-dogged Moon” calls “the corporeal rap.” Characters occasionally approach sex, that most body-affirming of acts, but it remains out of reach. After one failed seduction, a woman, apparently by way of “good-bye” to her uninterested partner, “raises one side of her shirt, exposing a breast as small and fragile as a teacup.” Strange, sad and beautiful, a chord this book plays many times. It's no surprise, then, that these characters often want spiritual relief. The stories use mystical means - seances, ghosts, imaginary and rhetorical flights - to escape, transcend, ascend; or to use Wells' own consistently brilliant language: each story is "a fast burning centrifuge spinning spirit from flesh." At the magical conclusion of the title story "Compression Scars," bats descend to brush bugs from the protagonist's bare belly, a spectral touch that contrasts with the earthier sex she can't accept from a young man with devastating compression scars spreading throughout his body. But Wells occasionally balances this spiritualizing impulse with a character willing to give the flesh a go. Even the pre-adolescent Hallie, in "Hallie Out of This World," when confronting a knife-bearing sexual predator who "just" wants to look at her, exhorts him to "Touch me." Whether that touch would be worse than what the man has already subjected her to is hard to say. In any case, the story withholds that touch, as these stories generally do, as if, in Hallie's words, "a plate of glass separated us."
Plotwise, these stories also tend to be a bit disembodied. A typical narrative puts a character suffering from the loss of a loved one through a seemingly meandering series of memories and encounters, set to the music of Wells' inventive, finely detailed, funny, and sometimes bracingly intellectual sentences. When the music is about to stop, we find that the story has deftly managed to locate itself directly above a trapdoor leading into feeling or insight - and out of the story. Without the unfolding of dramatic action to bring on their resolutions, something which depends on purposeful bodies moving through time, the stories often require imagined rather than enacted endings: a dead father returns for a conversation in "Star-dogged Moon"; Hallie imagines leaving this world with her friend Oedipus and an experimental cow named Gretel. But, in most of these cases, the power of Wells' language leaves me feeling that definitive plot action is for squares.
Interestingly, the story most grounded in familiar emotions and motivations is the amazing "Secession, XX," a story which also has the most body-crazed premise: conjoined twins, brother and sister, survive long enough to attend high school and fall in love with the same person. It's as if having paid off a massive debt to strangeness, Wells feels comfortable getting down to jealousy and desire. Here the climactic rhetoric (climactic maybe for the collection as well), spoken by the brother who has begun to thrive as his sister declines, gives the body its due: "I sense that it is, after all, in the body that one knows whatever one can claim to know about God; redemption occurs, courageously, at this site of pain and decay." but in the last story, the will to escape the flesh is re-ascendant. Yet as the characters at the end of "Hallie Out of This World" rise into the sky, ready to "burn ourselves out of this world," I'm tempted to say, "Not so fast. Down here, in our bodies, is the only place we can live." Then again, Wells knows this, deeply, and that's why she's written these beautiful, pain-streaked stories." - Andy Mozina

"For this debut collection, creative writing instructor Wells won the University of Georgia Short Fiction Prize. Her characters are unable to avoid disaster in a world where "things can get so strange, so fast." Fathers and mothers disappear; children are left alone to cope with their fears and fantasies. In "My Guardian, Claire," the young narrator is trapped in a role reversal. In "Godlight," a Jesus-like figure, Jonas, replaces burned-out light bulbs in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The light that he keeps for himself the light that comforts him is the light he sees when he imagines his dead daughter in heaven. The people in these stories are vulnerable, eccentric outsiders attempting to find their way in a world that puzzles and dazzles them. Wells adeptly portrays both their vulnerability and their fortitude. Her strong, unaffected prose contrasts sharply with the surreal quality of many of the stories. This collection introduces a writer of startling imagination and great promise. Suitable for all public libraries." - Marcia Tager

"Brother and sister conjoined twins; a teenage boy who believes he is dying from excessive scar tissue; a child conceived with the purpose of providing bone marrow for his cancer-stricken sister. Such abnormal afflictions lie at the core of Wells' debut collection of luminous short stories that reflect both the fragility and the flexibility of the human spirit. Emotionally and physically damaged as they may be, Wells' characters struggle with scars that are both internal and external, though they often fail to realize which of the two is the more disfiguring. Like Hallie, the teenage heroine of "Hallie Out of This World," Wells, too, can be said to "romanticize misfortune... the shortcomings, disabilities, grief and misery of others." What saves Wells, and what elevates her characters, is the inner strength and sublime compassion that compel them to assist others in singularly unconventional ways. Sometimes dark, frequently droll, by turns heartbreaking and humorous, Wells' phantasmal stories shimmer with a dreamlike vibrancy that continues to haunt long after the last word has been read." - Carol Haggas

"In the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan, fiction writer Kellie Wells, M.F.A. ’91, tells how from an early age she recognized “how persuasive words can be.” She pauses to think. “Potent,” she says a moment later. “That’s a better word.”
Word by word, sentence by sentence, Wells crafts her stories. “I write very slowly,” she says. “In paragraphs rather than pages.”
That approach has built a body of work that has garnered the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction, publication in prestigious literary magazines, and most recently, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, which has brought her to New York.
The cadence of language and the unconscious element of idea generation are two aspects of writing that intrigue Wells. It is not surprising, therefore, that her language casts a dream-like spell on readers, engaging their imaginations with oddball and often shockingly vivid imagery.
Her first collection of stories, Compression Scars, is being publicized on Amazon.com as “eloquent and original… vibrantly captur[ing] the oddities of both the everyday and out-of-this-world.”
In the story “Swallowing Angels Whole,” for example, protagonist Aimee Semple McPherson, a preacher with many stories, many truths, questions the ways of the world around her. She wonders whether “[Darwin] had felt the walk out of the water into the light click in his own bones, the weight of that forward movement pressing down on his skeleton. Bones remember. The ache that starts at the base of the spine is a bone memory of another posture.”
The evening of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards ceremony, sixty-five floors up in the pavilion of Rockefeller Center’s illustrious Rainbow Room, the best word to describe Wells and her writing was lofty. Overlooking a cloud-enshrouded New York City skyline, the literary world’s top publishers, agents, and editors assembled in late September to honor six emerging writers.
The writers are all women in the early stages of their careers who, in the words of the foundation, “demonstrate exceptional talent and promise.” Others to receive the $10,000 award this year are: Eula Biss, Adrian Blevins, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Ladette Randolph, and L.B. Thompson
A saxophone’s soft jazz filled the partygoers ears, fancy finger foods filled their mouths, and the names of future literary giants claimed their minds’ attention as author and philanthropist Rona Jaffe announced each winner.
Literary greatness, however, was not of foremost importance to young Kellie Wells. She was aware of words’ potency, yes, but did not immediately gravitate toward them.
“I was not one of those kids who wrote all the time,” she says. Only after college, when she found herself in a copywriting job at a public television station, imprisoned behind the strict confines of thirty-second spots, did she see the path that lay ahead of her.
“I found myself yearning beyond the thirty seconds,” she remembers.
"Wells had earned two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Kansas, Lawrence—the first in English, the second in journalism—and decided to test out the limits of fiction and poetry by enrolling in the M.F.A. program at UM in 1989. She received an extra incentive when honored with the University of Kansas Kate Stephens “Get the Hell out of the Midwest” fellowship for graduate study. It stipulated that its winners attend graduate school east of the Alleghenies or west of the Rockies. (Missoula, she says, was “exotic” in comparison to her hometown of Kansas City.)
“Being in school was something I was good at and enjoyed,” she says. “I was casting for an identity and couldn’t find one. I stayed in academe because I knew who I was when I was there.”
After earning yet another M.F.A. with a concentration in fiction from the University in Pittsburgh, she decided to make a career for herself in higher education. She studied abroad in Berlin and Hamburg, gained fluency in German, and received her doctorate in English and creative writing from Western Michigan University in 1999.
Though she says she “never lets naiveté get in my way,” she was struck by how demanding teaching was. Now an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, she does not get much writing done during the semesters she teaches. She simply does not have much to give to the creative side of things; teaching consumes so much of her energy.
To teach literature, Wells says she must first craft aesthetics and defend her positions. Students often ask her why she refers to certain readings, and she must be able to rapidly produce articulate answers. This process, she says, pushes her forward to do the work—the thinking—that she perhaps wouldn’t do on her own.
“It allows me to change, revise, and grow in a way that comes quickly,” she says. “I’m forced to be reflective all the time.
“Lots of writers who teach complain that they have no time to write,” she continues. “But for me, the only way to survive academia and writing is to see the symbiosis—how one feeds into the other.”
The Rona Jaffe Foundation bestows cash awards on its winners in the spirit of providing them with a cushion of time during which they can achieve a high level of reflection and creative output. Some winners use the money to cover the cost of childcare; others pay the rent for cubicle space. Wells plans to journey to Egypt to research Queen Hatshepsut.
At work on her second novel while making finishing touches on her first, she says her characters often get interested in subjects about which she is not personally knowledgeable, like ancient Egypt. “Sometimes an image pops into your head and attaches to this one character,” she says.
Her second novel, tentatively titled Fat Girl, Terrestrial, is still in the “embryonic stages.” Yet Wells already knows that one character, an amateur Egyptologist, would be interested in going to Egypt to visit Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb.
Wells says her writing process is two-pronged. At times she becomes grounded in language first, getting to character through language. Other times there is a character dilemma that she wants to work out through prose.
Her first (not yet published) novel, Skin, is set in the mythical town of What Cheer, Kansas. In this work Wells explores various crises of identity simultaneously. In what she describes as a “Midwestern magical-realism” genre, What Cheer residents grapple with big abstractions of body and spirit and work out the “consequences of the imbalances” in their daily lives.
Creative ideas like this one have been attracting attention to Wells for years. Nancy Zafris, fiction editor of the Kenyon Review, is a good friend of Wells’ from the days when Kellie was a student at the University of Pittsburgh. Zafris says she remembers Wells as a shy and unassuming student who had a mind full of thought-provoking ideas.
“She’s just so smart,” Zafris says. “She expresses herself really, really well and has an extraordinary vocabulary. At the same time, she is very modest, shy, and thoughtful. When she did say something, you wanted to listen to it.”
The class Zafris taught in the early 1990s was a literature class; the students handed in little of their own creative work. Yet, something about the way Wells talked about the readings provoked Zafris to ask for a writing sample. And what she saw—the beginnings of the title story in Compression Scars—blew her away. She urged Wells to write to an agent, which resulted in Wells getting representation.
“I sort of see her as a female David Foster Wallace in her own way. I hope she rises to the top. She’s the best literary fiction has to offer,” Zafris says.
Though Wells says she has been fortunate throughout her career, the past year has been exceptionally propitious. She published in the Gettysburg Review and the Kenyon Review, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, moderated a panel discussion on “The Figure of the Female Grotesque” at the Associated Writing Program’s annual conference, and landed her assistant professorship at Washington University.
She has come a long way since winning the “Get the Hell out of the Midwest” fellowship. Having been launched “into the stratosphere” after dwelling in obscurity for many years, she says, “This past year has been dizzying.”
Booklist reviewer Carol Haggas called Compression Scars a collection “of luminous short stories” that “reflect both the fragility and the flexibility of the human spirit. Emotionally and physically damaged as they may be, Wells’ characters struggle with scars that are both internal and external, though they often fail to realize which of the two is the more disfiguring.”
Haggas also recognizes that the characters appear to be saved by “inner strength and sublime compassion that compel them to assist others in singularly unconventional ways.”
Wells says that she is pleased that critics are picking up on the refuge her characters find in compassion.
“A lot of the world’s ills exist fundamentally as a result of a lack of empathy,” she says, adding that she is intrigued by the small places in which people find hope." - Jodi Werner


Interviewed by Dan Wickett

Kellie Wells: Digesting the Father (story)

Kellie Wells: Secession, XX (story)

Kellie Wells, Threnody (story)

Kellie Wells: Gaythal Dethloff, Mother of Murder (story)