Stand-up Comedians Have Nothing on Savannah Book Festival Author Kevin Wilson.
Written by Hunter Cottrell. Photos By Trinity Ray.
A true master of storytelling takes one lucky crowd on a journey from laughter to tears, all in 25 minutes before Q&A.
“Since I got here, there are three things I’ve been told: ‘Your hands are very cold. You look very nervous. Are you OK?’” said Kevin Wilson, opening his Author Talk last weekend at the Savannah Book Festival.
Wilson had been invited to the festival while on tour for his newest book, Run for the Hills, featuring a band of chronologically abandoned half-siblings inside a PT Cruiser on a quest to find their disappearing father “and beat him up,” said Wilson. It explores the themes of closeness, abandonment and what it means to be part of a family. His other works include Now Is Not the Time to Panic, about the collision of two teenage misfits, and Nothing to See Here, a New York Times bestseller about a pair of combustible twins.
His stories contain so much of himself, including his potentially combustible kids, his homeland of Tennessee, his hatred for PT Cruisers and his love for True Grit. His talk contained another layer of his identity. We knew what the inside of his head sounded like, and at the book talk he shared with us the sound of his heart.
It may have been on this tour that Wilson perfected his Author Talk formula, or potentially the morning before his speech at SBF, when he visited a local Coastal Middle School and talked to the final boss of public speaking: seventh- and eighth-graders. He told us what he told them, but the adult version, as “you don’t cry in front of eighth-graders,” said Wilson.
“In my junior year in our physics class, we had to do an egg drop. I didn’t know what in the world to do, but my parents were trying so hard to get me to not fail in life,” said Wilson. His father gave him the endearingly misguided advice that the safest place in the world was the womb. Wilson has the dad that his characters in Run for the Hills never did, one who lifted him up and saw his future through.
They placed the raw egg inside a water balloon, inside a shoebox also filled with water balloons, duct-taped it shut and dropped it from the roof of their home. It did not break. The crowd giggled at both the absurdity of the story and the honesty with which Wilson told it.
When he brought the recreation of his experiment to school the next day, the box was soggy and soaking up what must have been the insides of the pseudo-amniotic fluid for his experiment. He also had the misfortune that one of the teachers was married to a man who owned a helicopter, which they filled with the egg projects and dropped over the football field. Wilson described his classmates’ egg housings as “tiny little aerodynamic flat things” that fluttered, and his own “like you dropped a safe.” The crowd laughed and whooped.
“I was standing on that field with everyone around me, and I thought, ‘Why am I so stupid?’” he said. This was his Run for the Hills flip-the-PT-Cruiser moment. This was the moment where he thought it would be best to call it all quits.
“How do you explain to your dad, the person that made you, that you don’t think you can do it?” Wilson said. The crowd did not laugh. They let out a soft breath, like a sigh, intermingled with the quiet aww of empathy.
Wilson continued: “I think now I can tell that story from this vantage point of ‘I made it.’ And now the story is funny and relatable, and that is what writing can do for me. It can take these things where I felt the most alone in the world and you send that signal out where someone says, ‘That never happened to me, my God, but I know what you’re talking about. I know what it means to feel bad in your heart. I can see that and I can see you and I can see myself,’ and that’s the whole reason I write.”
The crowd lit up, clapping, cheering, standing and smiling. The applause went on for nearly 30 seconds, which is all the more special when the applause is unbroken and joyous. He received the only standing ovation I have ever witnessed at the Savannah Book Festival. In 25 minutes, he had brought us from the throes of laughter to the brink of tears, all when we had only known him from his writing and an introduction about his cold hands.
