Sharon Berg Interviews A.G.A. Wilmot

(ECW Press, 2024)

A.G.A. Wilmot

Sharon Berg: Thanks for agreeing to do this interview with me. I’m sure you are under pressure to respond to many requests for your time, but I appreciate you being open to my response to your book.
 
A.G.A. Wilmot: It’s absolutely my pleasure—thank you for the questions and the interest in my work!
 
SB:    Ellis is a complicated person with anxiety, unusual insight into others, and a troubled past that reaches into their present. I am curious if you tested out another sort of character to present this tale? Or did the story idea and Ellis simply arrive together?
 
AW:   Interestingly enough, the “original” character, as it were, was Analiese, who you only meet in flashbacks. This book started life as a short story titled “Heart Strung,” which is contained within as Analiese’s tale. But when I realized I had a larger story here that I wanted to tell, and I had the notion of a haunted house being somewhat akin to how one might feel about their own body when living with an eating disorder—of a thing that feels at times like a prison or a threat—the character of Ellis naturally emerged as a vehicle by which I could compare and contrast the two.
 
SB:    This story seems to carry many duties: speaking to the inner perspective of someone with an eating disorder, to the complicated terrain for a person suffering from social anxiety, etc. It presents an unusual, almost anti-hero sort of protagonist. In essence, you’ve turned horror writing on its head in this book. Do you care to comment?
 
AW:   It’s funny, but I never sought out to turn anything on its head. Any subversion of genres or genre writing is unintentional on my part. When I sit down to write a story, I usually don’t know where it’s going to go. I have a theme in mind, and a collection of points I want to try and hit, but that’s more or less all I have firmly in place before I dive in. Once I know my opening sentence, my opening scene, I just start in and see what happens. So I didn’t set out for Ellis to be one thing or another; it was the story and the overarching themes—of grief; of a haunted house and its parallels to how one might feel about their body—that set the tone for all that followed. And with respect to how it fits or doesn’t with other horror titles… I don’t usually think in those terms. I look at horror less as a genre used to label my work and more as a set of tools I can employ as I see fit to get across whatever I’m trying to say.
 
SB:    After the story is finished, you add a surprise in the Acknowledgements, revealing you have suffered from an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and other things that appear in characters featured in this book. The impression given is you reveal who AGA Wilmot is on all fronts. Yet your main character has great difficulty in opening up to others. I’m sure you have many barriers in place, but it leaves the reader wondering, ‘How close is the protagonist to the author?’
 
AW:   In the case of this book, the protagonist is very close to me. They’re in essence a younger version of me—more self-aware than I was at that age, and dealing with slightly different things (my father is still alive, for one, and I’ve never lived in a haunted house), but for all intents and purposes Ellis is a version of me, and Quinn is a version of my fiancée, Jaime. This book was, among other things, a chance to imagine what life would have been like had we met as teens and not adults. In terms of Ellis’s difficulty opening up to others, that was the case for me at that age. It wasn’t until my thirties that I started really being able to open up to and be myself around others. And I had to go through a lot of therapy first to get to that point.
 
I haven’t done anything so directly tied to myself and who I am before, and I don’t know if I will again. There’s always a part of me in my work—a shred, usually, something up close and personal I want to address. But for this story specifically, set in an otherworldly version of my hometown and touching on the things it does, it seemed thematically appropriate.
 
SB:    Every book takes a stance in the midst of its contemporary social and political concerns. How do you describe the position of Withered and its areas of concern in today’s world?
 
AW:   Mental health and queerness are topics of great concern these days, especially the latter given the far right’s ongoing disinformation campaign against trans and gender non-conforming people. To that end, I wanted to make sure to include characters representative of who I am and what I’ve been through, to try and normalize such things. I’m not terribly interested in writing a coming-out story, nor am I interested in people’s identities being the focus of their struggles. I wanted to simply have these identities in my story to be reflective of the world in which I live. To normalize them and treat them with kindness and respect. Additionally, I want to do what I can to further destigmatize eating disorders as well, for all people of all identities, and to show that recovery is possible even when it feels like some unfathomable, far-off thing.
 
SB:    Are there any questions you feel Withered left unanswered about the topics it addresses that you wish you had engaged with? What are they?
 
AW:   Less so the topics it engages with and more so the town itself—how what happened there, with Analiese, was even possible in the first place. It’s my hope to explore such things in greater detail with subsequent stories. My ambition, if I’m able to pull it off, is to write a mosaic, a story of a place—to piece together a history of the town of Black Stone over different time periods and highlighting different characters and relationships. Part and parcel with that, there are other aspects of mental health I’d like to explore in subsequent stories—I want to touch on as many things that matter to me as possible, and this town, removed from reality, is my vehicle for doing so.
 
And at the risk of sounding like a cliché, I know exactly how it all ends.
 
SB:    Titles are often difficult to come up with, though some authors seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for Withered?
 
AW:   Honestly, titling things is one of my favourite parts of any project. And usually they come pretty naturally to me. In this case, it popped out of the text itself. I used the term at one point within the narrative, and something just clicked inside of my head: this is my title. Without wanting to spoil anything, there’s a certain juxtaposition to it—Ellis is recovering from a disease that had previously withered them to the bone, while the story of Analiese is in essence a withering still in progress.
 
SB:    Did this book seem to lay itself out on the page quickly, almost as if it were channelled, or did you put a lot of effort into its developmental process?
 
AW:   A bit of both. I write quickly, but I plan slowly. I will often ruminate on a project for weeks or months before I ever put pen to page. Once I do, once I’ve figured out my entry point, I’m off to the races. Most first drafts take me a month or two if I’m able to work consistently. The longest a first draft has taken me to date is six months when I’ve been able to work on it somewhat consistently. (I say that last part because I’m currently at one year on another project, though my time to work on it has been sporadic at best.) I’m an editor by trade, and I know the trick with a first draft is just getting to the end. Once I’m there, once I can see the full scope of a project, I can spend however long I need working on that second draft—adding, subtracting, and generally shifting things around. That’s where the real work is for me—the first draft is about exploring the world, while the second is about actually figuring out what I’ve managed to say and how to say it better.
 
SB:    Books are often turned into television shows, movies, or radio scripts. They are also frequently translated into other languages. What would you say is a key point in Withered that should not be lost if it’s converted to another form or another language?
 
AW:   The main thing I’d want to preserve is the multifaceted identities of the two leads, Ellis and Quinn. Representation is crucial to me, and I have no interest in sacrificing any detail of that for any reason—doubly so because of the personal ties we (my fiancée and I) have to the characters. If this is going to be adapted, I want its heart, its people, to be who they are and to have that maintained. And if that’s a problem—for a studio, for another publisher—that’s their problem, not mine, and certainly not this story’s. I am willing to bend on certain things—plot details, pacing, etc. But I won’t budge on the rest.
 
SB:    In terms of your own development as a literary artist, what do you hope this book will achieve for you? Ignoring any reviews you may have received so far, do you think this book accomplishes that for you?
 
AW:   More than anything, I would love it to be successful enough that it affords me the opportunity to continue down this path—to be able to take the time to build out this town, this mythology, and to see it through to its end. With respect to my personal development, working on Withered has forced me to be honest with myself and to be able to open up certain parts of who I am to a wider world. I’ve already seen the fruits of that in other work I’ve done. My next manuscript, still in rewrites (the working title is Every Little Death), builds on this learned transparency in, I think, some essential ways. I’ve learned to lean less on forced sarcasm and humour and more on sincerity and depth.
 
And as I’ve achieved more grounding in my personal life, I’ve come to look at success more in terms of this kind of personal growth and less in terms of sales. To the latter, I’m not sure how well Withered will do. I certainly have high hopes, but this is new territory for me—my first book, The Death Scene Artist, was a bit more niche in its appeal, being both epistolary and body horror. I’m proud as hell of it, but I don’t think it carried the same potential with respect to appealing to a wider audience. To the former and the question of personal growth, I think, yes, it has accomplished that for me. Working on this title helped bring me to a place of greater comfort and confidence as a writer, while also (thanks to reviews and feedback) helping me to see what I still need to work on.
 
 SB:    How does this book fit in the stream of all of your written works? Is there some fundamental difference between Withered and your prior work?
 
 AW:   I’d say it fits in terms of themes and overall tone—I have a certain glib, conversation-heavy approach to writing, and that’s certainly present here. Additionally, the focus on mental health and personal struggle, and discomfort in one’s body are all things that crop up here and there in the work that I do. What’s different is, I suppose, the age range of the characters and the slightly more YA-ish bend to things. Most of my work leans a bit older (in terms of target audience) and is a little more abstract or surreal; however, Withered is a more straightforward narrative than both my first book and the manuscript I’m currently working on, not to mention my short stories. With that in mind, I sort of look to Withered and future stories I tell in this world as a playground in which to take things a little less seriously and perhaps explore a different sort of dynamic—one less focused on grand statements and more centred on small but personal character moments.
 
SB:    Thank you for being open to this interview. I truly wish you all the best in achieving your goals as an author.

AW: Thank you kindly!

​A.G.A. Wilmot (BFA, MPub) is a writer, editor, and painter based out of Toronto, Ontario. They have won awards for fiction, short fiction, and screenwriting, including the Friends of Merril Short Story Contest and ECW Press’s Best New Speculative Novel Contest. For seven years they served as co-publisher and co-EIC of the Ignyte- and British Fantasy Award-nominated Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Their credits include myriad online and in-print publications and anthologies. They are also on the editorial advisory board for Poplar Press, the speculative fiction imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. Books of A.G.A.’s include The Death Scene Artist (Buckrider Books, 2018) and Withered (ECW Press, 2024). They are represented by Kelvin Kong of K2 Literary (k2literary.com). Find them online at agawilmot.ca.

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Sharon Berg attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Writing Studio in 1982 and was accepted to Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony in 1987. She is also an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. She did her B.A. in Indigenous Studies at Laurentian U, followed by her B.Ed for Primary Education at U of T. Her M.Ed focused on First Nations Education at York U, and her D.Ed focused on Indigenous Education at UBC. She also received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, which released chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. She's published five full books and three chapbooks, working in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work appears in periodicals across Canada, the USA, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard (Cyberwit 2020) was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School (Big Pond Rumours Press 2019) won a 2020 IPPY Award for Regional Nonfiction. When she retired from teaching, she opened Oceanview Writers Retreat in Charlottetown (Terra Nova National Park) Newfoundland.