Wells Tower, Greenpoint Man of Letters

At a Greenpoint deli, a scene plays out on loop—the same scene, night after night. A man saunters in—drunk, belligerent—and there’s a lot of yelling; The deli owner, from a perch behind the counter, joins in and kicks the guy out. The drunk staggers out to the street. And from the sound of things, you’d think he’d have run a million miles in the other direction. But there he is, sitting on the stoop of the store that kicked him out, his back to the window as if he’s drawing warmth from all that hate.
One night, the author Wells Tower, who lives nearby on Norman Avenue, asked the man behind the counter what it was all about. “It’s just part of our thing,” the owner said. “We’ve been doing this for years.” “They’re screaming at eachother, but there’s a kind of love as well,” said Tower, who is built like a bear but has a gentleness about him. At the coffee shop Grumpy’s, he didn’t order coffee, black, as one of his characters might have, but asked for an orange seltzer. “I’m kind of a pussy,” he said. His debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, stars grizzly, real men’s men that endure brutal plots—attempting to rebuild their lives after a divorce only to end up handcuffed after a bar brawl, trying to connect with a younger brother on a hunting trip only to end up eating the flesh of a diseased moose. And it’s all told through heady, luxurious language that doesn’t turn florid; The geese “called to each other in voices like nails being pulled from old boards.” Praised by The New York Times for syntax “supple enough to wrap itself around several shades of meaning in the same sentence,” his stories were feted by reviewers who all had this to say: This stuff is dark, dark, dark. “I guess it’s fairly dark,” Towers said, then paused. “No. I think that’s crap. I don’t think I know anyone who thinks life is light and fun. If I were honest—I don’t think you can write honestly about what it is to be a person without writing about disappointments and betrayals.” As if to prove him right, there was one puddle on the street and one car that rolled straight through it, splashing Tower lightly. “It’s amazing that it was able to just, get that right there.” Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to two teachers, Towers graduated to attend Wesleyan. With a major in Anthropology and Sociology, he graduated and moved to Portland with a couple of friends, working odd jobs over the next years such as a clerk in a Nike warehouse or a database typist asked to enter numbers for obscure electronic devices for a parts distributor. “Even if I knew what the numbers corresponded to,” he said, “It still would have been totally alienating.” He moved back home to Chapel Hill and sought a way to write. A gig working as a nightwatchman at a Duke University magazine led to a connection that allowed him to pitch to The Washington Post magazine, which gave him free reign to pursue a short career as a carny for a traveling fair. With his anthropological gaze and his penchant for down-and-out characters, Tower was good. He got a contract for a couple of stories a year, going on to profile a homeless chess hustler, the scene at a horse track, and the life of a public pool, and work on the Bush campaign in Florida—which he wrote for Harper’s. But in the back of his head, he was always interested in fiction. He applied to the M.F.A program at Columbia and lived in a small studio in the West Village, writing of characters and conversations he’d studied in his years of odd jobs and journalistic immersions. The two stories he sent to the slush pile of thousands at The Paris Review were picked up, published, and won the Plimpton award—a plotline that haunts the daydreams of so many MFA students. Since then, he has published in McSweeney’s, Vice, and The New Yorker, among others, and is a man about the literary scene who thinks of his Greenpoint shotgun sublet as a hideout of sorts. “Greenpoint’s far enough off the grid that you can live a pretty quiet, anonymous life out here,” he said. “I like pierogis and kielbasa. And all this vinyl siding hasn’t gotten to me yet.” But what does affect him is what he calls “The New York rancor”—the fighting in the deli, the yelling and the hate. Still, that’s life. That’s work. That’s writing. “Writing is always frustrating. It’s very very hard. It doesn’t get any easier.” Dark stuff. But in his own life, if not in the life of his characters, redemption for years of work feels possible. “The only thing I learned now is to have some degree of faith that in weeks, months, years—it will work out.” This summer, he’s been invited to participate in Yaddo, a writer’s retreat, where he’ll work on a family novel. “It’s great,” he said, giddy. “They do everything for you. They even do the dishes.”