And also stuff comes to you out of chronology. And you want something beyond what you have, but you have no real sense of how you can get it. I’m always interested in adolescence because the first time something happens to you, no matter what, you’re going to ascribe meaning to it in a way that the 10th or 11th time that it happens to you don’t.īut I think also I wanted to write this book about what it feels like to be in a rural space before the Internet, which is this feeling of growing up in the middle of nowhere. The story is set in the mid nineties and it’s also set in a really rural town in Tennessee and, you know, I was a teenager in the mid-nineties and grew up in a really rural town in Tennessee.

JohnsonĬhristopher: Can you talk about writing these teenagers, the creation of Frankie and Zeke and this time period? Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Piscesby Melissa Broder, Bearby Marian Engel, Julian the Magician by Gwendolyn MacEwen, The Fetish by Theodora Keogh, Meg by Theodora KeoghĬhristopher: The Feather Thief by Kirk W.

Tom Hanks), The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender, Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson, Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine by Kevin Wilson, Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Small Game by Blair Braverman, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube by Blair Braverman, Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst, Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, Island of the Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, The Bear by Claire Cameron, Room by Emma Donoghue Heart of Junk by Luke Geddes, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, That Thing You Do! (dir. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!Ĭhristopher: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfeld, A Visit by Shirley Jackson, The Dead and the Countess by Gertrude Atherton, The Corner Shopby Lady Asquith Plus, he brings along Blair Braverman’s Small Game, which means survival talk and reality television. Kevin Wilson zooms in from his mountain to discuss his thrilling new novel, Now is Not the Time to Panic, and that means going into writing teenagers, the pre-Internet world, and magic disappearing as one gets older, and how that’s okay, along with a whole lotta other stuff.

Now is not the time to panic review