Matthew Wamser revels in the space he’s been given as a Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow. Working in a first-floor apartment with exposed wood timbers, he feels the presence of the past: a plaque on the door notes that the space was used by artists Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s.
The studio is perfect for writing historical fiction — what Wamser had been doing since he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. In one of his short stories, he mixes humor and tragedy in a narrative about a beekeeping monk in Milan who is struck by a meteorite. Much of his fiction is set in the 17th century. “It was this extraordinary time of social change, a time when many of the foundations of the modern world were laid,” says Wamser.
Since he arrived in Provincetown, the setting of Wamser’s stories has shifted along with the genre he’s working in. Walls of Bone, Walls of Meat, the working title of his in-progress horror novel, is set in an environment of what he calls “bureaucratic violence”: a deceptively bland, fluorescent-lit office filled with cubicles. The setting becomes increasingly sinister as the novel progresses.
“The liquid dribbled from a pipe in the ceiling and splashed in a puddle on the cement,” he writes. “It was dark. The edges had grown a crust like a scab. He knew it wasn’t leaking water. He was out the door before another drop fell.”
The characters in the novel are gradually transformed by the setting. One becomes increasingly hostile. “The building has a parasitic relationship with the people who work in it, and it begins to change their personalities in ways they don’t want to be changed,” says Wamser.
His interest in horror grew from a feeling of being “stuck in a genre rut” after grad school. “The fellowship has given me the freedom to explore a new genre and new ways of thinking about stories,” he says, “to break out of this research-intensive mode and do something more imaginative.”
He’s been focused on how to build suspense, reading novelist Shirley Jackson for inspiration. He admires her use of social anxiety and isolation. “For horror to work, the character needs to feel vulnerable to the danger, whatever the supernatural thing is,” says Wamser.
The inspiration for the setting came — at least in part — from his experience working a soul-crushing corporate job in Atlanta after graduate school. “Does this job really exist to make me miserable?” he laughs, recalling hours spent subdividing and uploading spreadsheets of tweets to a glitchy software program that fed into an app used by European telecom executives and salespeople.
Wamser used a whiteboard he found in the FAWC basement to post a “mission and values statement” for the organization occupying his novel’s haunted office building: “We stimulate transformative change to nurture frictionless integration between individuals, systems and the Community.”
Given the dark themes of his fiction, it’s fitting that Wamser is a night owl. His best, most “unhinged” ideas come late at night, he says, when he knows he’s the only one still awake. Mornings are reserved for a ritual he began as a teenager: recording his dreams in a journal. He carried all the journals with him to Provincetown, continuing to use the process to understand the architecture of his mind, as he puts it.
While few of the entries become actual stories, keeping a journal supports what many writers consider their greatest challenge: sustaining a daily writing practice. He likens it to a pianist playing scales as a warmup exercise. It gets him going and creates space to keep the demands of the world at bay just long enough to suspend disbelief that the ideas in his head might work well on the page.
“It’s extremely low-stakes writing,” Wamser says. “I have no expectations about it; it doesn’t have to be good. I think if I were to put more pressure on it, to say I’m going to use this to collect seeds for short stories, that would defeat the purpose.”
Wamser, 29, grew up in Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee as an undergraduate. He initially planned to pursue a career in film, but that changed after a professor assigned him to read Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino.
“It’s a series of humorous stories about a man trying to analytically look at different things in the world, and he always fails to pin down what he’s looking at in a systematic way,” Wamser says. He was struck by “the mixture of humor and tragedy” and the way Calvino “was able to marry description with narrative, even though seemingly nothing is happening in these stories.” Writing became more compelling than film with its strict schedules and necessity for coordinating with others. “It’s important for me to work on creative impulse,” says Wamser.
Calvino’s writing — his deliberate juxtaposition of humorous and serious elements — has influenced Wamser’s work. Humor, he’s found, can make serious or scary subjects more affecting, because when they show up on the page, “the reader isn’t quite ready for them.”
Wamser was watching the seals at High Head beach in North Truro on election day last November — an experience, that like his fiction, contained feelings of both helplessness and humor. “It was as if they were all on a conveyor belt or in a parade, all heading in the same direction down the coast,” Wamser recalls with a chuckle. “It was a day we felt there was nothing we could do and yet here were all these happy seals passing us by. It gave me a solace I don’t think I could have received anywhere else in the world.”
