Keith McWalter
Keith McWalter is the author of When We Were All Still Alive (on sale 5/4/21, SparkPress), writes the essay blog Mortal Coil, and his narrative nonfiction and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. A collection of his essays, No One Else Will Tell You: Letters from a Bi-Coastal Father, won the Writer’s Digest Award for Nonfiction, and his family memoir, Befriending Ending, was anthologized in the online literary magazine Feathered Flounder. McWalter grew up in Mexico and Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Denison University and Columbia Law School, and spent much of his first career in the legal and investment banking worlds of New York and San Francisco. He and his wife live in Granville, Ohio, and Sanibel, Florida.
Twitter: @KGMcWalter
What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?
“Watchmen,” recently adapted into a Netflix series that bore little resemblance to the original by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The actual comic was wonderfully cinematic, as close as you could get to film in static images, and very dark, except when it was exuberantly surreal.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
If I’m not engaged in the first few pages, I quit, unless I have a very good reason to continue, as with some of the classics that one just has to read to be well-read. I tried to get through Amor Towles’s A Gentleman from Moscow, which everyone loves, two or three times, and just couldn’t do it. On the other hand, I recently read Thomas Wolfe’s enormous Look Homeward, Angel for the first time and was gripped from the first page. I think this has to do mostly with language – if I can hear and am engaged by the narrative voice, I’m hooked, and if I can’t, no amount of sheer craft or plotline is going to keep me going. I admire the heck out of prolific authors like Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, but I can’t read either one of them.
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
City, definitely. That’s where the arts are concentrated. I lived in New York City for ten years when I was just starting out, and fell in love with it (as my novel makes clear). I’m also a foodie, and the first question I have on arriving in a city is where to go to eat (there’s also a lot of eating in my book).
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
I play piano. I have very little formal training, but can play a bit by ear, and figuring out how to play a song I love (usually an American standard) on the piano is as close as I get to the gratification of writing something well. Perhaps because of this, there are as many piano scenes in my novel as there are sex scenes (approximately two each).
What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?
My suits. They hang in my closet like chapter headings in a memoir, so clearly do I recall when and where and in some cases why I bought each of them (this could be a great organizing framework for a novel, too!). They’re like wayward children, a bit down on their luck these days, and I only rarely visit them. Suits have become relics, but I worked first in a law firm and later in finance, and these were once pursuits in which you didn’t dare show up at the office wearing anything but a suit. One, a jaunty fern-green double-breasted number, I wore to my own wedding, which is reason enough to keep it forever. But most men’s suits haunt us with the ghosts of our responsibilities. Or rather, our responsibilities wear our suits, and we’re just along for the ride.
