Origin Story

Andrew J. Wilt interviewed by Chris Kelso.

Andrew J. Wilt spent nearly half a decade building 11:11 Press—an unparalleled publisher who view themselves as ‘the invisible hand, and contemporary literature as an invisible school. The artist’s purpose is to render what is unseen, to teach their truth. Within independent publishing, artists lean on one another to spread a culture of curiosity and creativity with those ready to take a leap of faith.’ A staunch critic of traditional publishing, Wilt is motivated in his quests to drag the artistic credibility of the industry out of the desolate shadows. He zealously aims to extract that darkness and disseminate it. He is a fixer. A merchant of alchemy. Someone I wish I could have been friends with in real life.

CK: Tell me about your perception of reality and how it’s changed as you’ve gotten older.

AJW: As a child, I was only aware of things that directly affected my life, and I didn’t know that my story was only a leaf on a tree. Many of the world’s problems stem from a single leaf believing they are a tree when in reality, we are all leaves. This didn’t sink in until I became a parent and was directly responsible for the well-being of children, who completely rely on their caretakers. As perfect as parents want to be, we get tired, sick, stressed, and many of us are still working through our own childhoods. I spent more than a decade criticizing my parents and it sometimes came through in the art and writing I produced in those early years. When I became a parent, I understood how difficult it is to balance it all. I didn’t realize how small the world I was living in was, and how much bigger it could be. My wife and I laugh because things that we thought were so difficult before having kids are now a piece of cake. Most parents are doing the best they can with what they have, and even if they don’t live up to their children’s expectations, they honestly did their best.

CK: Do you think ignorance to the broader reality excuse certain behaviors?

AJW: No, this doesn’t justify bad behavior. What’s wrong and hurtful is still wrong and hurtful, even when the harm comes from ignorance or is a result of a perpetual cycle. But, going back to the metaphor, it does help a leaf like me understand why my family is growing on a crooked branch. It shows me what holding onto pain does, and how holding grudges affects future generations. Most importantly, my story can only exist within the story of a bigger story.

CK: That’s an incredibly mature attitude to take. I think on paper I like to believe life is too short to harbour grudges or register wrongs, but it’s easier said than done – although I can see how clinging to animosity is like a slow poison. Have you released all your grudges?

AJW: My father and I are just now mending our relationship, and it feels really good to be moving in a healthy direction. My father had a rocky relationship with his father, same with my grandfather and his father. Standing at the end of the branch, looking down and sideways, I’m not sure how far down the chain it goes. Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters. That’s why I can’t just start describing the pressure cooker I was born into because my story is connected to a larger story and I want to give my story context so you can see what I couldn’t. My father’s father grew up incredibly wealthy. My grandmother once told me that when she was courting my grandfather during the Great Depression, my grandfather’s family had butlers and maids, which was unheard of during that time.

CK: It’s funny how these cycles are perpetuated within these family units – the masculine chains are usually the most resilient when it comes to sheltering ill-feeling. I know that from experience as well. It’s heartening to know that these relationships can be mended, even after decades of neglect and abuse. Sorry, you were giving me the context…

AJW: During World War II, my father’s father’s father, who was the CEO of a large lighting company, went to Washington D.C. to help with the war effort. His company manufactured electrical-related products for the war. Later, after all the money was gone and all that we had left were stories, an uncle told me about how my great-grandfather kicked senator Truman (later, President Truman) out of their little D.C. carpool due to a minor disagreement. That was the kind of power and influence he had. During that time, my father’s mother’s father was part of the Office of Strategic Services, which would later turn into the CIA. My great grandfather, my grandmother’s father, went missing in 1946 and the US government claimed he never existed.

CK: And he never showed up again?

AJW: Shortly after my father’s parent’s divorce in 1966, which was a result of my grandfather having several affairs, my great grandfather appeared outside of a nursing home with paperwork, not knowing who he was, where he was, or where the last twenty years went. Upon a medical examination, he was recovering from a lobotomy. By the time my grandmother’s father mysteriously appeared, my father’s father’s father had passed, leaving a considerable sum, including two large homes, one in Chicago and one in Toronto. In a few short years, it all disappeared. After the divorce, my father’s father moved to a trailer park where he would stay until his death. My grandmother, who never received any child support and was left penniless to raise my father and two brothers, was taken in by a local church for friendship and charity, and this was something that had a profound impact on my father. This, in turn, was the reason why my childhood centered around the church. Besides school, I spent more time at the church than anywhere else.

CK: What became of your father having grown up in this unstable environment?

AJW: My father worked his way out of poverty and earned a scholarship to a university, where he excelled. It was here he met my mother, who was studying education and psychology. She was calm and levelheaded, naturally following routines that kept her balanced. A stark contrast to my father, a self-identified workaholic, who was always fixated on something.

CK: Given your fathers ‘workaholic’ tendencies, did he expect similar levels of motivation and success from you?

AJW: I’m not sure. My father has a way of throwing himself completely into everything he does, which was intimidating to me as his son since I felt I was being judged at the same level he judged himself. At 24, he earned a lifetime achievement award at The Burroughs Corporation (yes, the same Burroughs who wrote Naked Lunch, rather, the company his grandfather started) for solving an emergency tech issue that was allegedly costing the company a million dollars every day. In comparison, at 24, I had started a record label that went under when my best friend (who was the co-owner) was arrested by the FBI. I founded a university-funded alternative newspaper and then dropped out of school in Michigan to be a writer in Seattle. Not to mention, I struggled with addiction, drank obsessively, and lost money as soon as it was in my hand. I’m surprised I’m still alive today.

CK: It seems like you had the motivation your father had, you just rerouted it into creative ventures.

AJW: Eventually, yes. Haha. After several failures. But I’ve always been cautious. With my father’s success came incredible stress, so much so that at one point he abruptly changed jobs the year I was going to start elementary school and we moved to a different state. Decades later, we discovered it was due to the sensitivity of a project he was working on, and it was so sensitive he thought our lives were in danger. But there’s so much mystery behind what he does and his past, I’m not sure. I may never know, and I’d be ok with never knowing because my grandmother’s father taught us all what happens when you learn too much.

CK: And the church remained an ever-present source of comfort for your family at that time?

AJW: No matter where I lived, church was family. And it became more so when we began settling into our new home in Michigan because my mom found her life’s purpose at the new church we began attending. With a background in early childhood education, she felt God was calling her to start a preschool. My mother began the first year setting up in the narthex, as the church was so small. Every Sunday after church, we (my dad, sister, and I) stayed to set up for her class the next day. For a few years, as the school grew, it was all hands on deck, setting up and tearing down. The preschool grew, and many of the families that came for the preschool became members of the church, which caused the church to grow. Her classes, written with her own material, including songs and prayers, became so popular, area churches began borrowing some of her songs and curriculum. I remember asking her, “doesn’t it bother you?” “Of course not,” she said, “It’s a compliment when people borrow your work, especially when it glorifies God. More children will hear his message, and that’s the only thing that matters.”

CK: Was there ever any corrupt goings-on behind the scenes? I’m aware there is a very phallocentric hierarchy within organized religion.

AJW: Despite what you see on TV or read in the news, American Christianity is fairly tame. There are, though, some churches that abide by word-for-word interpretation of the bible, which is scary. And that’s the type of church I grew up in. For example, women could not hold leadership positions or vote in church affairs and, despite my mom’s preschool being a major evangelism effort, which resulted in revenue for the church, the male leadership rarely supported the preschool with additional funding. More than anyone, my mother taught me how to start, build, and grow a business. If the deck is stacked against you, you never waste energy complaining, you use that energy to push yourself harder. You find solutions. When God wants something to happen—rather, when you believe God wants something to happen—solutions will appear. Whether due to God or positive thinking, it worked. She had a magnetism that drew others in, and soon, they didn’t see problems, but new ways to find creative solutions. Eventually, the church council granted the preschool a building extension to add on to the church and build classrooms, so long as the rooms could also be used for other church functions. Even as a college student, on break visiting my parents, I helped set up her rooms on Sundays after everyone else had gone home.

CK: Does God still have a place in your life?

AJW: The church, which was at the center of my life, mirrored my father’s relationship with us, which was love through law. God was a God of laws. God represented justice and punished those who broke the Law. Similar to his background in physics and math, everything adds up and there is a right and wrong answer–always. Later, after I left the church and began studying philosophy and other religions, I’d realize that the God I wanted to follow was one of self-realization, but it took years of discontent before discovering this simple path.

CK: Do you still carry the Christian guilt around? The stories of heaven and hell can be powerful and disturbing images for a young mind to process.

AJW: Growing up with the absolute belief in hell was difficult to overcome. I was haunted by hell. From an early age, I would wake up in the middle of the night unable to move, thinking I had died and descended into hell. I’d come to from a dream trapped inside of myself. Locked in. I couldn’t even scream. I was taunted by beings from another world; some good, angelic even, but most were demonic, horrific creatures. As I grew older, and the occurrences grew more frequent, I learned how to will myself into a lucid dream and escape both the beings and my paralyzed body. I didn’t know about sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, astral projection, or that one could become conscious out of the body, and when I told my parents they were reluctant to call it anything but a bad dream. When I was 19 and tried to kill myself, I was visited by the beings again, coming into view as I slipped out of my body, but I couldn’t thrust my consciousness into a lucid dream. I encountered a new feeling, a loss of both bodily control and the ability to control my consciousness.

CK: Do you believe they could be more than hallucinations?

AJW: Perhaps the beings are always with me and only visible when the two worlds merge in states of altered consciousness? If these beings were more than a hallucination, I’m not sure if they were good, bad, or neutral, because whenever an angel appears in the bible the next words that follow are “and they were terrified.” Thankfully, I was unsuccessful in my attempt to leave this world, but at the time, it plunged me further into a depression as I realized I was stuck between a life I wanted to end and a death that would be far worse than merely existing in my body. I began drinking heavily and continued for seven years.

CK: During your period of heavy drinking did you find support within your family network? Was your father ever attentive, even during your blackest hours of need?

AJW: This was a difficult time for all of us. When I left to go to University, I was at odds with my parents because I wasn’t interested in a degree since I was playing music and recording bands at my newly formed record label. We were at such odds that during the freshman move-in week, which is usually a heartfelt and bittersweet occasion in the U.S., I received a phone call that my belongings would be left on the curb outside of my apartment and that I could only return home as a guest. At this moment I was on my own. Three months later, I would lose the record label and my best friend, and the FBI would come and take most of my possessions, including all of my electronics, and leave everything else in shambles on the floor of my University apartment. Since the local police & FBI took all my notebooks, too, and I had nothing left that was uniquely mine, I often sat on my floor in total awe, not understanding how I ended up where I was: at a school I never wanted to attend and with no one to turn to for comfort. Everything was imploding at the same time. I stopped playing music because I couldn’t handle the dynamics of being in a band, which included navigating big egos, drugs, and relationships. Honestly, I was so unprepared for life outside of my religious cult bubble. If you can imagine me at 18 or 19, a lifelong devotee to a strict interpretation of Christianity, questioning little bits of my faith, and in doing so, being tossed into the real world of sex, drugs, deception, selfishness, college hormones, and it was too much to handle. Romantic relationships, for example, were so confusing to me since I had never been in one, and was unsure how to reciprocate love since, for the most part, my parents were stoic with their love. Now, absent of religion, family, my bandmates, and closest friend, I felt such emptiness. It wasn’t so much a desire to be loved, but sorry that I had lived my whole life up to this point unaware of true friendship.

Going back to your question, no, at that time, I could not rely on asking my parents for help. In their defense, I’m not sure many parents know how to confront their child’s addiction. A few years later, I thought I was making a breakthrough as a “transgressive dirty realism” writer, but the truth was, I was drunkenly journaling and vomiting bile every morning since I spent money on alcohol instead of food, and I was able to go to a rehabilitation facility since I was still a dependent on my parent’s insurance plan and they coerced me into going. At the time I hated it, and it took a few years to become completely sober, but it seeded some important ideas that eventually led me to sobriety. In reflection, during these years I now believe I was near death at many points since I would frequently wake up in a lucid dream in my room. I’d see my body lying on the floor, walk around my room, thankful to no longer be carrying the weight of a body. I can’t get into it here, but events like this have given me confidence that consciousness can and does exist outside of the body, and death is only a departure of consciousness from the physical.

CK: Before the troubles with your parents in your young adult life, was your family relationship always stressed and fractious? You mentioned not understanding love and friendship, was it because those concepts were adrift in your childhood?

AJW: Every family is working out the kinks in their complicated relationship, and I don’t want to drag out old laundry here because despite everything we’ve been through my parents are very caring, and I have to admit fault on my end of our relationship. Growing up, despite my dad’s frequent traveling and working most evenings, he tried to be active in me and my sister’s life. Since he grew up with an absent father, every free moment at home when he was not working, he spent as a present father and husband. At dinner, he would teach us basic physics, like seeing which foods were buoyant in his water glass. My sister and I loved our parents dearly. We were so desperate for our parents’ love, and we soaked up every drop, no matter how small.

This love was further complicated by frequent doctor visits. I was born with a heart defect and the hospital was a place of deep animosity as I was taken away from my parents and was only returned after hours of excruciating pain. Before our move to Michigan, I had two major heart surgeries. During one of them, my heart was stopped for a period of time. My father told me the doctors spoke of my miracle recovery, and the absence of scar tissue. This further confirmed my parent’s faith and the power of prayer. We were staying at a charity home in Chicago for families of children who were undergoing operations that required several days or weeks of inpatient care. The family we shared the living space with was from Pakistan, and their daughter and I were recovering in the same pediatric intensive care unit together. I don’t know why or how, but certain impressions have stuck with me. Her long dark curly hair. The infection from her surgery pulsing through her body. Memories of feelings, so intense that I still feel them now as I type this. They are positive emotions surrounding death, unlike the time I tried to make an exit on my own, thinking my departure would be similar to hers. My daughter is now the same age as the girl when she transitioned, and despite the memory of warm feelings, I can’t bear to imagine such a tragedy. Since we were living together, the doctors asked my parents to comfort and be with her parents, but what was there to do but hold one another and cry?

CK: That sounds like an emotional experience. It must have shown you another side to your parents though, a more nurturing and thoughtfulness side. Can I ask, did you believe that girl in ICU would go to hell?

AJW: The church I was raised in would say yes. I was raised to believe many odd things like the Pope is the antichrist and the holocaust wasn’t all too bad because Jews are going to hell anyway. My parents are more compassionate and would likely say, “God is the judge, and it’s not our place to judge”. Personally, I believe the only hell that exists is the one people create for themselves. But when I was growing up and sincerely believed in the Christian hell, the death of a non-Christian was agony, because that person’s soul will live in fire, weeping, and the gnashing of teeth for eternity. And when I learned this at a young age, I wanted to spread the Word. I’ve always had a strong desire to help others and that’s why I spent Saturdays every spring of my youth knocking on doors to invite people to my church. Church elders found that if children knocked on doors, people were more likely to open them, and they were more likely to take the invitation to our church service. The adults stood in the back if any serious questions arose. The justification was biblical because Jesus said to be as the little children, and when you’re a child growing up in a religious echo chamber, you don’t understand the complexities of faith. You don’t understand that someone simply can’t choose to not be gay. Or leave Judaism or Islam, because unlike the McDonaldization of Christianity in the U.S., those religions are more than a belief, they are a culture.

CK: Was there a moment where you started to question Christianity?

AJW: I saw a lot of hypocrisy in the church where men got away with bad behavior and became critical of how scripture was being interpreted. There were also these ethical questions of equal rights, LGBTQ+, and the concept of hell that left me unsure about my faith, my childhood, my relationship with my parents, especially as I grew older. At 16, I began playing music in thrash metal bands and experiencing the world outside of my belief bubble. Timid and awkward, I didn’t fit in with the non-conformist crowd, because I knew nothing of the secular lifestyle, but I knew there were serious problems with the church I grew up in. Seeing the new path I was headed down, my father began insisting I adhere more closely to the laws in scripture. It was a desperate effort to save my soul. Growing up, he had watched his older brother begin hanging around the same type of friends that were my friends. His brother began using heroin and left home, stealing the few precious things my grandmother still had so he could buy more drugs. To my father, it must have been the repeat of a bad dream, his worst fears realized in his son. Naturally, I pushed back harder. And we both kept pushing until one day we both stopped. He was only a father to me in what God commanded him to be. As for me, I had no father because I would not accept love if it was conditional or out of biblical obligation.

CK: How did you eventually come to accept love and find some kind of inner peace?

AJW After numerous dead ends, chasing things that I thought would make me feel whole, I shifted my focus from searching for a piece outside of myself to one that was within. I realized that hell is something we humans create and live inside. Hell is on earth and it is in us, carried on by avoiding one’s true self. A life without inner peace is hell. For years, I found it easier to live with this familiar suffering instead of facing it head-on. Pain can be comforting, especially if it’s all a person has known. I am confronting my hell through writing and by going to those deep places I’ve tried to ignore. One of those is my relationship with my family, specifically my father. As soon as I acknowledged my source of suffering was an attachment to stories from my past, I realized that I, as a narrator of the present, could release that pain through art. And in their own unique ways, many of the authors we publish at 11:11 are doing the same: using art as a way of courageously confronting their innermost selves.

CK: I suppose I can relate to confronting hell through creative expression. It must be gratifying offering that platform for young writers trying to protect themselves from some kind of personal existential torment. What brings you, a narrator of the present, comfort in the terror of silence?

AJW: Not too long ago, my mother gave me her grandmother’s family photo album with pictures that date back to the 1800s. Some of them have names written on the photos, but most of them don’t. Yesterday, I was flipping through the album with my three-year-old son. Some relatives I knew or knew of, pictured in school clothes or at their wedding, but others I’m not too sure. My son asked, “Dad, who’s that?” I don’t know. “Who’s that?” I don’t know, but I think we’re related to them? It’s easy to dismiss history because it all looks so foreign. We are the future they dreamed about, and in death, they can teach us how to live. But rarely is the weight of death understood. The fact that they’re dead is as unrelatable as their clothing or the technology used to produce the photo.

CK: Do you ever find comfort or peace in that disconnection from foreign images? Sometimes I think the closer we are to our families the more we see their fallibility. I often wonder if things might have been better if we just had a profile in tattered polaroid and a few good stories.

AJW: What brings me peace is knowing that one day I too will be forgotten. Most people are aware that one day their body will be the one in the basement of their local funeral home, and their blood and fluids will be sucked out of their body and replaced with embalming chemicals, but they don’t consider that their life’s work will one day be forgotten. That their life only mattered to the small communities and friendships they made, and now their life can only exist in other people’s memory. And yet, there is great strength living with the knowledge that you will one day be forgotten. Even if no one remembers your name, right now, you have the power to create ideas, tools, and art that might last forever. Every act of creation will one day become anonymous, so why bother worrying about how it will be received by the public? Why worry about accumulating possessions or awards or more drugs? Whatever you fear controls you and if you’re afraid of death (your own or another’s) or losing wealth or a job, afraid of another person, of living a sober lifestyle, of losing your memory, or others losing you in their memory, then you’ll never fully be present in your life.

CK: Do you think fiction that deals with darkness directly can have therapeutic advantages for the creative and psychological soul? Which writers give you the most relief?

AJW I once ended an interview with the suggestion to write a poem or story like you would a prayer, and to not tell anyone what you’re doing. Really put yourself into it, and don’t hold back because you’re not going to show anyone. Print it off if it’s on your computer and delete the file so you only have the one copy. Now, go out into the world, on a hike, or on a boat, or to your local corner store, and gently tear it up. Bury it, throw it into the water, light it on fire, drop it into a large city trashcan or fold it into a paper airplane and toss it off a cliff. You made something you loved, only for yourself, and now it’s your secret with the universe. How special is that?

CK: Very special.

AJW: It’s like the Tibetan monks who spend days creating a sand mandala only to destroy it once it’s finished. That’s life. That’s art. You can’t take it with you when you die, but the act of creating art forever changes your consciousness and that is something I believe can never be taken from you, because death does not destroy the energy of consciousness, it only breaks the string that connects it to the body. Therefore, the goal of art shouldn’t be to publish or to gain power or respect. The goal is to challenge yourself and change yourself through the act of creative work.

CK: And what about transgressive literature? How does that play a part in your life or sync up with your new outlook? What constates as transgressive in a world that has lost direct communication with its soul – and where nothing is left to truly shock the human mind or heart?

AJW: In the last 25 years, transgressive literature has gained a lot of mainstream momentum. Books (and later, movies) like Fight Club and American Psycho grew in popularity because of their unapologetic normalization of extreme violence. Often overlooked is that the violence is rooted in the main character’s search for identity. Now, in 2021, most books about drugs or nudity are boring because these topics have lost their shock value. The most transgressive thing someone can write about is honesty. Authors like Lidia Yuknavitch, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Vi Khi Nao, Elle Nash, Chelsea Hodson, Grant Maierhofer, Garielle Lutz, Mark Richards, Tom Spanbauer, Peter Christopher, Joy Harjo, Mary Gaitskill, Christine Schutt, Diane Williams, and Joy Williams courageously look into the eyes of their own reflection. Reading authors who face their lives, their past, their future, encourages us, the readers, to do the same.