Elizabeth Wetmore and the Usefulness of Righteous Anger

It’s autumn. The ground is covered in leaves. And Elizabeth Wetmore and I are hugging like the old friends that we are. True. But that’s only half the story.

Despite summer having come and gone, the temperature is still in the nineties, and the fallen leaves are victims of severe heat and drought, not the graceful changing of seasons. And despite our emails, text messages, and social media interactions, Ms. Wetmore and I have never met in person.

There are already students arriving to the Katherine Anne Porter House in anticipation of Ms. Wetmore’s fiction workshop, but we still take the time for pleasantries before sitting down. After all, we both grew up in Texas and place a certain amount of importance on customary congeniality. Though I do make the mistake of calling Ms. Wetmore (who goes by Beth) an empty-nester (she’s just dropped her son off at college in Michigan).

“I hate that phrase,” she says in a less-than-kidding tone. “Don’t ever say it again.” That’s fair. Congeniality has its limits. We’re from Texas, not Georgia. 

Ms. Wetmore and I have more in common than just our origins. We both released our debut novels in 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both of our novels were set in West Texas. We both waited until our thirties to go after MFAs. We’re both parents. Both spouses. And, ironically for our first meeting, we both hate interviews. 

There’s one more thing we share: rage. 

Ms. Wetmore has spoken in the past about rage being the defining characteristic of her youth, and about her twenties being full of tough but valuable life experiences. So it’s no coincidence that the women in her award-winning novel, Valentine, are also full of the type of anger that Ms. Wetmore says can empower women and even engender their survival. It can also create the type of literary passion that is so often missing from modern writing, when work has been stripped down, over-edited, and workshopped away until it’s void of any style or risk-taking or, in Ms. Wetmore’s case, anger. But that too is only half the story. 

After taking writing classes at a community college, and later transferring to a university in Arizona, Ms. Wetmore was accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she earned her MFA and began a new chapter in her life. She worked, married, and raised a son, while crafting one of the most notable Texas-set books in recent memory. The novel was adored by readers and critics alike, debuting at number two on the New York Times Best Sellers List. 

With a second-half arc that highlights triumph and redemption, I wondered if the rage Ms. Wetmore mentioned had been relegated to the past. As we sat down in the graciously air-conditioned interior of the KAP House, I got right to the point. 

James Wade: I want to talk about your rage. Or, more specifically, is it still there when you write?

Elizabeth Wetmore: Oh, wow, you’re just going right in there.

Wade: Is that alright? Feel free to tell me to fuck off. 

Wetmore: No, it’s okay. It’s still there. And you know, I think rage is really underrated, just in general. I get why it’s an uncomfortable subject. But people talk about fight or flight, and my instinct has always been to fight. And why wouldn’t you be angry? I think about that a lot when I’m writing fiction: why wouldn’t these characters be angry? Not every story I’ve ever written has a sense of rage underpinning it, but Valentine certainly did. And I had to really contend with that over the course of many drafts because obviously you don’t want your work to just be a rant. Rage is complicated that way. Unfocused rage, useless rage—that stuff’s not helpful. But rage that propels and compels? Rage that changes things, changes people? Rage that allows women in tough circumstances to survive, or maybe even thrive? That’s good rage. That’s useful. And maybe rage isn’t even the best word. I think it’s more of a righteous anger.

Wade: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Righteous anger is the perfect phrase. And you mentioned unfocused rage, or unfocused anger. That’s how I feel a lot—overwhelmed by anger or frustration, and I struggle to harness it in any efficient way that is useful to the writing. How did you manage to do that with Valentine? How did you narrow it down or focus it?

Wetmore: I didn’t think about it that much, consciously. I tried to make a friend of each and every one of the characters. All of them have their genesis in women or girls I knew growing up. And so I tried to sink myself into those characters, and the anger came pretty organically (laughs) without me thinking about it or even noticing it. So much so that I would hand drafts to readers every now and then and my friends would hand it back and say, “lotta anger in there,” and I’d be like, “really?” But one thing that was very much part of the process was differentiating my anger with the anger of the characters. Those were different things. And making sure to realize that is what helped keep the novel from just being a polemic or a rant. 

Wade: Well, it’s certainly neither of those things, but it does have some heavy thematic elements. Rape, racism, classism, some of the darker aspects of humanity. And yet, it’s not a depressing book. There’s hope. There’s an idea of redemption. How did you balance these two opposing forces?

Wetmore: Marilynne Robinson, who is one of my favorite writers, was one of my thesis advisors. I sat in on a lot of her workshops and seminars. And she has spent a lot of time in her work talking about the nobility of the person—about our ability to do just the shittiest things, but then also to do the very best things. Things we couldn’t imagine or expect from each other or ourselves. And I believe in that. I believe in redemption. 

My grandma, my Nana, always said, “until they carry you out the back door in a pine box, there’s always a chance. You can always turn it around.” My Nana was a mean old southern lady, but that was one of the things that she said that really stuck with me. And I’ve witnessed it in my own life. The power of forgiveness. The ability to find yourself in circumstances—whether they’re dire or even beautiful—and in that circumstance, in that moment, you say, “whatever I’ve been doing, it ain’t working.” And you vow to make a change. 

And I’ve also seen the way these characters, these women [in Valentine], who in spite of not having a lot of resources, a lot of education, a lot of money, in spite of some of them being very young mothers, find a way to hold each other up. Find a way to hold up their daughters, their children, and each other. That goes to the heart of the way I try to move through the world when I’m at my best. 

Wade: Yeah, that’s kind of the other half of the story, right? There’s the anger and the sense of injustice, but there’s also the redemption. The ability to do something about it. 

And speaking of you moving through the world, I want to talk about that. Something that gets brought up a lot in MFA programs and everywhere else in creative fields is this idea of imposter syndrome. Is that something you dealt with before Valentine? You’re a best-selling author now. Do you still deal with it? 

Wetmore: Every fucking day. Right here, right now. I don’t know if you ever get over it. I’m sure some people do, with a ton of therapy, or drugs, or maybe they grow out of it and they realize their own worth. But there are some people who temperamentally, artistically, I don’t know, they just have this painful sense that they don’t quite belong or fit in. Or that people will get to know them and see (laughing) and I’m talking about these people in the third person as if they’re not me, when in fact that is exactly me! 

Wade: (laughing) Okay, so what advice would you give these hypothetical people that definitely aren’t you?

Wetmore: Things take as long as they take. If you had told me when I graduated from the Writers’ Workshop in 2002, that my first book would come out eighteen years later, I would’ve been like, “I’m not doing this.” Some of us, it takes longer than others. I’ve read novels by twenty-six, twenty-seven-year olds that are brilliant, deeply empathic, structurally interesting and compelling. 

Wade: The best thing Larry McMurtry ever wrote was Horseman, Pass By and he was only twenty-four or something like that.

Wetmore: That’s a great example. I love that book. That’s one of my favorites of his. It may be the favorite. And some people do that. Good for them. Others of us have to learn things like how to write and tell a story and live the hard way, and it takes a long time.  

Wade: You made sure the time counted, though. I mean, Valentine is a huge hit. How do you handle that success? 

Wetmore: I really don’t. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have much of a social media presence. I lay pretty low. I mean, I fish a lot. I camp. My husband and I get our kayak and disappear into the woods when we can. I just lay low. Lie low? Lay low.

Wade: Lay low sounds better.

Wetmore: Yeah, fuck it, that’s one of those grammar mistakes I’m not gonna give up. 

Wade: You should lead with that in the workshop that I’ve made you ten minutes late for. 

Wetmore: We’d better go.

Wade: Yeah, let me just turn off the recor–