Wilson’s guest is Rustin Larson and they’re discussing his new book of short stories, Red Wing. Larson has published extensively in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and in The Delmarva Review.
The reader’s comments on the back cover of his book Red Wing suggest that the stories are strongly about place. The place being rural Iowa. And that is basically true, Larson has woven the Iowa landscape into the structure of his stories in a way that captures the emotion and feel of his characters. But there is more, so much more to these stories. Wilson suggests they are about time or rather the relative nature of time. The Amish time travelers for example in "Einstein," the first story in the book, and the mishmash account of Thanksgiving history in the title story "Red Wing." It's a history broken in pieces, laid out, meaningless as history but at the same time in its context making complete sense. Shards of memory like a broken plate, each shard has its own unique story to tell but at the same time each gives us a mental picture of the whole.