Walsh doesn’t like writing things the easy way, and not just when he restricts himself to a documentary format in writing a novel. In February, Keyhole Press is publishing a short, 45,000-word book that — since meta-fiction has been done to death — could be called meta-nonfiction. Questionstruck assembles texts from questions in numerous books by Calvin Trillin — with his bemused permission. (This isn’t all that odd for him if you know that he once amassed a compilation of every sentence in Ulysses that referred to the potato that Leopold Bloom carries around with him as a talisman. Walsh likes playing within limitations.)
A year or so after that publication, a short story collection will be coming out. And by then, a novel he is one-third through writing will probably be done. It takes the family in the late 1960s TV series The Big Valley, and thrusts them into the 20th century. “Instead of being a Western, it’s set in Providence in a family-owned strip club,” Walsh says.
If the emphasis on character development in Without Wax is any indication, it looks like that novel will be about more than pole dancing.
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