You Don’t Have Privacy, so Instead You Have Secrecy: The Millions Interviews D. Wystan Owen
There’s something especially rewarding about befriending someone who is quiet—a sense of finding something special and rare. I met David Wystan Owen a few years ago, when we overlapped in our time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He and I never took a class together, and in drafting this introduction, I tried to locate my earliest impressions of David or recall an anecdote about how we became friends—but I failed. It seems our friendship sprung fully formed from the dive bar we frequented in Iowa City—I.C. Uglies, a dark, scummy gem with cheap whiskey—one of the few places we could meet in small groups without running into crowds of acquaintances. We were seeking a bit of isolation, a bit of privacy, a safe place to talk.
That is a bit of the feeling one gets when walking into to the private lives in his debut collection, Other People’s Love Affairs (Algonquin, August 2018)—a feeling of having walked into a quiet space, unseen. David gave me an ARC of his book last spring when I visited him and his partner, Ellen Kamoe, in the Bay Area. I planned to read the 10 stories on the plane ride home to Seattle. I settled in and opened it just before takeoff. Instead of finishing, I found myself teary and pensive at the end of the first story. The plane was still near enough to the ground that I could see texture on the brown shoulders of grass below, and already I needed a break—to save the rest. I found myself spending much of the plane ride turning over just this one delicate story in my head, rereading the ending, tracing back the gestures and movements of each character toward one another, and looking for the origins of the subtle distances that ultimately prove uncrossable. Every story in the collection is this way: It’s a book to savor.
David’s father is, along with our friend, writer . Having grown up with an immigrant parent, a sense of dislocation characterizes David’s understanding of what it means to be a person, and each of the stories tenderly examines the ways residents of a fictional British town, Glass, feel their own forms of dislocation. We sit beside them in moments of small humiliation and private triumph that too rarely earn such attention and care.
