A story about a pet dog who does stand up comedy, or a precocious girl who signs her name with a mathematical formula learning how to ballroom dance may sound crazy, but English professor and award-winning author Kellie Wells comes up with these stories.
Wells is the author of three books and is currently working on an anthology where she will further explore the supernatural.
Wells credits her love for the supernatural through both her enjoyment of grimoires, which are filled with “recipes for magical concoctions and spells and incantations,” and her admiration for specific figures like Baba Yaga, who despite her familiarity with audiences is also “hostile and trickster and to be feared.”
“Writers tend to be most enthusiastic about the thing they’re doing at any given moment when you talk to them,” Wells said. “And so I’m having a good time with this collection of stories that I’m writing just about crones.”
Humor is also important to her work. Well said that she “gravitates” to comedy in her life and her love for stand up has helped her include humor in her writing.
“When you find a writer who’s able to make you laugh in a way that serves to make the reading all the more painful. That’s when the writer has gotten to that experience of being human that most interests me,” Well said.
Despite being an author whose works feature a great deal of both fantasy and comedic elements, in regards to genre, Wells is optimistic that the “binary of the literary” is starting to “dissolve” and offer more freedom to writers.
At work, Wells is also a teacher who challenges students in unique ways through her classes on fiction writing with exercises designed to challenge their creative writing abilities.
“Sometimes when I ask writers to write badly, to intentionally write poorly, they have to think, ‘What is bad writing?’” Wells said. “And oftentimes, their responses to those assignments end up being some of the most interesting writing that they do, because it’s very hard to write badly when you’re trying to.”
Although she’s unsure, Wells isn’t too concerned about when her book will be completed.
“I’m not in any particular hurry, although I’ve been working on it for quite some time, so I should probably get in more of a hurry, but I want to keep writing and experimenting with genres that I don’t typically write in, and I would like to keep doing that,” she said.
