Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Wells Tower, the author of a first book of stories

called Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

It's published by Farah Strauss and Giroux.

Now, the publishers sent out a pamphlet prior to the book that has two earlier versions of a story

that appears called retreat.

And by this token, it becomes quite clear that you're a very industrious rewriter,

and I wanted to ask you how you developed your process.

Oh, I suppose... and i wanted to ask you how you developed your process oh i suppose

out of the ordinary self-loathing that

most writers uh... feel about their work when we when we confront it later

you know with with the collection it was suppose eight years of short stories

that i assembled into a large manuscript and then sent out in 2007.

And, you know, so sitting down and looking at the edits, you know, it was really, it was like a slightly more mature writer having to confront the work of a younger writer and figure out what to do with it. And so for that reason, I went up swinging lots of wrecking balls at the earlier stories. And then also some of the later ones that with the early stories, there was something kind of simple and primitive and occasionally kind of

lovely about them and then it's a but I was trying to bring a bit more

sophistication to the early stories and then with the later stories I think I was

trying to bring a little less cleverness to them and so that that was what

...