interview with Wyatt Bonikowski

Wyatt Bonikowski's stories have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, HAD, Lake Effect, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and other journals. He teaches literature and creative writing at Suffolk University and lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife and two daughters.

Wyatt Bonikowski writes as if memory itself were unstable terrain, skipping, looping, and quietly reshaping what it means to have lived alongside another person. His prose is restrained but unsettled, allowing the extraordinary to emerge with the same texture as the ordinary, as if grief, shame, or longing have subtly altered the world’s logic. His narrators return to moments that resist closure, where small, misread encounters imprint without resolution and identity forms through repetition rather than revelation. The result is work that lingers with a photographic stillness, intimate, estranging, and already slipping into permanence as it unfolds.

We interviewed Wyatt about his piece, GIN: A DIPTYCH, published in The Palisades Review. Read that story hereand read his interview below.

TPR: "Gin: A Diptych" is written in second person, creating an intimate but unsettling closeness. What drew you to that point of view for this story?

Wyatt: It was an intuitive decision; I just heard the sentences in my head in second person. Looking back, I can see that second-person has a distancing effect that enabled me to write it; the material felt too close to me to use first person. But it’s true that there’s an intimacy to it, like an internal, private voice, the voice you use to talk to yourself. I like this dual distancing and closeness, and the way that second person can shift in register from accusatory to comforting, like when we beat ourselves up or try to reassure ourselves.

TPR: Alcohol appears not just as subject matter, but as ritual, structure, and timekeeper. How did you think about the role of routine in shaping the emotional arc of the piece?

Wyatt: I hoped the repetitive routine in the first piece would capture the claustrophobia of sameness over the course of many years, a sameness that keeps emotion tamped down. Within that routine there can be a kind of expansion, a fog of temporary relief in which time doesn’t seem to exist. But one ends up returning to the routine, and it repeats until it feels like there’s no escape. In the second piece, I wanted to lean into that expansion through longer sentences and open up the emotions of earlier days, long before drinking became routine.

TPR: This piece resists traditional plot and instead accumulates meaning through repetition and image. What does narrative momentum look like for you when you’re working in this mode?

Wyatt: For me, the momentum of the piece comes through both the accumulation of images and the rhythm of the sentences. The sentences in the first piece are shorter, quick and steady in their forward movement; we are getting through the day (and the next and the next). The sentences in the second piece are much longer and less steady; they’re more liquid, they expand and spill, as they describe the tumultuous movements and emotions of the characters.

TPR: The prose has a stripped-down, declarative quality that feels both controlled and raw. How much revision goes into achieving that surface simplicity?

Wyatt: I revise obsessively. It’s my favorite part of the process. I write first drafts quickly, and I write more than I need. Then I read it again and again, often aloud, until it sounds right. I want to strip away everything but the clearest images and to get the right emphasis in the language, both in terms of sound and the rhythm of images. I also put this piece away for a while after working on it for a bit, about two years, which isn’t typical, but the time helped me gain greater distance on it and see what worked and what didn’t.

TPR: There’s a strong sense of compression here: decades of experience distilled into a few pages. What do you cut when you’re writing toward that kind of density?

Wyatt: In this case, it’s less about what to cut than the need to severely narrow the focus in order to write about the subject in the first place, a kind of cutting in advance. In the first piece, I used a single day to stand in for many years. The second piece also focuses on a single day, but it remains unique and in the past; it is one very specific time that one can’t return to except through memory and nostalgia. Narrowing the focus of both pieces in this way allowed me to write it. I don’t think I could have written it if I thought I had to get everything in.

TPR: The stories feel confessional without offering easy catharsis. How do you decide what to leave unresolved on the page?

Wyatt: First I wanted to make sure the question of the narrator’s addiction was resolved; he does stop drinking. But I also didn’t want this resolution to feel triumphant. Recovery is a long process and doesn’t necessarily feel cathartic. So the first piece is claustrophobic, repetitive, and seemingly endless. The second piece opens out into something that might feel freer but is also looking backward and doesn’t point to a definitive future. The gap between the two, I hope, suggests that the emotions in each are still active, still swirling around somewhere: the regret and guilt, the longing and relief.

I’m suspicious of catharsis and confessional narratives that suggest a total transformation. The diptych allowed me to create a gap between the repetition of addiction and its aftermath, where one can look back and even feel nostalgia for the pleasures that became such a burden.  

TPR: These pieces don’t moralize addiction, but they don’t romanticize it either. What felt most important to you ethically or artistically in approaching this subject?

Wyatt: Thank you for this. That’s it exactly: not to moralize or romanticize. And yet, the second piece is meant to feel romantic and nostalgic. Can you feel nostalgia for the beginning of an addiction, for that first sip that becomes the thing you want to return to again and again? Yes, you can, but it’s different after you stop drinking. In the midst of addiction, nostalgia isn’t possible. The first sip each day is a desperate attempt to recapture a feeling that never really existed in the first place. Addiction repeats a fantasy, but nostalgia recognizes the fantasy for what it was: the attempt to fill an emptiness. At least nostalgia recognizes that emptiness. I wanted to try to hold that gap open so that it felt painful to cross it.

TPR: How do you know when a piece like this is finished, especially when its power comes from lingering rather than closure? 

Wyatt: This is a very difficult question to answer. I can only say that it’s a feeling after reading and re-reading the piece over and over again—in this case, also after a gap of two years. Each piece had to have its own internal consistency, to feel complete in itself, so that the difference between them could communicate through that gap. So I worked very hard to stay true to the different emotions in each and not to explain the relation between the two or guide the reader’s understanding of that relation.

TPR: Are there writers that influenced the shape or tone of this work?

Wyatt: I wasn’t thinking of him consciously, but Denis Johnson has long been an influence, especially when it comes to writing about addiction.

TPR: What do you hope a reader sits with after finishing this piece?

Wyatt: I don’t want to suggest too much what a reader should take from this piece. I just hope a reader will sit with the gap between the two parts and find something there that moves them. 

Jessica Austin