My Mother's Touch
An Interview
with author Alexis Wiggins

Though a fiction writer from the start (her first story, written at age 5, is saved in a file in the attic) Alexis Wiggins finds her “true voice” in creative nonfiction.  “As a requirement for the degree [MFA in Fiction] I had to take a CNF course,” she explains.  “Something clicks with me and creative nonfiction.”

This “true voice” that Wiggins describes is front and center in the short piece My Mother’s Touch.  She says, “I guess I never expected to bare my soul so much. That's what I find funny—and slightly intimidating—about CNF: I begin thinking I will write a certain kind of response, and it turns into a damning piece about my mother. I don't think I began writing this piece attempting to paint my mother so badly, but it turned into that. It's highly therapeutic, I'm sure.”

“This piece was born out of an assignment I had to do in my first CNF class. The assignment was to answer this question in brief format: What is the one thing you could never tell your parents? This poured out on the page pretty much as it is.”  This was lucky for Wiggins, as a self-confessed “lazy writer” who finds her greatest writing challenge to be the revision process. 

 “I am ablaze with a million ideas and when I find myself stumped or at a crossroads with a certain piece, I will give up and promise to come back to it later while I work on a new piece. I rarely do come back to it. I am reworking a piece now that I started in college, about 8 years ago. I try to overcome my allergy to editing by just forcing myself to do it,” she says.

“I find short pieces much easier. While I do enjoy writing full-blown longer pieces and have done so, I find myself coming back to short pieces again and again. I like to render a moment, a flash, and no more. I find Brevity's pieces very powerful, and it has nothing to do with laziness as a reader. There is something visceral in short work, flash fiction and nonfiction.”

A young writer herself, Wiggins passes along the advice “Keep at it. If there is something in you that pulls you to write, no matter how many form rejection letters pour in, just do it. If I knew I would never publish again, I would still write because it's something I love, something that comes from within.”

—Sarah Klingler