In Kevin Wilson’s fifth novel, Run for the Hills, forthcoming in May from Ecco, a quartet of half-siblings, strangers to one another, join up to embark on a cross-country road trip to California to confront their father, who over the years had left each of them in turn to form a new family. Charles Hill, the absent father, is a man with “no anchor,” Wilson says. “There are no threads that connect him to all of the kids.” Through the course of the novel’s narrative, the siblings slowly create their own threads, but the father, Wilson says, “can’t be a part of it.” 

Like many of Wilson’s books, the plot for Run for the Hills was first seen in a previous novel. In Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco, 2022), it’s briefly mentioned that a writer character who’s had a successful series of young adult novels wrote just one for adults, he says, “and it was about a woman who goes to pick up all of her half-sisters on this road trip to go to their father's funeral, and they all have the same name. And it was not good. So for some reason, even as I was finishing that novel, I just kept thinking, ‘How could you make that good?’” 

Many of his books have sprung from seeds planted in previous work, Wilson told me in a Zoom interview. “Family Fang, which was the first novel I ever wrote, has fire children in it. It has that weird line that becomes the basis of Now Is Not the Time to Panic.” Part of that, he adds, is simply that Family Fang (Ecco, 2011) was his first novel. “I didn’t know if I’d ever publish another one, so I just put everything into it.” 

He needn’t have worried; the novel was a success—a best-seller with rave reviews and a 2015 movie adaption starring Nicole Kidman, Jason Bateman, and Christopher Walken—and he thought, “Oh shit, I have got to write more books!” he says. So he decided to return to unfinished business. “I want to go back in and take some of those things, because I’m not done with them,” he recalls thinking.

Wilson is hardly the only writer to recycle good bits from earlier books, but it seems to work much better for him than for most others who spring to mind. Like Faulkner, his novels share a fictional world—an imagined version of Coalfield, Tennessee, features in all of them—and ideas about family and imagination and the making of art are always present. Still, each new novel feels different from the last, standing on its own and following its own path, despite the clear family resemblance. 

“At the heart of everything, mostly what I write about is domesticity,” he says. “That’s just what I am. And mostly what I write about is: How do you create a space that will hold the people that you love and let them leave when they need to?” 

For Wilson, whose two children with his wife Leigh Anne Couch are reaching the age of leaving home, these questions feel especially urgent. It’s not a surprise that he’s worrying about the notion of endings, reinventions, and family dispersal. “So many of my books kind of hit at the same time where I am actually experiencing some of those things,” he says. “Perfect Little World was [published] when we had a baby. I wrote a book about kids catching on fire [Nothing to See Here] when we had little kids.” 

For Run for the Hills, he says, he tried to put himself into the mind of Charles Hill, a serial abandoner of the children he partially raised to share in his own obsessions—writing, farming, basketball, and independent filmmaking. Wilson could imagine some of it from his own experience: “Every parent’s terror is, ‘What would happen if I died? What if I left this world and my children at a stage when it’s so crucial to be there [for them]?’” he says. As his own kids have grown older, he adds, he played with questions like: What if I had done things differently? 

“My kids are at the age where they’re about to leave us,” he says. “And one of the things I wanted to figure out was, ‘Can I write a story about a journey that leaves a trail that [allows you to] get back to where you started?’” 

Wilson now lives with his family in the same county where he grew up. In his memory, childhood in a small town in rural Franklin County, Tennessee, made him dream not of escape but of a way to somehow blend his love of reading and writing with the world he already knew and loved. 

“My dad was an insurance salesman for the Farm Bureau,” says Wilson. “He would take me to the chicken farms and the soybean farms and dairy farms. And one of the things I was really interested in is how much of yourself you have to put into that enterprise, and how you can’t be guaranteed a return.” 

Wilson’s two children have inherited his interest in the land and what can come of it when it’s properly nurtured. One of them, he adds, “has really gotten into food and food scarcity and farming, and he’s been taking [food-related] workshops at this place called Sequatchie Cove Farm” in nearby Sequatchie, Tennessee. “I just love the people there,” he says. “It’s a family that has been running it, and they bring back heirloom grains. It’s just a really cool place. And I just thought, ‘I love the idea of: Where do you put this energy? You put it into the ground that you’re standing on.’” 

The two oldest siblings in Run for the Hills are a writer and a farmer. The farmer, Madison Hill—she goes by Mad; all her siblings have nicknames—works alongside her mother to run the organic farm her father started in the 1980s, when she was a young girl. Now it’s a Saturday destination for its road-stand eggs and home-crafted cheeses. She’s given to quoting a line from her father’s favorite novel, O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (“I’ve been very lonely, Carl”), one of the few things he left her when he moved out before she turned ten. 

Mad is just the latest in a long line of female characters to have played leading roles in Wilson’s novels. When I ask him about his facility with inhabiting a female character’s point of view, Wilson is characteristically humble while pointing out that he does tend to favor a certain kind of woman to write about—mostly the sort of super-competent women who are able to remain unbothered when coping with the men in their lives, often chaotic or befuddled brothers. It is perhaps for this reason the new novel is dedicated to his sister, Kristen. 

But he also says that centering women helps make him a better writer. “At an early start of writing, I was like, ‘Could I gain distance from the reader just by making this female instead of male?’ That gives me the distance to know that [it’s not simply] autobiographical, and that frees me up on the page.” 

There’s another aspect of writing women well, he adds. “In a lot of these stories that I’m writing, the female perspective works for me partly because these are characters that have been denied so much.” And when you can create a character who wants more than she can get, that’s how to make a story work. “If I can figure out desire—what does this person want and what are the constraints that are making it difficult to get that thing they want?—then hopefully I can build the character well enough that the audience and the reader believes. And this is the thing: It’s the relationship with the reader.” 

Unlike his novels, all of which feature strong female voices and a woman’s point of view, Wilson’s short stories, collected in two books—Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (2009) and Baby, You’re Going to Be Mine (2018), both published by Ecco—mostly center male main characters. “My novels tend to be a little floatier and lighter and tend to have female main characters,” he says, “whereas my short stories tend to be darker and have boys as the main characters. Anne [Patchett, one of Wilson’s closest writing friends] and I used to talk about this a lot where I was like, novels are girls and short stories are boys for me. But what’s tended to happen is now my novels are getting shorter and my stories are getting longer.” 

Whether the two will swap places is a question that intrigues him. It’s “a nice moment of instability” right now, Wilson says. A story he’s writing about “boyhood, masculinity, sexuality in the Deep South,” might be stretching from a short story into a novel. “These things that I kept separate are becoming one and the same, whether I like it or not.” 

Growing up, Wilson says, “I was lonely in my head,” but he had friends. “We all loved basketball, we all loved music and movies.” Despite their shared interests, though, he felt at a distance from even his closest friends. “There was this weirdness in my brain that I couldn't tell anyone about, that was just constantly misfiring and malfunctioning. And so that always made me feel slightly outside.” 

Tennessee during Wilson’s childhood was home to an extraordinary dynasty, the Lady Vols of the University of Tennessee, coached by Pat Summit. “Chamique Holdsclaw, Tamika Catchings—I just loved them,” Wilson says, naming the players on that basketball team at the time. “And I think part of it was that I was such an isolated kid, and I really loved the idea of what it would be like to depend on other people and know that you succeed only if they succeed, how that kind of camaraderie could be so helpful.”

In Run for the Hills, one of Mad’s late-found siblings is Pep, short for Pepper, who plays basketball at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s weird,” he adds, “never has there been an advantageous time to have a book with women's basketball in it until this very moment, honestly. But it makes me happy.” As for his own b-ball prowess, he demurs. “My timidity on any court was just never going to let me succeed. I was so terrified at every moment of making a mistake.” 

Instead, he was an avid reader as a boy. “The library was such an incredible thing to me, and my parents never restricted what I read,” he says. And he and his friends used to haunt the video store—Action Video in Winchester, Tennessee—searching for strange movies nobody else had seen. “I would go to video stores for hours and just get anything,” he says. “And it was one of those ways that I could learn storytelling.”  

But he didn’t really start writing until high school, when a summer program called Governor's School for the Humanities, he says, “kind of changed my life.” It was a place where he could be weird and succeed, even if the story he remembers writing there—“about a boy who was in love with a stuffed animal”—was not well-received. He was seventeen. The next year Wilson went to Vanderbilt for college, where he felt he was far behind everybody else. 

Then, in his sophomore year, he took a creative writing workshop with Tony Earley, who was also new to Vanderbilt. “I had never heard of him or read him, but I just kind of imprinted on him,” says Wilson. “He was so helpful, so lovely. He was the first person who said, ‘If you want to do this, I think you could do it.’ And I was wanting somebody to tell me that, and I just took it and ran.” 

He graduated with a degree in creative writing and a minor in Women’s Studies, a field he fell into as a reader of literature by women. “I can’t stress enough how far behind I was,” says Wilson. “I was really struggling, and Karin Westman, a graduate student at the time, took an interest in me. And she said, ‘Next semester I’m teaching “Intro to Women’s Studies.” You should take it.’ I took it. I really loved it.” 

Women’s Studies took Wilson to Harvard and a job at the Graduate School of Education, working as an assistant to Carol Gilligan. It was his only time living outside of the South, and he was alone, living in a rented room near Harvard Square. Although he often felt lonely, there were wonderful parts of his time there, Wilson recalls. “It was radically exciting, having access to those libraries. I can’t stress enough that to be able to go to Widener Library and get any book that I ever wanted to read, any novel, any short story collection, was insane and so wonderful.” 

After Harvard, Wilson moved back south, eventually going to the University of Florida in Gainesville for his MFA, where the faculty included Padgett Powell, another mentor, another fan of “language and absurdity.” While there Wilson wrote “a magical realist novel about baseball that was not very good,” he says, but the years there were wonderful. He worked summers at the Sewanee Writers Conference, where he met Couch. 

“It was good to be back in the South,” he says. “I felt like I was on the precipice of what would come next, whatever my life was going to be, and I just wanted to get closer to my family and where I had come from.” 

Still, he’d always known he was a little different, but it was only later in life, in 2006, that he found out why: He was diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome. “When I get nervous, I get very ticcy, I make lots of weird sounds, but it’s mostly repetition and recurrence, saying the same phrases over and over,” Wilson says. “A lot of recurring, unwanted thoughts. It’s just the way my brain works.” 

It took a long time to get the diagnosis, but he doesn’t fault his family for that. “My parents are the loveliest people,” he says. “They would drive me to a psychiatrist in Nashville, an hour and a half away, every week. They did everything they could, and I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t.” 

“I’ve always been really supported and loved by everybody I’ve come into contact with,” Wilson adds. “But even with all of that, there was always this deeper, darker uncertainty of my brain and my body that made me unstable. So now I just have to figure out how to manage it. And writing is one of the main ways that I manage it.” 

Writing fiction has become, he says, one of the best ways to harness the energy of his brain’s habit of working overtime. “And it’s more that I have recurring thoughts. My brain’s just always on the loop. It’s not good. It’s not a great thing to have. But for writing, it’s been helpful. Writing in some ways was the way for me to be like, ‘Oh, you can actively take these recurring things, and each time they recur you can lessen the impact simply by placing it in this fictional landscape and seeing what happens.’” 

To this day, when anyone asks Wilson what he does for work, he says he’s a teacher. “I never say writer,” he says. He loves that his work allows him to talk about the craft of fiction with people who are similarly invested in it, and that it forces him to read new work. And it lets him be that person Tony Earley was for him: someone to say to a student, You could do this, if you wanted to. 

Just as John Irving has his bears and his wrestling, Wilson has basketball and Pop-Tarts, recurring motifs. Partly it’s that he loves both of them, and partly, he says, Pop-Tarts “feel emblematic of feral childhood. So much of what I’m writing is like, ‘What happens if you thought you were this dirtbag kid who came from nowhere? What are the touchstones that signify how you got from there to here?’” And even a toaster snack can become one of those threads that connect us. “My books, I hope, are for everyone. But ultimately there are those little things in the stories where I’m just like, ‘Do you remember what it was like that the only way you could communicate with another person was just like, What is your favorite flavor of Pop-Tart?’”

Becoming a father has changed his writing rhythm, Wilson says. “I used to write all the time as much as I could. It was just frenetic, and it was obsessive,” he recalls. “But then you start to realize that in the real world, you’re building a life, and you marry someone, and you have kids, and those things take priority. Writing is never going to take precedence over the bedrock real things in my life.” 

He can go days or even weeks without writing, although he’s always working on fiction in his imagination. “In times when it’s quiet, my brain’s racing,” Wilson says. “I just start going over and over it again forever until I figure it out. I can’t think of a more calming thing than running through the limitless possibilities for the story until one clicks. It’s not necessarily that it’s the best idea or the worst idea, it’s just that once I make that choice, it clicks.” And when he’s figured it all out, those days of writing go very, very fast. 

“My wife and I have a rule that each of us goes away to write, and twelve days is the most you can be away. So I just hold it in my head until those twelve days come and then I write so fast, I mean as fast as I can possibly go.” While working on Nothing to See Here, once that writing time came Wilson holed up and “basically [wrote] the novel in ten days in a cabin.” 

He allows that this may be in part why his novels have been short, but he also thinks that for the kind of work he likes to write—“that balance of humor and sadness” with a “weird conceit” at its heart—a short form is what works best. Some of his favorite novels are short, like Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Viking Press, 1962), or Carson McCullers’s A Member of the Wedding (Houghton Mifflin, 1946).

After five novels and two story collections, Kevin Wilson is still working the same territory he always has: “What’s our responsibility to the people who made us or that we made?” Sometimes it’s biological family, and sometimes it’s found family. In Run for the Hills, he was able to do both—“what if your biological family is your found family?”—and that allowed him to ponder the thing at the heart of everything: “I think about the threads that connect you to other people. And so what would it mean to have all these threads that you’ve never once felt thrumming? You’ve never felt the tightness of that thread connecting you to that person, but they’ve been there the whole time. And that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, this will be fun. I can work with this.’”

A former president of the National Book Critics Circle, Kate Tuttle is a freelance writer and editor. 

EXCERPT

Strange people often came to the farm, but they tended to be late risers, so Mad knew the first few hours would be easy. Starting at 7:00 a.m. every Saturday, the Running Knob Hollow Farm’s roadside stand welcomed their weekly regulars, people who lined up for the kind of food that Mad and her mom, Rachel, grew and gathered and made and sourced. Sine they’d been featured in magazines like Bon Appétit and Southern Living, the organic eggs sold out in less than an hour, as well as the week’s offering of produce and fruit. The cheeses, which were her mother’s domain, a few varieties that people swore by, would go next. By 10:00, the people who arrived at the farm had to make do with whatever was left, talking themselves into the possibility that, even though they’d hoped to have a dozen eggs and some escarole, maybe they actually wanted half of a lamb. Did they want half a lamb? Mad could usually talk them into it, these people slightly dazed by the sunlight, possibly hungover from the night before. It all happened without having to think much about it, money changing hands, people talking, a little community. But by 11:00, with only an hour before closing? That’s when weird things happened. 

Mad swept the floor, took stock of what was left, rearranged some garlic bulbs. “I’ve been very lonely, Carl,” she said to herself, one of the last sentences in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, a line that always occurred to her when she was the slighted bit tired or inconvenienced. 

O Pioneers! Was one of the few works of fiction that her father had liked, preferring Old Farmer’s Almanac and Wendell Berry essays, and he read the book to her when she was nine years old. Just before he left her and her mother twenty-three years ago, ran out on them, never to return. 

Sometimes she thought if she ever met a nice guy named Carl, she’d marry him just so she could say the line to a real person. But there weren’t any Carls I this little valley in Tennessee, not many Carls left in the United States, she figured. And, honestly, she wouldn’t have married him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to marry anyone, but it would be nice to have a handsome farmhand named Carl to who she could say this line at the end of every day. And then they’d go to their own rooms, alone, independent. 

“You’re married to the earth,” her mother once said, more to herself than to Mad, as if consoling herself that she might never have grandchildren. “Do you think that’s right, Madeline? That you’re married to the earth?”

“God, Mom,” Mad had said, “no. There just aren’t many cool dudes out here.” Mad was thirty-two now, and she realized that her mom at that age was about to have her husband disappear and leave her with a young girl and a farm to run. Mad had avoided being left, she supposed, by not having anyone arrive. 

From Run For the Hills by Kevin Wilson Copyright © 2025 by Kevin Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.