During the 2008 financial crisis, I worked on Wall Street. I didn’t work on Wall Street in the sense that I spent my days bundling ugly mortgages or evaluating the risks arising with the repeal of Glass-Steagall or plugging holes in Lehman Brothers’ leaky dam with my thumbs. No, I worked on Wall Street, a stretch of brickwork laid in Lower Manhattan, where I dragged myself to a nondescript office a few stories above the New York Stock Exchange, spending my days reading words that died upon my tongue. Such was where I’d somehow landed in my late thirties, and such were the labors necessary to produce some of the last of the dying daily ink in the financial news industry, that little newsletter we printed on genuine paper covering private equity and bankruptcy, venture capital and M&A, all of it spoken through gargantuan dollar figures, outlandish sums of money that could leave my head reeling. The job did offer quite a view, though, if you weren’t afraid of the heights: Here was where I watched the big gears turning behind the country’s private-sector economy. Here was the money changing hands among companies and investors and law firms at such a furious pace it all became a blur. And here were the 1% fat cats getting even fatter, while I was taking a pay cut just to keep all of us on staff and out of the breadlines. When I worked in that office, it sometimes seemed to me, it was as if I’d traveled on a rocket ship to some cold, dark, distant planet—and I just wanted to find my way home.
So what sort of apprenticeship, one might ask now, for perhaps this is an origin story, was this for an aspiring novelist? Simply put, it wasn’t one. I’d learned much about the trade of fiction long ago, and I’d flat-out stopped writing by the time the housing bubble popped. Having gotten the bug back at UMass in Amherst in the early ’90s, then receiving my MFA at Cornell before the turn of the millennium, I’d quit with fiction by the time I’d picked up a dictionary to finally figure out just what in the hell was a “stalking horse” bid. And, yes, I’d seen some successes with my work. I’d published a dozen or so stories in journals like The Georgia Review and Glimmer Train Stories and The Massachusetts Review, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, taught college for a few years, even had a couple agents thinking maybe I was hot stuff—but now, once and for all, I was acknowledging that it was high time for me to stop with all that dreamin’, kid. And like many writers, I’d gone through this whole quitting bit before. The air leaks out of the balloon slowly, though, so I suppose in that office I still found myself thinking like a writer, leaving my eye naked, even if I didn’t set a single word to page. But I needed from time to time to remind myself that lunch was over now, kid. I’d brown-bagged it once again today, some cold sandwich and a piece of bruised fruit, my break taken outside on Wall Street, the Financial District humming like a hive about me. So yet again, I scraped myself off the steps of Federal Hall beneath its bronzed George Washington, then trudged back to my desk above the stock exchange, where I stared at a screen blinking with massive transaction after transaction, my soul wholly flown.
Sometime between Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy, I was finally, inevitably, mercifully laid off from that job. Laid off, one might ask now, for perhaps this is an origin story, why on earth did you stay so long, soul crushed, all that sad brown-bag lunch stuff, etc.? There’s an easy answer, and there’s a hard one. And since this is basically a three-paragraph theme you’re reading here (and we are already into the third), let’s go with the easy one: I am, if anything, a creature of routine. And like that job holding me in its clutches for so long, perhaps nothing more than the familiarity of writing off and on for more than twenty years brought me back into the fold. A few months of unemployment allowed me to finish a backburnered historical novel (rejection, rejection, rejection!), then start another book (my debut, Relic Light, a ten-plus year undertaking that’s forthcoming in Australia in 2025 from Transit Lounge). And because one thing often leads to another, the day after I’d finished Relic Light, I sat down at my regular writing time of four a.m. and began In the Riddle Sea, which will come out at Regal House in 2027. Fear not, dear reader, the book is not a chronicle of Wall Street (neither the financial markets nor the brickwork outside the NYSE), but it is perhaps at some level about the gross inequities in our country when the money tree is shaken. Set in the months between Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy (see what I did there?), In the Riddle Sea begins when Peter Fischer—a recent college graduate, DJ, and former occupier himself—takes a job as a healthcare attendant on the Upper West Side for a man named Benjamin, then quickly falls for Benjamin’s adopted daughter, Mamiko. And like those records Peter plays during his radio show, his world goes spinning as he eventually has to confront the death of his father after a career in a weapons testing facility in the Skylands of New Jersey. “Love will tear us apart again,” Joy Division’s Ian Curtis once sang. Peter drops the needle on it now. Perhaps you’ll tune in to listen.
A playlist from Peter on his radio show Touching From a Distance on WFNO, including tracks from Agitation Free, PJ Harvey, A Silver Mount Zion, Gang of Four, and Christian Löffler.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Brennen Wysong’s In the Riddle Sea in 2027.
