Ghosts on a Landscape

Author photo by Jennifer Yin.

Karolina Waclawiak in Conversation with Colin Winnette

Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay is a superb, sweeping western full of ghosts looking for a place to land. Winnette escapes easy classification with his fifth book, building a world that falls somewhere between Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, while rearing a singularly haunting bastard child all his own. We sat down at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, in front of an audience, to talk about Winnette’s take on traditional westerns, how his childhood in Texas influenced him, and just what his unforgettable characters are looking for.

—Karolina Waclawiak

I. SOMEWHERE ON THE HORIZON

KAROLINA WACLAWIAK: Your book was labeled an “acid western,” was that an intention of yours, or was it a marketing thing?

COLIN WINNETTE: It was a marketing thing. I mean, I think it’s a descriptive label, and useful, but I was really hesitant around the idea of even calling it a Western. While it’s definitely very interested in and dependent on westerns, there are so many parts of “The Western” that this book just completely throws away, or looks at very obliquely. I really just plucked out the parts of The Western that I was interested in fucking around with. And I guess it’s a kind of trippy book…

KW: Have you ever done acid?

CW: I’ve never been clear on how it works about publicly speaking about taking drugs…

KW: It’s fine.

CW: Alright. I’ve taken acid. I didn’t particularly like it. I’ve taken other hallucinogens that I liked much more. Acid was very, uh, it was too lucid of a trip for me. Even though I was seeing all this crazy shit I was like, ah, man, you’re just on acid. I want to forget that I’m on a drug, which is why alcohol is sort of preferred.

KW: That’s funny because I only took acid once as well, and it was horrible. And I kept saying, ‘When am I going to stop being on acid?’

CW: That’s the other thing. It lasts for fucking ever.

KW: Yeah, it was like three days, and I had to take an airplane.

CW: Three days?!

KW: It felt like three days. But it triggered long-lasting anxiety attacks, so it was really like ten years or maybe forever. I was at a rave in Oakland. On Halloween.

CW: Were you taking acid all throughout the night?

KW: I was candy-flipping.

CW: I have no idea what that is.

KW: That’s taking acid, a liquid acid, and ecstasy. And then I had to fly home...