“Camera Lake” is a fitting title for a new collection of short stories by Wisconsin-born author Alex Pickett. He might be the last person to realize that.
The title story of the collection, published this month by the University of Wisconsin Press, describes a Wisconsin man who begins to believe that someone is secretly filming his cabin from across the lake. “Camera Lake” also thematically resonates with Pickett’s moving and funny stories, which reveal the unique perspectives of his characters.
Plus, the combination of the two words “camera” and “lake” sounds so great.
Pickett, who has lived in London since 2017, initially gave a different name before his partner looked over his shoulder and realised the file was named “cameralake”.
“She’s a film professor and has great taste,” Pickett said. “I said, ‘But that’s not the actual title,’ and she said, ‘Well, that’s the way it should be.'”
“These two words don’t automatically make sense when you see them together, but there’s still something about perspective and clarity that applies.”
Whereas Pickett’s first novel, “The Restaurant Inspector,” was a laugh-out-loud satire about a hapless government agent dealing with a small-town panic, the stories in “Camera Lake” favor emotion over humor. In the opening story, “Practice,” a high school football coach punishes his players by confiscating their cell phones and forcing them to text their fathers, “I love you.”
In “Perfect Nonsense,” an elderly woman goes along with her grandson’s pranks by saying random things to a toll booth attendant, and in “Pharaoh,” a father quits his job and embarks on a bizarre get-rich-quick scheme that includes sending unsolicited slogans to the Ford Motor Company.
“When I set out to write the novels, I wanted them to be funny,” Pickett says, “but I think that focusing too much on funny would make the stories too light. These stories are sharper, more moving, and they use humor to lighten some of the lightness.”
Wisconsin-born author Alex Pickett currently lives in London where he teaches writing.
University of Wisconsin Press
“Pharaoh” is based on stories Pickett heard about his paternal grandfather, and many of the stories in “Camera Lake” are inspired by family lore. “Perfect Nonsense” is a tribute to Pickett’s brother and Found Footage Festival co-creator Joe Pickett, who encourages people to say strange things.
“Every time I go through a toll booth, he has this guy who’s just trying to do his job say something weird to me,” Pickett said. “It’s a fun challenge to take something like that and make it into a story, because it’s not a story. It’s just a waste of time.”
Other works draw on Pickett’s past jobs, including working as a winter ranger in an Alaskan park more than a decade ago, which he said left him at a crossroads: whether to make a living as a writer or give it up for something more stable.
“I was in a cabin with no running water,” he said, “and I thought, ‘Okay, if I’m not going to stay here and write, then I’m just going to give up because I don’t have anything else to do.'”
“Luckily, I wrote. I’m sure it wasn’t very good, but I kept writing.”
All of the stories in Camera Lake have been published within the past ten years, but Pickett has revised them all extensively for this collection, and revisiting the old stories has been a real pleasure.
“A lot of the stories are about characters trying to figure out what they want,” Pickett says. “When I wrote the stories, I didn’t necessarily know what they wanted. Now, after a few years of living in them, I’m revisiting stories I thought I’d never return to, and I think I know what they want, even if they don’t know yet. And, at least indirectly, I’m able to bring that into the story.”
Pickett teaches writing in London and will return to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks this summer. He has no “Camera Lake” readings scheduled for Madison, but he will do an event at Boswell Books in Milwaukee on Aug. 6.
He is about to start work on his next novel, which he plans to fund through his doctoral program.
“I’m going to be working with a novelist and a neuropsychologist,” he said. “My dad has memory loss, which is a fairly common condition but not much is written about, so I’m thinking about doing something with a character who has that condition, and it’s set in Wisconsin.”