Calvin is a 23-year-old college student finding his way in the world for the first time and navigating what it means for him to have a voice. In the middle of it all, he finds himself with powers that have a consequence every time he uses them.
In Curse, Vash Wilson has created a world in which readers can sit back and reflect on how they would approach their choices, if they would, and what it means to live in a world full of both choices and consequences.
Resolute Magazine: For those who haven’t heard of Curse yet, and those who haven’t read it, what is Curse about?
Vash Wilson: Curse is about this run-of-the-mill college student, Calvin, and one day he has these powers awakened inside of him and it’s through a traumatic experience. And he’s told once he gets these powers “You can use them, but there’s a caveat. There’s a catch: Every time you use these powers, a little bit of your life expectancy is depleted. But, not only is it depleted, you do not know how much life you have left.”
So, Calvin has to wrestle with the choice of using his powers not only just for his own selfish gain, but also for those around him. Because he does run into some scenarios where the people that he loves, they need saving.
It’s a tale of choice. You can put yourself in Calvin’s shoes and try to get a feel for how you yourself would make these choices. If you would make the choice. You know? Because with the catch of the life depleting, would you make a choice? It’s one of those morally gray types of deals. That’s what we’re tackling in the book Curse.
RM: You’ve written this book. It was released on February 6th and you’ve been sharing BTS about the book on social media. But, also, you’re self-published. To start, why did you name the book Curse?
Vash Wilson: I named it Curse because I look to look at how the story is and how the character and how the twist on the whole power thing is. I was trying to figure out “What could I name it that’s straight to the point?” Something that’s creative, but also that’s straight to the point, that’s not like “What could this mean?” or “What could that mean?” Like, when I tell you the description of it, you know, it jumps at you like “Okay. So it’s a curse.” It’s not like… it’s cool, yeah, because you have powers and everything but it’s consequences. You know what I mean?
Mmhmm.
And, I wanted to separate myself from, like, the normal genre of, you know, superhero-type things. Because with those you’ve got like an Avengers type of event and the city is left in ruins and they go home and eat pizza. You know what I’m saying?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There’s no real responsibility on them for using their powers and whatnot. But, for this, it’s flipped. It’s “No, you got responsibility. But not only for everything around you, but for your life in general too.”
RM: So, in the book, what are some themes that will pop up for the reader?
VW: Um, I feel like an important one is choice. I feel as though a lot of times we don’t move on things. We decide to sit in the middle or on the sidelines, even in the story of our own lives. Because we don’t want to take that chance at failing. We don’t want to disappoint anybody. But, I feel as though you have to not be on the sidelines. You have to make a decision. At the end of the day, every choice you do or don’t make has a consequence.
I think just playing around with them, is something that everybody could connect to. Especially with the main character because the main character’s in college. And even if you haven’t [gone] to college, you’ve been at that age where you’re tryna figure stuff out. You’re tryna see what works. Maybe your whole childhood people were saying “Hey, go to college. Get a degree. Get married. Have kids.” Like that whole American Dream type of deal. What a lot of people don’t really tell you is that it don’t work out that way. At least not as easy as it seems to work out that way. And, that might not even be what you want.
That’s all going back to, like, the theme of choice. You’ve got a choice to make. And Calvin, the main character, he has a choice to make since he has these powers now. Whether he wants them to have an impact on his life to where he could use them to better his family, his friends, or his community, or he just doesn’t want to use them.
RM: With this book, you talk about consequences. What are some of the consequences that Calvin, the main character, finds himself having to face?
VW: He has a few consequences. The ones I can talk about without really spoiling anything, like I said in the beginning, he has these powers–a little bit of his life expectancy is depleted every time he uses them. So a consequence is, “Okay. If I saved this woman from getting robbed on the streets, from getting mugged, cool. But, how much did that just cost me?”
Then it becomes a thing of morals. Because you can have some good standing ideas and good intentions of doing the right thing, but then you have to ask yourself “Okay. What happens if I do get married down the line? If I do have kids. Did I just take off a year that I would be having to spend with my kids?” You know?
Then, there are also consequences of how is he going to explain this to people. Because I set up the world of Curse, it’s not like the regular superhero world where people are aware there are people with powers, you know? So, just him having to deal with “Who can I tell? Who can I not tell? How much am I willing to go through before I’m able to tell somebody?” Having that inner fight within himself because all of these things are happening at the same time and it’s a little bit traumatic. Especially, how he gets his powers. So, for him, it’s a solo fight for a while. He has to figure out, like, do I want to jeopardize the safety of everybody around me including myself by letting them know what’s going on with me?
RM: As far as world-building, you set up a superhero story in Chicago. I know you’re from Chicago. Did that influence that? Or was it more “Yeah, I’m from Chicago, but I haven’t read many stories where superheroes exist here?”
VW: Reading books as a kid, even reading comics and watching cartoons, there were a lot of cities where they were made up or if they were real–they weren’t Chicago. Mostly New York, LA, and Philadelphia–the bigger cities. The more popular cities at the time. And, I always wanted Chicago to be at the forefront of something.
So, like, Batman films–the last decade they were filmed in Chicago. That’s cool. I get that. But as far as me reading and actually being able to get a feel of Chicago and some of the settings and just being able to see that, I thought that that was important for me. To not only see my city reflected in a certain light but also to see the characters and how they navigate in the city of Chicago.
RM: For the main character, you said we have the choice of sitting on the sidelines or just getting to it. Is there a time when Calvin notices he’s sitting on the sidelines of his own life and made the choice not to continue to do so?
VW: It goes back to what I was saying about consequences. There’s a certain place in the book where he looks at the consequences of his actions. Because… this isn’t like your average superhero-type story. There’s no super-armor. There’s no Iron Man like, you know things like that. It’s real. There’s no Disney-type of movie. The consequences are real. They are dire. People can die, you know, in the blink of an eye. And I think Calvin gets into these situations where he looks at the gravity of everything.
It’s one thing to sit there and say, “Okay, I’ll help out some. I’ll use my gifts sparingly.” It’s a whole ‘nother thing when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun and you have to really have that conversation in your head that’s like, “What am I doing? This isn’t some video game where I can respond 5 minutes later. This isn’t some made-up world. This is real life. I could die by just tryna play a superhero. By just tryna save people.”
It goes back to what I was saying before is there really a bad answer to the question of “Is it a good thing for him to use his powers or not?” You know? It wrestles with that.
RM: For Calvin and his powers, you talk about a lot of that risk of cost. Every time he uses his powers, his life expectancy drops. How did you reach that for this character?
VW: For him… So, I’m a poet. I like to utilize everything that I have in a certain project and this project just so happened to be a novel. I looked at him and his power, which isn’t something random that I just gave him. It’s specific because I wanted the character to be relatable. I wanted the character to be likable, obviously, but I wanted the character to be relatable.
I guess I could give it away it’s not that much of a spoiler. He has the power of, basically, persuasion… That’s his gifting on a basic level. So, I wanted that to go hand-in-hand with the fact that he is a college student still tryna figure it out. He never necessarily had a voice of his own and now he does. The problem is: He has the consequences of it. So, now, [Calvin] trying to navigate the fact that he has a voice in everything, now it’s a cost. It’s a bigger cost than he could have possibly imagined.
I came up with that whole thing for [Calvin] because I wanted him to be really relatable, but I also wanted people to see growth within him. By the time you get to the end of the book, you see a completely different person than you did at the start of the book. Somebody who’s not as timid or letting the wind blow and take him as he sees fit.
RM: In being a poet, did you notice if those skills lend themselves in writing this novel?
VW: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Starting at the basis of everything, I came out with my first poetry book in 2018. That set the groundwork for literally everything that’s going on today with the novel because I had to learn how to write the novel. I had to learn how to structure it. I had to learn how to go about self-publishing–all of those things.
I didn’t start from ground zero with Curse. Because I had that experience built on from my poetry book. Not only that, but from me writing poetry for years, I have a voice. As a writer, you try to find your voice and things like that. That’s something that I already had. It was easy for me to transfer that to the novel. The only thing that was really challenging is now it has to be something that everybody can get a hold to and understand. With poetry, it’s “I can write this and it can be abstract and I know the theme. I know why I wrote it. How I wrote it. And this is what I got from it.” But somebody else can go and they can take something completely different from it, which is fine because that’s how the poem relates to them. And there’s a connection between both of us. I can’t do that with a novel.
It has to make sense to everybody. I can’t just put something in there that’s like “Oh, man, that’s clever. That’s artistic. That challenges them to think.” Because then you’re reading and it’s like “This don’t make no sense. Why would he do that? Why would she do that? Why would they say that?”
Me being a poet definitely lent itself in writing this book and making it easier. So, I didn’t have to start at ground zero with everything.
RM: Getting into world-building… It’s always interesting to me, whether it’s a book about someone who has powers or someone whose moving to a new city, it’s interesting for me to see how that world is built. How did you do your research and the planning for building this world that Calvin is in?
VW: It’s something that I realized a few years prior because I was in the process of writing a novel before I kind of sort of shelved that and started writing my poetry book. So, I took a couple of writing classes and what I learned was that your world has to have rules. You can’t just make a world and do whatever you want with it. Even something as off the charts as something like Superman, right? He doesn’t have a weakness besides kryptonite, but you can’t just have him do anything. It has to be constraints on him, the world, and everything for it to be a good story. If not, you’re just writing to write. You know?
The first thing was, with Curse, that whole deal with the powers–that was the starting point. From there, everything else branched out. Because now it’s like these powers, they exist, with this catch. “Does everybody know about it? Or does a certain amount of people know about it?... So, now, how do I go about selecting who gets powers and who doesn’t get powers? Do I even want to explain that? How did the powers originate in the first place?” And it branched out from there.
For me the world-building was fun. Just coming up with different rules and different scenarios for the characters whether they could really like sink or swim.
RM: Having a self-published book, what did that process look like for you?
(laughing)
RM: You’ve been through it before with the poetry book.
VW: Awwwww, man.
RM: And I know that formatting and stuff is different between poetry and a novel… I know it can be a nightmare.
VW: Yeah.
RM: So, how’d it go, Fred?
VW: It… it was a pain in the butt to really do. Because even though I had already published a poetry book, it’s like I mentioned before, it’s not that big of an undertaking. I could write a poetry book in less than a year if I wanted to. Just sit down and hammer it out. The main thing is, it’s an expression of me. And I’m just hoping that it connects with people so people can read it and be like, “Oh, this is good poetry! I got this from it” or whatever. And that’s what it is. That’s simple. I know it may not sound simple, but it’s simple. It’s easy.
The novel on the other hand was different. I had to understand world-building. I had to go and look up what type of font and the spacing thing for a general fiction book. I had to research how long a novel is typical. How many words? This is all before me even really started to write it. Then, I had to go and do a little bit of research on self-publishing or publishing. And when I finally got to writing, it’s writing that thing out one time–one complete time–and then going back and changing things and doing drafts.
Yup.
The fact of the matter is I can’t really enjoy the book because I have seen it so many times. So many times over the course of the like last year and a half. It’s, like, I’m sick of looking at it. It’s like when you are cooking for people and it’s time for you to eat, I don’t want to eat my own cooking. It’s one of those things. I’m proud of it. I love it. But, I can’t consume it like everybody else can.
I had to go and do the formatting. I had to go and get an editor. Not cheap, by the way.
Nope. Not at all.
And it’s cool because the editor is, like, one of my good friends. So I was happy to like pay her her money. Didn’t ask for like a friend discount or nothing like that, paid her her money. So, that was cool but it was kind of one of those heart-sinking things of like “Oh. Okay. This is… this is a lot. I’m not even finished with it yet.”
I had done my drafts. But it’s different when you do your drafts and then you send it to an editor and they do their editing, and you gotta look at it and see what needs to be changed and altered. And you gotta figure it out. That’s a whole other set of drafts you got to do. Then, you gotta start looking into marketing. So, I really didn’t start marketing the book until 2 weeks [before release]. Which was a rookie mistake.
There was a lot of learning. A lot of re-reading, re-writing. I didn’t even mention the website. The website took me about 2 and a half days of trying to get it how I liked it. How I wanted it. I had to go and do a little photoshoot. I’m not–back when I was younger I used to be conceited, so, like if Instagram would have came out like 2009-2010, that would’ve been my app. Now, I’m an old grumpy man, no. I don’t wanna be taking pictures like that. It’s like, I get it. I understand it. Especially with me making reels and making skits like that–I’m having fun now, but at first it was like pulling teeth. Like me pulling my own teeth to do it. Those having fun with it, kudos to them because it’s a lot of work.
But, I’d do it all over again. It’s been a heck of an experience. I’m more comfortable on camera now. Just even going on Facebook Live and Instagram Live, that wasn’t something that I normally did. But, I challenged myself to go and do it as a form of promo and marketing.
It goes back to what I always say, in order to get comfortable you gotta get uncomfortable first. And there was a lot of uncomfortable things that I had to deal with in the writing process. And that’s just dealing with the writing process. I had a rough year last year.
Yeah.
My mom passed away last year. Four more relatives proceeded within the span of 6-7 months. On top of me writing this book. So, it was a lot. It was a lot. But it showed me what I was made of. What I am made of. To be able to push through and get this thing done. You know? Outside of dealing with all the loss of life last year, as far as the writing portion is concerned, I’d do it all over again.
RM: Final question: What made you want to write a novel?
VW: The initial one would be that when I was younger, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an astronaut before I realized that involved a lot of math. I already hated math, but they told me it involves a lot of math, and I was like “Whelp. That’s something that I’m not gonna get into.” So, my next big thing was writing because that’s something that I always loved. I always read these books, especially when I was younger– did they have Bluford Series books out there?
They may have. I don’t remember.
Because it was a bunch of Black authors like writing scenarios and things like that really targeted Black children or Black teenagers at that time as far as like family drama. You know, brother and sister in a gang. Somebody moves and they get into a rough high school or something and they gotta transition. All of those sorts of things.
Yeah. It sounds familiar.
Yeah. So, I read a bunch of those. I had a teacher that was really into challenging us to read. So, I read things like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
That was a good one.
It was. I read things like Monster.
Another good one.
Like, Scorpion. I read The Alchemist. So there was a lot of books that I read. The problem that I ran into was that I didn’t read anything that I really liked with the characters and people that looked like me. Because reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Monster, and Scorpion and things like that they were cool, those were great books, but the scenarios and things that they characters were dealing with were like “This is a lot. I see this a lot.” It’s almost kind of sad in a way because it was a lot. A lot of trauma and pain and I was like “Why can’t I read about a Black guy who kills a dragon or something?”
Exactly.
You know?! And I was like “Where can I find that book?” So, that’s what really motivated me. But, the more recent answer was I was in men’s fellowship, and some of the guys were talking–I was listening. And then the whole initial idea of Curse hit me. Like, have you ever just sat there and you were just minding your business and you just had like a grand idea just come out of nowhere. Like that’s what it was for me. So, I got the whole premise of having powers and life depletes and everything and I’m like “Okay.” And it was from God. It had to have been because I wasn’t thinking about it at all. So, I give all the credit to Him. But once I got that, I took the ball and I just started running with it.
I always wanted to write a novel, I just never knew necessarily what to write about.
And I think that was May 5, 2021. So, once I got that idea I went off with it. And that’s how we got here today with Curse. It was an idea that was fresh to me and interesting. And I knew what type of characters I wanted. I wanted a predominantly Black cast of characters. I wanted it to be something that yeah they gon’ have their issues, but it was gonna be uplifting. You know what I’m saying? Not any trauma-inducing things like that… I know I wanted to do something different. That really drove me to write Curse.
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Cover Illustration by Shawn Haliburton
Writer Bio:
Shonette Reed is the founder and editor of Resolute Magazine. The South Central LA native enjoys cooking, exploring, and reading a good book when she's not working.
