‘Camera Lake’ points and shoots at quirky Wisconsin characters

“Camera Lake” is the perfect title for Wisconsin-born writer Alex Pickett’s new collection of short stories. He might have been the last person to realize that.

The title story of the collection, released this month by University of Wisconsin Press, features a Wisconsin man who begins to believe somebody is secretly filming his cabin from across the lake. “Camera Lake” also resonates thematically with Pickett’s poignant, funny stories that reveal the distinctive perspectives of the characters.

Plus, the two words “camera” and “lake” just sound great together.

Pickett, who has lived in London since 2017, had given the story of a different name originally. Then Pickett’s partner leaned over his shoulder and saw the file name: “cameralake.”

“She’s a film studies professor and she has great taste,” Pickett said. “I was like, ‘it’s not the actual title though.’ And she’s like ‘Well, it should be.”

“It doesn’t automatically make sense when you see those two words together, and yet there’s something about perspective and clarity that fits.”

While Pickett’s first novel, “The Restaurant Inspector” was a laugh-out-loud satire about a hapless government worker dealing with a small-town panic, the stories in “Camera Lake” put feeling ahead of humor. In the opening story, “Practice,” a high school football coach punishes his players by confiscating their phones and texting “I love you” to their fathers.

In “Perfect Nonsense,” an elderly woman goes along with her grandson’s pranks and says random phrases to tollbooth workers. In “Pharaoh,” a father quits his job and starts pursuing bizarre get-rich-quick schemes, like sending unsolicited slogans to the Ford Motor Co.

“Going into the novel, I wanted to be funny,” Pickett said. “But stories I think can be too light if they’re focused on being funny. These stories are sharper and more moving, and use humor to alleviate some of that.”

“Pharaoh” was based on stories Pickett heard about his paternal grandfather, and many of the stories in “Camera Lake” were inspired by family lore. “Perfect Nonsense” is dedicated to Pickett’s brother, Found Footage Festival co-creator Joe Pickett, who eggs other people on to say weird things to strangers.

“Every time we go through a tollbooth, he makes me say something weird to this person who’s just trying to do their job,” Pickett said. “It’s a fun challenge to take something like that and make a story of it, because that’s not a story. It’s just wasting time.”

Others are based on jobs that Pickett has had in the past, such as being a winter caretaker at a park in Alaska over a decade ago. It was at that job where Pickett said he came to a crossroads about whether he would pursue being a writer, or give it up for a more stable job.

“I was in a cabin with no running water,” he said. “And I was like, ‘OK, if I’m here and I don’t write, then I’m giving it up because I literally have nothing else to do.”

“Luckily, I wrote. I’m sure it wasn’t any good, but I just wrote the whole time.”

The stories in “Camera Lake” were all previously published in the last decade, but Pickett went back and did substantial revisions to all of them for the collection. The process of revisiting old stories was a real joy.

“A lot of the stories are about characters trying to figure out what they want,” Pickett said. “I think when I wrote them, I didn’t necessarily know what they wanted. Now living for a few more years, and coming back to stories I never thought I would come back to, I think I know what they want, even if they still don’t. And I can put that in, at least obliquely.”

Pickett teaches writing in London, and will be back in Wisconsin for a couple of weeks this summer. While he doesn’t have any readings of “Camera Lake” scheduled in Madison, he will be doing an event at Boswell Books in Milwaukee on Aug. 6.

He’s about to work on his next novel, which will be funded through a Ph.D. program.

“I’m going to work with a novelist and a neuropsychologist,” he said. “My father has a memory loss condition that’s pretty common, but not really written about. So I’m going to do something with a character who has that. It will also be based in Wisconsin.”