Guest Judge Jim Shepard chose Michael Hughes Wesner’s “The Big Reboot” as the third place winner in this 2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers. Read the story here, and then check out this interview in which Wesner talks about the relationship between humor and deflection, the human preoccupation with physical appearance, interrogating a character’s intentions, and more!
At one point, the main character says of his wife, “I do as she asks, but my mind fixates on it, the border where real me meets fake me,” which I think gets to the central question the story grapples with: Is our identity made up of how other people see us, or is it only how we see ourselves? Without giving too much of the story away, where do you think the story ultimately lands?
I think there are signs, especially toward the story’s conclusion, that contradict this, but my inclination is that the story suggests our identities are generated by self-perception. (For better or worse.) I’m very morbidly fascinated by the mind’s often twisted relationship with the body—particularly in how one’s obsessive preoccupation with their own physical flaws (either real or perceived) can be impenetrable to even the most generous feedback. It doesn’t matter how many people inform our main character of his newfound beauty; his overwhelming discomfort with his artificial appearance prevents him from enjoying his second chance at life, much to the frustration of those around him.
Another question the story asks is: If you could start over, would you? This is a pretty heavy question, and yet the tone of the story is light. Can you talk a little about your use of humor to either enhance or deflect the pathos of the story? Did the voice and tone of the piece come naturally or was it a case of paring back in some places and layering on in other places.
Can I first say that I’m relieved to hear that the humor is working? Humor is such a bedrock for my work, but it can sometimes act as a crutch, supporting a lackluster narrative. In this case, the tight, sarcastic voice of the narrator came about very naturally. He simultaneously expresses an almost childlike wonder at this new head while also harboring conspiratorial reservations against the very people responsible for reviving him. That double-barreled tone was extremely fun to write in, constantly ping-ponging between “Ooo, how do these new ears work?” and, “My wife has forsaken me.”
To answer your question, I think the humor is an enhancement via deflection. (Is that a cop-out…?) I’ve spent a lot of time considering what my professor, Kellie Wells, calls the idiosyncratic first-person, wherein a narrator urgently hyperbolizes in an attempt to deflect from meaningful self-reflection. I think the humor in “The Big Reboot” functions similarly. Either via memory loss or the suppression of trauma, our narrator cannot engage with his interiority. So, he deflects, leaning into sarcasm and paranoia and blame. The story came about quickly once that tone was established. In each ensuing scene, I kept asking myself: “What is this guy hiding? What is he misremembering?”
I found myself not trusting the doctor or Jenny (or the pastor, to some extent) because their motivations seemed to be driven by selfishness—the doctor to perform this ground-breaking surgery and Jenny to re-invent a husband into someone “better.” Do you see them as a kind of moral foil to the main character, or are their motivations more complicated than that?
It’s difficult to say! From the narrator’s tortured perspective, my knee-jerk reaction is the same as yours: to be absolutely distrustful. But maybe there’s an even more interesting, more terrifying story out there from Jenny’s perspective. “Why won’t my pain-in-the-ass husband stop trying to tear his own head off???” Something like that.
I’m a bit of a naive sap, so I would hope that the characters orbiting our newly-headed protagonist have pure-hearted ambitions and are simply incapable of looking beyond themselves. Jenny wants to save her husband, the doctor wants to perfect this life-saving procedure, and Nate wants to protect his own deeply insecure son. What’s the problem with making the protagonist a little more handsome in the process? Perhaps, in another world, our narrator was a looksmaxxer prior to the accident, and, to his family’s delight, he fully embraces this attractive prosthetic. (“Hey, look at my new chiseled jaw and perfect hairline! I’m cured! I’m cured!”) I doubt there’s much of a story there, but still.
What does your writing routine look like? Are you a writer with a dedicated block of time, or are you more in the camp of writing whenever you can?
I am a writer with a dedicated block of time who commits frequent and depraved acts of infidelity on said block of time. I write best with absolute quiet and three cups of strong coffee. To write at any other time complicates those prerequisites, so I try desperately to be a morning writer. But the morning is also when the cat needs breakfast and the dog needs to pee and the recycling needs going out and the emails begin to arrive. So sometimes my writing comes sporadically, cannibalizing my afternoons and evenings.
And lastly, what are you working on now?
I’m working on two—count ‘em, two!—books. The first is an absurd tragicomic novel, titled Life Enders, which follows a cancer patient whose young life is thrown into mortal disarray after an incompetent oncologist loses the results of his life-saving surgery. With no clue whether his cancer is spreading or cured, he spirals into a self-grieving, existential mess. Similar to “The Big Reboot,” the tone is suspiciously jovial, and the narrative likewise blossomed from my own paralyzing distrust of medical institutions.
The second is a collection of comedic, speculative stories, much like this one, all of which merge literary realism with some element of sci-fi, magic, and satire. Weird, but not too weird. A Goldilocks level of weird—or so I hope.
Interviewed by Jen Dupree