A Conversation with Ryan Call

[Ed Note: This interview was posted a couple of months back, but since Ryan is making some news, I figured it was timely to repost it today. Enjoy, and congratulations to Ryan!]

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Ryan Call’s debut collection, The Weather Stations, is forthcoming from Caketrain and if you haven’t pre-ordered it, you’re performing a disservice to yourself. Today, we talk with him about skyless worlds, what it’s like behind the scenes at HTMLGIANT, and what happens when our personal lies about the reality of our deaths begin to unravel.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What fires you up? What makes you sad?

I don’t really think of myself as being from anywhere. I was born on Hill Air Force Base in Utah, lived there for maybe a year or two while my father flew F-16s; my sister was also born there a year later, and then we moved to Maryland when my father left active duty to fly for the airlines. We lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, beginning the summer before my 6th grade; my parents still live there. Since then, I’ve lived in Memphis, northern Virginia, and now Houston, which seems to be the place that my wife and I have settled. I’m not a typical Air Force brat who can claim to have moved every year as a child, but I think it was enough to keep me from feeling sure of where I’m from. As a result, I’m from, probably, not a place, but a family.

Usually I feel pretty calm, though it still happens that I get intensely emotional about things. More often, I get happy in a calm way. This usually happens when I think about being with my wife, about hopefully living with her for a long time, about reading my favorite books, working on my writing, being with friends, my family.

I also get sad a lot. I get sad when I think about my childhood, not because I had a bad childhood, but because I’ve since left that world and cannot get back there. I’m very susceptible to nostalgic sadness, I suppose. Recently, I’ve been taken with random moments of sadness, which usually come about because I’ve somehow remembered that I will die, and my wife will die, and my family will die, and other people I love will die. I get sad when I think about that, about not being able to be with them. Something I wonder about, though, is how this sadness is a kind of anticipatory sadness; I’m frightened to experience how the emotion will shift once there’s physical cause for its existence in my body.

Does this anticipatory sadness influence your writing?

I think it does, but how it does, I’m not sure. I mean, if I had to examine an origin point for this anticipatory sadness, I’d say it was winter of my 5th grade year right before my school’s Christmas program. My father had recently returned from an exercise in Florida flying A-10s with the Maryland Air National Guard. His best friend, an F-16 pilot who he’d flown with in Utah, was killed in a mid-air collision. My sister, my mother, and I were decorating the tree that night when my father answered the phone and received the news. I did not understand, exactly, what had happened, but I knew that I should be sad for my father. I remember that we sat on the floor in our living room and everyone was very sad. I was sad too, but I think the important thing was that I was sad for my father.

I feel like much of my life since then has been directed towards one day understanding completely the nature of my father’s sadness at having lost someone he loved. I think that must certainly also influence my writing. How could it not? And this isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate happiness and so on, because I really do and I usually consider myself to be happy, but that only recently I’ve learned that I cannot shun sadness or try to avoid it, because the quality of my sadness directly influences the quality of my happiness.

In reading “The Architect’s Apprentice,” I was struck by how close that world was to collapse. I’ve been reading quite a bit of fiction lately that muscles up and functions through a sense of imminent disaster, but what struck me about your story was that the worst part of the disaster has yet to occur, or is happening now. Most of the fiction in this vein that I’ve read takes place post-cataclysm, so, despite the conclusion to your story, I find it more hopeful in that there are characters striving to repair that to which they cling. Is there a particular reason you position this story pre- or mid-disaster? What does that allow you to do that wouldn’t be possible in the aftermath?

I didn’t have any particular reason for setting the story pre-disaster. The story, as many of my stories do, I guess, came out of a length of words, in this case a first sentence, which I wrote and let sit until another sentence could attach itself to it. I suppose the imagery grew out of my trips to the Menil here in Houston, in which hangs a painting by Yves Tanguy called The Hunted Sky. This has been one of my favorite paintings to go and stare at, and I think much of that first paragraph is a response to that painting.

From there, I guess, it was a matter of adding more sentences to figure out how and what these piles were on the plain. They became pieces of the sky, and that, I think, led to the mounting disaster of the story.

In any case, I think the positioning of the story allows me to play with the different skies the apprentice encounters. Had the disaster already occurred, I don’t think the narrator could have dipped in and out of the different skies. Instead, he would exist in a skyless world, which actually sounds kind of neat too but isn’t a part of that story’s possibility now, I guess.

Another thing about “The Architect’s Apprentice” that intrigued me was the motion from universal concerns to the particular and individual. Initially, the apprentice talks about how the sky falling affects the city as a whole. There’s a sense of tragedy about these happenings as the events consume the lives of everyone, but as the story progresses that sense of tragedy narrows to individual pain, most dramatically after the loss of the Architect when the apprentice begins to consider what he’s lost himself, how he’s affected, till finally the world itself is neglected and forgotten as he takes solace in what might be construed as selfish concerns, especially when so much is at stake for the city-at-large. Do you think there’s a difference between those types of concerns, the tragedy of larger disaster versus the more private concerns of personal pain? Can one be ranked more important than the other? If so, why?

I feel uncomfortable trying to rank anything like the pain of public tragedy versus private disasters. I mean that I don’t feel one is more important than another, necessarily, though I know that there has been a greater loss of life in a public tragedy, such as an overwhelmed city, than the single life gone when a teenager loses his parents, so the amount of instances of pain is greater in the former. But I don’t feel that makes the pain of the grieving son any less important than the pain of a grieving city.

Is this a relativistic position that you’re taking?

I’m not sure. Perhaps it is. It’s still something that troubles me, to be honest, and I usually feel confused by my thoughts and feelings on the issue. I usually feel desperate when I think about this. I cannot be truly sure how my emotions, my pain and my happiness, parallel what others feel, but what I can do is examine my own feelings in light of public tragedy or others’ private disasters. I recognize that I’m supposed to feel sympathy for those affected, and I do, and I’m sad when I do, but it’s not until I somehow turn the prospect of that tragedy on my own life, try to anticipate it, replacing the others with myself and my life and loved ones, that I can begin to understand a little bit of what those directly affected are experiencing. Is this a selfish consideration? I suppose it is, yes, because it takes over the experience to a degree and makes it mine, however superficially. But it’s also the best way I have of trying to sympathize with others.

Do you think a text should try and sympathize with a reader? I’m thinking of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake here or perhaps the work of Christopher Higgs and Blake Butler wherein internal structures often support the work as opposed to typical emotional or cognitive bridges that a reader can easily cross. Does a story or a novel or a poem have any responsibility in presenting its content to a reader in an easily digestible manner? And if a work makes these concessions, what might that say about the reader?

I’m usually bad at answering questions like this because I’m scared of saying a text should or should not do something. But, my instinct here is to say, no, a text should not try and sympathize with a reader, nor does a story or a novel or a poem have responsibility to present content in an easily digestible manner. A text should be a text. A writer should be a writer. A reader should be a reader. I don’t know. I’m rarely thinking of these things when I write or read.

When I read, I usually try to trust that the author has the best of intentions. When I write, I hope that the reader trusts me. Really, I like what Gass says about his ideal reader in the preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country:

I am fashioning a reader for these fictions… of what kind, you ask? Well, skilled and generous with attention, for one thing, patient with longeurs, forgiving of every error and the author’s self-indulgence, avid for details…ah, and a lover of lists, a twiddler of lines.

His version seems to place great responsibility on the reader, asking him or her to accept the pleasure of the text. I find myself agreeing with this idea the longer I write and read, patiently losing myself in the texts that I enjoy, forgiving those I do not and moving on, and writing for a reader who wants my words to lead the way.

I should also quote Joseph Reed, who, in this interview, talks about what sorts of writing Caketrain is interested in publishing. I strongly admire this idea that from the language comes all else of a story, so it makes sense to focus on the language:

For us, the innovation in writing comes at the ground floor of words. We don’t ever want the language to simply convey a meaning or message. News stories, street signs and instruction manuals do that. That’s not what we’re looking for.

A news article makes concessions to expectations of genre. A street sign is easily digestible: STOP. Instruction manuals have responsibilities to help a consumer.

A story is free of the requirement to sympathize with a reader, in my opinion. A story should be, if anything should be something, language in vivid action and onward.

I like what you’re saying about the responsibility of story. It reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller,” where he basically talks about a story’s goal as being (my phrasing) to spur the production of meaning, not to actually mean anything itself. In fact, the more open-ended a story, the more power it has and its ability to persist is amplified.

Right, I like that. And yes, the story as a piece of art in the world, rather than as meaning in the world. “What is magic about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation.” Because a story has the freedom to simply be an object, a productive thing, if we consider resistance a kind of production, it can accomplish many different things, can spur the production of meaning. Regarding the internal structures versus emotional and cognitive bridges aspect of your question, I feel, honestly, that such a dichotomy is perhaps too simple when applied to Blake’s stories (unfortunately, I cannot speak about the writing of Christopher Higgs yet, nor have I read Finnegan’s Wake). I think what you see in Blake’s Scorch Atlas is a structure, certainly, but that structure really helps support both interesting language and emotional activity, thus spurring a reader to produce a meaning. The greatest example of this combination, in my opinion, is “Seabed,” which structurally follows a traditional and emotional quest narrative and creates that narrative through Blake’s peculiar language vehicles. I think it is the most strictly structured of all the pieces in the book, though it may not formally appear to be, in contrast to “Damage Claim Questionaire.” To me, “Seabed” grounds Scorch Atlas. All structures in Scorch Atlas revolve around “Seabed” and its emotional landscape. A father who has lost a child must leave his diseased town in the company of a young girl, only to find a home in the bottom of the sea? To me, that is a fairly traditional emotional drawstring to tug when building a story, and because of that it helps the reader to orient themselves within the greater, more complicated lost and found of Scorch Atlas. I originally told Blake that I thought “Seabed” should close the book, but now I understand why it appears exactly in the middle.

What’s it like being an editor and contributor of HTMLGIANT?

Now I tend to work behind the scenes at HTMLGIANT. Early in the site’s existence, I tried to post as often as I could, silly stuff and nonsense stuff and serious stuff, but we’ve since gathered a fresh and excellent group of writers to contribute to the site that I don’t think I’m needed up front. Instead, I try to pursue ads, get some reviews going, handle the emails, help Blake and Gene with whatever they need me to do. I’m usually behind on everything, but I do my best.

Working on HTMLGIANT has helped me become closer with some people whom I had originally admired from afar but now consider my friends, both contributors and readers/other members of the internet literature scene. I feel like if I needed help or if someone else needed help, there would be a large group of people who would provide that help unselfishly. I do think that working on HTMLGIANT has helped me also to understand how excited many people are about reading and writing, and I like knowing that I can access that excitement quickly when I’m feeling down.

Of course, there are also the usual internet spats and anxiety-inducing things that go with the scene, and these often affect me too, though I’m much better now at brushing them off. I have to constantly remind myself that I should understand how and why certain unhealthy internet things happen.

Do you understand that? Can you help me understand it?

When I interact online with others, by directly communicating with them or simply reading a thread in which they’ve been posted, I don’t have nearly the amount of context clues that I would had I been talking or sitting with them at a bar or something. Because of this, I have tried to learn other ways of figuring out what’s going on online. If it’s a person whom I haven’t read online before, then I usually treat them sincerely and try to understand the argument they’re making, even if I initially perceive it as a horribly mean thing to say. I think because online is tougher to understand what people are saying and how people are saying it, it’s more important for me to reserve judgment until I can get more information or until the other person clarifies his or her position. I try to go through this process as emotionless as I can, but I’m not always successful.

After some time reading and so on, I can get better sense from what different purposes commenters or posters write online. Being behind the scenes at HTMLGIANT is helpful, because I can also see anonymous commenters’ IP addresses, so I can always compare those and get a history of an anonymous reader’s comments as well. Once I know that, then I can interact with commenters or ignore/minimize their comments or even delete their comments.

What helps me in this process is that I try to be as patient as possible when reading the internet.

I usually tend to think that the majority of problems on the internet that we initially think are unhealthy are just a result of people not understanding or taking the time to understand each other. Why the mean stuff happens? I don’t know for sure, but if I can quickly figure out whether or not a commenter is trying to be disruptive (versus sincere and salty), then I can dismiss the comment from my mind.

Tell us something about HTMLGIANT that a typical reader might not realize.

I don’t want to make wrong assumptions about the typical HTMLGIANT reader, but I think one thing people might not understand about the site is that much of what is posted is not run through an extensive editorial process. Blake has invited writers to contribute because he trusts them and finds them interesting, but that’s usually the extent of the editing (besides any administrative or copy editing we do at the last minute). In other words, a contributor can post his or her opinion on the site, and often other contributors will disagree with the argument in the post. So, I would encourage readers to get to know the contributors as individuals rather than dismiss them as simply yet another HTMLGIANT writer. Our contributors are a diverse group, and they hold a variety of different opinions regarding art, literature, life, and so on.

You’re someone who comes to HTMLGIANT as an internet browser/visitor (essentially, someone tracked in our statcounter); what is your reaction to the site?

It took me a while to learn how to read HTMLGIANT. At first, I was reading in the hopes that I might connect with the group, become popular and internet-famous, and these were the wrong reasons to participate, I now understand. There wasn’t really anyone there that I aligned with in a literary way so those connection attempts didn’t work out very well. I ended up getting my feelings hurt and almost quit reading during Mean Week once, but then a couple of new contributors came online and HTMLGIANT’s voice took on new resonance, at least for me. I find Kyle Minor’s posts very informative and often eye-opening. I’ve also started reading Christopher Higgs’s posts with a different sort of attention and found there was a lot there to learn, even if I disagreed with much of his basic literary premise. Both of those guys have helped me grow as a writer. I’m also (slowly) growing in confidence and that has probably been the greatest contributing factor to me being able to cull what I need from the GIANT’s information stream without tripping on the bumpy bits. I suppose I’m developing into a selfish reader in that I only pay attention to the things that will benefit me and in doing that, I find HTMLGIANT highly rewarding.

Yes, growing self-confidence is important. So is being selfish. There’s so much to sift and sort through, that you have to be selfish, otherwise it’s easy to get lost or caught up in all that is unnecessary. Not that getting lost or caught up in the unnecessary is wrong, because sometimes you do, but you should try to do it under your own power.

What are you working on now?

I’m slowly writing on several projects: the first is a bunch of short stories, which includes the stories that have been published in Mid-American Review and New York Tyrant; then there’s the field guide to North American weather, on which my sister Christy is working with me; we also want to try to do some more stories like “Pocket Finger;” and then I’m picking at something that feels like it could be a novel.

Are you far enough along to tell us anything about the novel?

I don’t think I could tell you enough to really satisfy anyone. I mean, I’m still trying to figure it out. So far, it seems to have a lost aviator, flying machines, wrecked children, and gremlins. A four thousand word portion of it is forthcoming in Conjunctions this spring. But it’s been slow going recently. Very slow going.

Have you ever read a book that changed how you viewed the world or lived your life? If so, which one? Why?

I have a hard time thinking of books that have changed my life in a huge way. I haven’t yet read a book that has changed the way I live my life, nor do I think such books exist for me in the absolute sense of the phrase or how I think it’s traditionally understood. I’m unable to change my habits, much to my wife’s annoyance; she’d prefer that I stopped biting my nails. I do think, though, that most of the books I’ve read have changed me in some way, however minutely. Some of those books include White Noise, Infinite Jest, Grendel, and Notes from Underground.

I think, though, that one book did affect me in a way that altered how I think of my life and what I think of my life, and that was Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. I read that book in the summer of 2007, right when I was beginning to have what my wife and I referred to as ‘freakouts,’ which were essentially minor panic attacks. The stage didn’t last long at all — I went through maybe two or three significant ones that fall — and, anyhow, I think reading that book helped me understand a little bit about what was happening to me and why, maybe, it was happening.

I’m not familiar with that book. Care to elaborate a bit on what understanding you achieved?

Towards the middle of the book, Becker reviews the work of Otto Rank on artists and neurotics. Becker writes:

Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural worldview that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

I think I read that at a point in my life when I was struggling with — well, I wasn’t believing the lie I had created to cover up the reality of my death, that it will someday occur, etc. I mean, that’s how Becker phrases it, essentially, right? He says that the neurotic is someone whose personal lie about the reality of his or her death no longer seems believable.

So when I read that book, I think it helped me re-purpose my writing. I felt that I was no longer writing to mimic other writers, but instead writing my own version of the world as produced through my personality and experience. It felt more important that I should try to write this way.

Do you workshop your writing much? I ask because you do seem to write from an individual vision and I think that transition from mimic to individualism is something that all writers struggle with as they improve and grow. Was this re-purposing totally on your own, or did feedback from other people help?

I don’t workshop my stories anymore. Obviously, I did quite a lot of that during graduate school, but since then I’ve actually tried to keep the sharing to a minimum. I found workshopping helpful at that time, yes, but now I know that I benefit from hearing the careful responses of a few trusted readers. I don’t think of it as workshopping to show a draft to one or two people, which is what I usually do now. I trust Blake Butler’s responses. I trust Matt Bell’s responses. I trust Mike Scalise’s responses too, and one other friend’s as well. These few have really helped me figure out a lot of stories recently, and I’ll continue to seek out their thoughts on writing, as long as they’ll let me.

The re-purposing came slowly. It wasn’t all on my own. It happened within the context of a graduate program, in which I found myself internally pushing back against some of the reading lists and discussions, especially by the end of my time there. I wanted to read other things that were exciting to me, which is how I learned about all the activity online.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I didn’t benefit from graduate school, from the readings and writings I encountered there. For example, I think The Denial of Death was recommended to me in a graduate course. But instead, I think that the graduate school experience helped me learn how to turn and look elsewhere, to examine my own immediate experiences with a critical eye.

The re-purposing also came about with the help of others. My friend once recommended The Stupefaction by Diane Williams, which I finally read the summer of 2007, and that contrasted so harshly against much of what I was reading that it frightened me into seeking out more of her stories. In my search, I came across an old interview, in which she says, in speaking about how she began to write:

Then I thought, now I know how to do it, now I know. It was anything in my life that I wanted to say no to—that didn’t happen, I didn’t see that, that couldn’t be. It was the revelation that I could write about what was painful and terrifying.

I still think a lot about that quotation, and I also think a lot about the experience of reading that quotation, and though it may not have happened explicitly at the time, I now think reading that helped me shift my writing, helped me begin to write about trying to say no to the lie I had created (and still create) regarding death.

At one point there was post on HTMLGIANT by Blake Butler wherein he offered short descriptions of the people associated with the site. Yours said something like “thinks he’s too good to publish on the Internet.” When I look at the work you’ve published, most of it has been in well-respected print journals. Do you think there’s a substantive quality difference between print vs. internet publishers? Also, how much importance do you give to “reputation” in the literary realm? Does this ever factor into where you might send your work?

I don’t think there’s a difference in quality between the two, though I also don’t know enough, really, about every print magazine and every online magazine to make a good judgment on that. I only really know the few magazines I read or actively pursue, and they’re a mix of the two. I tend to feel pretty ambivalent about the online vs. print debate; I’m not trying to be difficult. It’s just a conversation that, like the MFA conversation or the death of [genre of literature] conversation, is generally uninteresting to me. I have my favorite magazines that are printed and I have my favorites that are published online, and I read those. I don’t often think, seriously, about the distinctions between how I read them. I just read them.

So, how to explain my having published in more print magazines than online, especially given that I’m someone active in the internet lit scene? How does reputation figure into it? I guess I would have to say that many of my publications have come about because I see, read, or know of a collaboration going on between editors and writers I admire, and I want to join that collaboration. I look at reputation, I guess, based on my own values: what I enjoy reading, authors whose writing I like to read. This hasn’t always been how I’ve sent out my stories — for example, I occasionally send a longshot submission — but I’ve found that when I’m careful and think carefully about how my stories might work with other stories and editors whose vision I feel like I understand, then I have more of a chance. I haven’t always done it this way; it’s something I’ve had to learn.

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Ryan Call is the author of The Weather Stations (Caketrain). His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, New York Tyrant, The Cupboard, Quarterly West, and other places. He and his wife live in Houston.