Recently on Zoom I spoke with the endlessly energetic David Ryan about his new collection of brilliant and strange short stories, Alligator. Our conversation as was wild and surprising as the book itself, and as vast and varied. Among other subjects, we talk doppelgängers, experimentalism, the practice of self-imposing creative obstructions, and maybe most crucially to the stories in Alligator, we talk about memory—the way the past always seems to be bubbling up into our present, whether we’re ready for it or not.
David Ryan teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He is a two-time O.Henry Prize winner (2022 and 2023) and is author of Animals in Motion: Stories and the hybrid nonfiction critical memoir, Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Brandon Ahmad Haffner: This is a total aside, but I thought it was cool to see my hometown of Fort Wayne, IN briefly referenced here in the story “Mirror.” Have you been?
David Ryan: I was born there. Hoosiers! You, me, and Michael Martone. That’s amazing.
BAH: So for some context, when were these stories were written?
DR: My first collection, when it first came out, had stuff that was 20 years old. But most of these are within the past five years. “The Beekeeper” is from when I was in my 20s. It was the first story—actually Gordon Lish took it for The Quarterly. And it never came out, because that issue of The Quarterly never got made. But a lot of these are really new.
BAH: The stories in Alligator share an aesthetic so that’s not terribly surprising. How did you decide to sequence the collection? And were there any stories you considered cutting but kept? Or the other way?
DR: I knew that Cash 4 Gold’s audience was a certain kind of group of people. So I wanted to honor that. But I also knew I had these other stories, and I was like, if I can throw in a couple of the more mainstream stories, inasmuch as you can call them that, they might help with people who aren’t only going to read the other stuff. So that’s why “Elision” and “Warp and Weft,” the O.Henry stories, are in it. I want anyone to be able to pick up this book and find something in it. And the ordering—I wanted the collection to start off with the kind of register that [the title story] “Alligator” had because I wanted people to be ready for whatever came after. If you could identify with that first story, then you’d be fine with whatever came afterwards. There’s a really surreal story in it, “The Zoological Gardens.” It’s sort of a riff on Leonora Carrington. And I think at one point, the editors wanted that to start. And I was like, no way! That sets it up as a completely different collection. So you start with “Alligator,” and that’s weird enough. Then you follow with certain ones that are more open to a lot of people, and then other ones that get really weird, and then open. I was trying to get it to have its own lungs, breathing from one story to the next.
BAH: That definitely echoes my own experience moving through the book. We’re coming up from air every once in a while, then getting back down into the weird weeds
DR: Even to the point of considering point of view, verb tense, whether something ends horribly—there is that idea of trying to keep the switches flipping, the poles moving throughout.
BAH: Speaking of handling the “weird” versus maybe the more, I guess you’d call it “accessible” stories: the book’s back matter describes the stories as “experiments,” and I’ve seen some other folks describe your work as “experimental.” I was wondering how you feel about that term and if you identify as an experimental writer.
DR: I think of this stuff as realism. I don’t think of it as straying from that. It’s realism in the way that Joyce thought Finnegan’s Wake was realism. If it’s capturing something that’s hopefully true, that’s close to the bone, that’s real enough for me. But any act of writing is experimental because we don’t know what’s going to happen next ideally, right? It’s an experiment. I have this idea, and I want to watch it unfold. So I think “experimental” is pushing it maybe a little bit, but, I also think there are some stories in Alligator that people who aren’t used to reading different kinds of things might think are at least “weird.”
BAH: The stories “Pickpocket” and “Warp and Weft” were originally one story, is that right?
DR: Yeah. I wrote “Warp and Weft” at a time I was doing a lot of readings. You do these things, and they say, we need you to read for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes. As an experiment, I wanted to write a piece where I could take one section out, read it by itself, and it would hold up. The idea was to be able to take any one of them, put it with any other, and make a modular time slot I could read. With “Warp and Weft,” the Harvard Review editor, Christina Thompson, had said, “This is too long. Can you do something about that?” So I unplugged “Pickpocket” from it. I kind of like this fact that they’re sperate now, and you don’t have to necessarily know that there’s anything in common.
BAH: That’s interesting as a creative obstruction that led to those two stories. Have there been other occasions where you self-impose an obstruction to generate new work?
DR: I do it all the time, and a lot of it is because I teach. If I wrote a story and I felt like, wow that was really fun, and it worked! I might try to reverse engineer that and come up with a prompt. I keep an idea journal. Often it’s less an idea for a story than an idea for a formal approach. For instance, in “Warp and Weft,” every piece [of that story], regardless of the subject, had to have the sound of the crane, because they’re all happening simultaneously in New York City. That’s the one thing pinning each of the vignettes down. And I made a rule for myself that I’d free-write each morning, and the piece had to have an ascent or a descent. It had to have the idea of paternity or a family. So I do think about that stuff all the time. I just don’t think of it in terms of, make sure each paragraph is only twenty-three words long or that kind of stuff. It’s more working with a metaphor.
BAH: I’ve been telling my students the last few years to “lean into their own strangeness.” That’s a refrain I’ve found myself using. But sometimes I find it tough to do that in my own work. So very recently, I’ve been thinking about more consciously engineering strangeness and imposing exercises that have that effect.
DR: I’m teaching summer classes, and tomorrow I’m doing a class on Lish’s The Quarterly. I have like 25 back issues of The Quarterly. They’re 30 years old, but there’s this new generation of people who are worshipping all that stuff. So I thought, for this class I’d teach over the summer, I would dip into some of that. And you know what? It holds up. The thing I’ve been teaching over the summer is, “Where’s your swerve?” How does each story have two serves that completely flip the reader’s expectations into some place that it makes you gasp as you’re writing? Those hammer something into the story that make it indelible. That’s where weirdness can pop up. Where you take what seems like a mundane story, and then it flips.
BAH: Thinking about swerves, and before we get too far away from “Elision”—there’s the moment where the central character finds her husband’s weird-ass book. And I saw in another interview that you had an idea of all of the stuff her husband was into, but you don’t reveal hardly any of that in the story. It’s more like an impression. Which to me is much creepier.
DR: To leave it out, right?
BAH: Yeah. I wanted to know more about that decision. From the point of view of a writer, it would be so easy to deliver that information about the husband’s behavior as a cheap gut punch. At least in a first draft, I would probably be tempted to reveal that. Could you talk a little bit about that thinking?
DR: What you’re suggesting is that idea that monsters live in the dark. It’s far creepier to not get an answer for what in the world is going on in that book, right? So that story is the first chapter of a novel. And the novel seeks to find out what all that stuff’s about. The idea was, I wanted him to be this perfect man who happened to also be a complete monster. And the experiment with the novel was going to be, how does she keep searching for what was going on in that book? The little bits that she learns, the more terrified she is of him, and the less inclined she is to even broach the subject. So a lot of that stuff is living in a text in the distance.
BAH: That’s exciting that that’s on the horizon. One thing that struck me as a pattern was how many of these stories depict characters who are sitting or standing. Like in terms of their physical action, they aren’t doing much. “Blueberry Season,” “Eel in the Tree,” “Alligator,” “Pickpocket,” etc. A lot of characters, their physical motion is stagnant, but their minds are moving all over the place. What draws you to that kind of interior story where the central character—in the present action line, anyway—is more or less physically idle, but their memories, thoughts, and dreams are full of dramatic movement?
DR: I hadn’t thought about that. I almost wonder if part of it is, if you have too much physical movement and interiority, it’s too much. If I’m going to have a lot of noise in the interior space, it might mean that I can’t have them doing too much on the outside. I’ve never thought about it, but I wonder if that’s probably it. The interiority is the part that is for me the action. So many of these stories are based on things that happened to me, are memories that I’ve sort of tricked up. So maybe because I’m sitting experiencing them in my head, it’s communicated though the lack of activity in the protagonist.
BAH: There’s a line in “Horse with Tornado” about a parrot: “The parrot’s past and the real storm gather and become a single thing now. Memory materialized into the present.” To me, this struck me as one of those lines that articulates something, almost at a meta level, about the book itself, emblematic of a strategy I saw a lot in these stories, where memory “materializes into the present.” I think this is a related thought actually to what we were just talking about. There’s a moment in “Elision” when the protagonist is falling to the grass, and suddenly it smells like burnt chocolate and she’s in the kitchen with her mother. But there’s no memory filter. It’s not like, “she remembered” being in the kitchen with her mother. She falls to the grass and then she is in the kitchen. There’s not even a comma to offset. It’s a little audacity that makes a huge difference for me, the reader, because it animates her memory in much the same way that my own memories work. When I’m remembering something, the memory takes over my field of vision. And I don’t see it very often rendered in this same way in fiction.
DR: You really spelled it out exactly how I feel it. Which is, we don’t sit there and go, “I’m having a memory.” You know? We don’t do that, right? It shoots up. An episode from our past will fill the visual frame. It takes prominence. It dominates until we clear it. It’s a very conscious decision. I will edit and revise so that it is clear that the memory has taken over. Because that surprise—you know, it’s those little moments of audacity that are a kind of narrative energy all their own. When you are surprised, it gives you the jolt that a good plot twist can give you. And especially if you’re not working with stuff that is entirely plotted, then you need those surprises, those little micro-audacities to happen. Memory doesn’t work any other way than as it’s being written in these pieces, hopefully. It rises up, you don’t expect it, and it’s usually triggered by a sensory cue. So there’s the burnt chocolate.
BAH: I also noticed a trend of character duality, where you’re playing two different characters’ identities off of each other. In “Zoological Gardens,” there’s the main characters’ repeated, almost defiant dancing, and then there’s another characters’ defiant turkey call. Maybe the most obvious one is the “Eel and the Tree,” where the main character’s identity almost merges with his neighbor across the street. And in “Black Box,” with Anna and the unnamed woman from the narrator’s past. Could you talk more about your interest in that kind of interplay?
DR: There’s a great energy in doppelgängers. How do you set up a duality between two characters where you can’t say they’re opposites? What’s the center they’re both bouncing off of? I’m also drawn to the uncanny quite a bit. “Black Box” was a real experiment in the uncanny. It was like, how do you state something that’s impossible? The woman’s dead or she’s not. There’s that slightly annoying way she doesn’t tell him, but the story is navigating this counter-factual space where it doesn’t bother him. There’s a tension in that. So many of these are about looking in a mirror. Because that’s all I’m doing, you know? You have the subject, and you have an object. How do you have them move schizophrenically from one to the other, trading places with who’s going to be whom? That tension you get from saying: There’s the David, and there’s the David with a strikethrough. I think the dualities are absolutely both accidental and intentional. Even if I think I’m being spontaneous, there’s very clearly something in me that’s focused on that.
BAH: Could you talk a little bit about the writers who are influences on your prose style?
DR: When I was in undergrad, I was an English major, and we were reading Dickens. All the practical criticism classes. The canon. I was living in Boston, and down the street from me was the Brookline Book Annex. It was this beautiful, old used bookstore. And I’d go in, and I stumbled upon a black and white cover, this really stylized cover. It was John Hawkes’ book Second Skin, a New Directions title. They were all beautiful grayscale. I remember bringing it home, and during the first third of it being almost physically repulsed by the prose. It was too dense, too difficult. And then something snapped, and I was more in love with the writer than I’ve ever been with anyone’s writing in my life. I went back to the bookstore and I found another book with that same kind of black and white cover. So, New Directions started to shape this alternate education I was getting while I was still going to school. Toby Olson. William Gaddis and William Gass. Alain Robbe-Grillet was a huge influence. His prose in translation is so gorgeous. Claude Simon, another French new novelist. He has a book called The Flanders Road, blew my mind. So that was a weird grounding and was shaping how I would write. Which means I’ll never sign a big book deal, and I’ll never make any money, because I have built into me this way of writing that resists anything that anyone who wants a simple sentence is going to get. More recently I’m trying to find the subversion in writers like Ishiguro. Rachel Cusk, the Outline trilogy is an amazingly subversive set of books. I love Emma Cline. Elena Ferrante.
BAH: Along these lines, how do you feel like your writing has changed since your last collection, Animals in Motion?
DR: I had a pretty seismic shift in my life about 15 years ago where I got sick and my wife got pregnant. We have a daughter, 15 years ago she was born. Everything in my life changed in terms of what I favor, what I feel is more important. And that’s changed my writing quite a bit. There’s that thing they say about photographers, that there are three stages of being a photographer. The first is gear and technique. A young photographer is really focused on technique and the gear. The second stage is composition. And the third stage, the final stage, is light. All that matters is light. The assumption is that you’ve internalized the prior two stages so that you can then only focus on light. You’re going to intuit the composition, you’re going to intuit the settings. You know, William Trevor could write a story out of thin air. He had already mastered form, and the sentence, and everything else. You start to see his concerns become more soulful as he gets older. I mean, I’m not in my 80s or 90s yet, so I don’t want to think of myself as ancient. But I do feel like I’ve entered this stage where Alligator is an example of moving into a concern with light.
BAH: I read an interview you gave with Barbara Lock about your piece “The Stag Beetles.” And you mentioned you had read it aloud in a bar and somebody came up to you afterwards and said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I don’t know what I just heard, but it was thrilling.” I feel like that’s how a lot of folks are going to react to certain stories in Alligator.
DR: This all began when my daughter was born and I found out I was going to stay alive. I really thought I was going to die. And “The Stag Beetles” is a story that was a pivotal expression of that panic. And in fact hidden in that story is my wife and daughter. If you read “The Stag Beetles,” you see no mention of a pregnant wife in it, but the whole story is about that. The thing that I do the most now is, I try to write around the center, write the margin. So the center becomes this glowing thing that a reader feels. Ideally, somebody would finish a story and go, I don’t know what happened, but I can’t stop crying, I can’t help but feel something in my chest. That, to me, is the soul jumping into them.
BAH: Exactly. Even when I wasn’t sure what was happening on the page, it still left me with a clear emotional impression. What’s next for you? What else are you working on?
DR: For reasons I’ve mentioned, I have this real life drive in me and it’s manifested a lot in writing. I wrote three stories the past three days.
BAH: Oh my gosh.
DR: I’m working on a revision of that novel, which is called Elision. I have four other novels that need revision; they’re sitting around. There’s a collection of lyrical essays that get at the word “last.” It’s going to be called The Book of Lasts. And it’s one piece after another that explores this idea, the irony of—speaking of a duality—the irony of the word “last,” that it can both mean the terminal point and also a duration that does not end. I keep coming up with ideas for stories and I can’t seem to stop. Trying to keep busy. With the world as it is, the other thing that’s kept me writing in the morning is, I’ve got to do something for myself. Because the moment I stop doing that and look at the news, it’s like, the world is trying to kill me. We have our chance to have our own lives, and our own chaos, that we can control. And I need that.
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David Ryan is the author of the story collections, Alligator (C4G Books) and Animals in Motion: Stories (Roundabout Press). Winner of the 2022 and 2023 O. Henry Prize For Short Fiction, His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Soft Union, Alaska Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Story, The Adroit Journal, West Branch, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, The Common, The Threepenny Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fence, Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, The Hopkins Review, Puerto del Sol, the Potomac Review, Pinch, Tin House, Esquire, BOMB, and elsewhere.
