Interview
David Ryan, author of story collections Alligator and Animals in Motion: Stories, joins us as the L’Esprit Featured Writer for Issue Nine.
Read an original story from David in I9.
L’Esprit Literary Review: Tell us a little about yourself and your writing background. How did you come into literature? Give the audience a sense of your literary influences, styles, tastes, and philosophy.
David Ryan: Well, I was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but spent my teens in South Suburban Chicago. I left home for Boston later, lived there for years, then moved to New York for a decade and now live in Connecticut with my family. One formative influence came when I was thirteen and read E.L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake. It was on a list of books we could use for book reports. I just liked the title. The other options were books like, you know, Billy Budd (one I picked for the next book report), titles like that. But Loon Lake, for a 13-year-old, was a pretty provocative and strange book. Doctorow is accessible enough for a Midwestern 13-year-old, but risky enough to be pretty electrifying at that age. I went on to read all of his books. That was the first time I completely flipped over a writer. And learned that style and form could go beyond the conventions. (At my age, then, Doctorow was teaching at Sarah Lawrence; coincidentally, I’m teaching at Sarah Lawrence now.) Poe was a big influence, and I recall Jack London, flipping over these writers.
Undergrad, I eventually went to UMass. I went late after bouncing around Boston for a few years of my late teens into my early twenties. I loved the English teachers there, though the degree didn’t at the time offer many creative writing classes. The emphasis was survey, practical criticism. And I love reading Charles Dickens and Tobias Wolff and people like that, and surely needed that education. But I wanted more. I had a pretty voracious appetite.
And I recall picking up Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night once at a used bookstore down the street from me. And just flipping out over Céline’s writing. I didn’t know anything about his politics and thankfully I wouldn’t for several years. So I had time to appreciate the part of his mind that seemed so brilliant. I’d never read anything so charged, so stylized. I then read Death on the Installment Plan and again was floored. I believe these books were my introduction to the publisher, New Directions. I sought out New Directions titles—they were pretty easily identified because, back then, their covers were beautifully graphic, in grayscale. So, for instance, I found John Hawkes’ earlier books there—of which Second Skin, The Beetle Leg, and The Lime Twig, became a kind of heavy-rotation personal canon. Walter Abish was a big one; I sort of accidentally fell into that camp of experimental writers, albeit a generation or two late.
My tastes, however, are pretty broad. In terms of a staple of influences, Henry Green’s two novels Living and Loving, sure. I really like noir. Jim Thompson is a huge influence. I teach books by Elena Ferrante, and I’m a huge fan of Tom Drury. Jon Fosse. I love early Michael Ondaatje—you know, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. There are so many bad books out there. So much of what is being palmed off as “literary” is just so saccharine. But then we do have Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, and several books by Kazuo Ishiguro I’d say are hugely influential.
And then just probably a lot of the stuff that’s going on in journals these days. I remember back when I was in that undergrad program, I picked up John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. And I was wildly naive and just believed that I should seriously consider whatever this cranky dude said. And he mentions (and I think this is correct) that literary journals publish the writers who will be big in 10 years. And I thought, Okay, well then. So, I started reading literary magazines. It was earlier than I think most people my age back then. And it’s true that this was an amazing education. It’s when I started to discover writing that I’d never known you could do.
I don’t know that I have a philosophy so much. I need to write, in some way, every day. I don’t see it as optional, and I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t do it anymore.
LLR: How did your piece come to be, and what do you want our readers to know about it? Is there any context you would like to provide?
DR: The story is closely autobiographical, other than the murder. But everything else is just a memory of something that happened one particular night there during this time of my life. There were so many nights that were this extreme, and beyond.
In my late teens, I left Illinois and came to Boston. I was the same age as other college students, but wasn’t going to college. I just wanted to leave home. I got a job in a donut shop, and they trained me to be a baker. I worked the night shift.
The donut shop paid cash under the table, which meant they hired a lot of ex-cons and even a couple of guys who were hiding from the law, living under assumed names. The guy who trained me to bake was still wanted in twelve states for a spree of armed robberies. I had known him as Mario, then later, when the police finally found him and took him away, I learned his real name was Floyd. It was there that I suppose I got something of an education over the course of several years there.
The donut shop was located in a part of Boston, a student slum, that at night turned into a red light district. And so there were mob people and drug dealers and pimps and sex workers, and they’d sometimes need a place to hide when the cops were doing a sweep of the neighborhood.
It was a strange several years. A surreal life, often violent and sometimes really shocking—the things that I saw. Those years at the donut shop were by far the strangest of my life, the most beautiful in a dark way. And I was living a bit like a ghost. Because I wasn’t going to school, I didn’t really fit in amongst all these students my age. I mean, we all looked alike in a sense. And I touch on this in the story, the differences.
But the night people, the street people, just sort of accepted me for what I was. They knew I wasn’t really on the same path as them, but we were fellow travelers anyway. They’d hide from the cops or rivals in the donut shop and tell me stories about their night. About their lives. Their pasts, how they grew up, what they did during the day. What their mom and dad were like. They taught me a lot about the human condition. Wild, crucial things I knew no one in college would even believe, let alone have had a chance to learn. I feel so lucky to have had this in my life.
I’d get off my shift at four or five in the morning and pass through them all on the way home. This feeling that time was peeling away and I was a ghost and they were all ghosts, which I’m sure they all are now. Perhaps this is a story mostly about that.
LLR: What attracts you to the short story form, as opposed to longer forms?
DR: You know, I don’t feel a stronger attraction to short stories. I think, as a reader at least, I might be less drawn to them. I do write novels and novellas—I have four or five done, in various stages of revision, and I’m about to start another one. The story, “Elision”, for instance—the last story in Alligator, is the first chapter of one of the novels.
But it’s true that short stories have certain stellar qualities. Many people will have said this, but sometimes there’s one short story that will burn itself into you. You finish it and know you’ll never forget it. I feel this way about this story by the German neo-realist Judith Hermann—“Summerhouse, Later”. I feel that way about certain Roberto Bolaño stories. And though I feel that this is certainly the case, in a more expansive sense, with certain novels, a short story can almost burn brighter because it’s such a distilled form of experience. It’s one powerful memory, in a sense—a comet—compared to a novel’s arc of dozens or hundreds of memories. To extend the metaphor, a novel is more like a constellation. Compression, distillation, too, in a story—this allows it to open inside the reader, and here too is something of an advantage. You’re not worried about long-term fatigue from the way you use figures and objects and more challenging stylistic choices—and less of a plot.
But, to be fair, a novel like Bolaño’s 2666 challenges anything I just said. (This is, in itself, a very Bolaño-esque statement.) That novel just burns so much brighter than any comet I’ve read.
LLR: What is your process like for sequencing stories in a collection?
DR: For this latest collection with Cash 4 Gold, I was pretty mindful of their audience. But I also wanted to include some stories that weren’t incompatible but had, I hoped, a broad appeal. So, for instance, I included the two stories from the O. Henry Prize and a couple of other ones that I really liked. My thinking was that you could move from one story to the next and be sort of bounced around the different forms and the different tonal registers. You’d always trust that the next story coming up might throw you in a different direction. I did want to anchor the collection up front with a certain tonality, and I suppose that’s why I chose the story “Alligator”. It feels closest to the kind of writing I’m interested in now, which is moving more into the lyrical essay.
I went back and forth a bit with the editors about the ordering. But I felt that if I had put one of the more vicious stories up top, that would suggest the register of the entire collection. Whereas if I put one of the quieter stories up front, I thought that too might put off a certain grouping of people. I guess I thought “Alligator” was just estranged enough that it covered a lot of different bases.
It’s like a mix tape or playlist, you know. If every song is in the same key and roughly the same tempo, it can get old. I read a lot of collections that this feels to be the case. So I thought a lot about tonal registers, points of view, verb tense, things like that. Trying to make sure nothing repeated too much.
LLR: Do you tend to read while you’re writing, or do you prefer to keep those practices separate?
DR: Teaching keeps me reading constantly. But I also seem to need it. Didn’t Hemingway say you need to read other fiction at night so that in the morning you can continue with your own work?
But then, there is that risk: feeling too influenced by a book. I’ve gotten a little bit better at shaping that anxiety of influence, preventing it from carrying over into my own creative decisions, beyond simply feeling inspired. We selectively steal, but I think the more accomplished you can get, the better you internalize the influence and process it into something of your own. As far as what I’m reading, beyond what I’m teaching, I suppose I’m reading a lot from various journals. I’m teaching Elena Ferrante and Jesse Ball this week, and it’s kind of fun to revisit these texts, having read them so many times—I learn even more each time.
As far as really influential books, I think Eugene Martin has been a big influence. I mean, you wouldn’t see it in my writing. I would never presume to be able to write like that guy. I love some of Ben Lerner’s more expressionistic stuff—the prose poems and shorter work, but also his novels and novellas. Rodrigo Ray Rosa’s The African Shore—I really admire. Hanna Ørstavik’s Love. I teach these, too, and have read them half a dozen times. Same with Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. There are a couple of Ishiguro novels I’d put among the best books I’ve ever read.
But also, there’s just so much out there, younger writers who are cutting it up. I went to Boise’s Treefort Music Festival this past spring—the Storyfort series within it, run by Sam Berman. It was just so vital and great. I’m excited about the whole new generation of writers. I recently pulled out a bunch of old copies of Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly—I was teaching a class on short story form and using stories from those back issues. Amazing how vital the writing remains.
LLR: One thing we especially enjoyed about Animals in Motion was the scenic immediacy found across the pieces, and the way physical detail worked as an engine to both narrative and characterization. Can you talk a bit about how you approach scene-making, and its place in your crafting of fiction?
DR: It’s interesting. I think a story only becomes real through the manipulation and detailing of its objective world. But only insofar as the details and objects you’re choosing to work with are surprising and, especially, uncanny. This can happen naturally if you’re vividly *seeing* the moment, transcribing a waking dream. This is, for me, how the objects and details come to feel more original and stark. It doesn’t have to be a second-order part of the process. Though revision is such a great space to add details and fix the ones that have misfired.
A really good, uncanny detail can also trigger an event or action you hadn’t expected. Concrete details can produce an unexpected emotional swerve. When I think about those stories in Animals in Motion from one to the next, I don’t know that I was ever thinking about them consciously.
I teach constantly this idea of mimetic and contagious magic every word and object can possess. The ability of one word to appear in one milieu, then appear in another, and then another—each time grabbing hold of some discrete emotional trace. Each word or object gives off a spectrum of meaning. The way an idea ‘touched’ against another, or shapeshifts into some variant—these generate an unspoken kind of power in between the words.
LLR: Can you tell us a bit about how you approach the fictionalization of real events or figures? In a story such as “The Canyon” (with Spahn Ranch), for example, we notice play with historical situations in a new way; tell us a bit about this process.
DR: I had to do a lot of research, something I never do. But I needed to know more about the Manson family, a topic I would normally have no interest in. I also researched Laurel Canyon at a certain time in American history. That was one of the weirder stories in that it took a lot of thinking about the setting and the time.
But “The Canyon” was actually based on a true story some people I worked with once told me. It happened to them. They’d bought the ranch next to this blind rancher, George Spahn. And at some point, the dirtiest hippies they’d ever seen (they were themselves hippies) seemed to move in and live with George. Much of what happens in that story is what happened to them. And for years I thought, ‘this is such a wild story’ but could find no way to take it beyond an anecdote. As it happened, at some point, a friend recommended I read Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. There’s a poem/letter in there called “Letter to Simic from Boulder” and I was just floored (as I was with the whole collection). I thought, what if the protagonist is this guy who’d come back from WWII and was trying to cope. I suppose I was thinking a bit of Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”, too. But what came of all of this was a metaphor for my own coming home from tours, when I was a musician. This complete sense of dissolution and loss. I realized the problem I’d been having was this: The story my friends told me about their encounters with the Manson Family (though they weren’t known as that yet) didn’t have a metaphor yet. It was an important lesson. We might have these great ideas for anecdotes. But they become stories, and then maybe good stories in how some metaphor constitutes them. Somehow, in “The Canyon”, the fusion of this anecdote about Manson with the life of the ranch owner next door pushed me into thinking about this idea of the dissolution of the self—and this, in that sense, begets the ending of that story. The potential for violence at the very end finally brings the protagonist into himself, or at least the self the war had made him into.
LLR: Your most recent collection, Alligator,has several stories where dreams interrupt waking life. Similarly, “Meteorologist” blurs between the present moment and memory, slipping between the two without warning. Can you talk a little bit about the role of dreams in your work and your process of rendering those moments on the page?
DR: I like the challenge of splicing consciousness into one stream of time. You know, the way we seamlessly move between the current moment and memory and imagination. That all of these can constitute the reality of the span of ten seconds.
And so this is, for me, a fun writing exercise is figuring out how to approximate that. But more importantly, it’s also a way of conveying genuine experience, versus conveying a story.
It might seem strange but I don’t particularly like dreams. I certainly don’t like hearing about them. And so why I would impose them on anyone else is kind of beyond me.
But it’s another technical challenge, I guess. When we really dream, we have our own psychic framework to give meaning to these events and displacements that are otherwise kind of nonsensical. They mean something because they’re happening inside us, drawing from this vast reservoir of repressed memories and impulses and instinctual drives that are wholly relevant to us.
But if you go the next day and try to tell somebody else your dream, the only way you would make it interesting is if that person possessed your own psychic architecture, your own repository of repressed memories, impulses and instincts.
That’s why dreams are so dull, experienced beyond the originating mind. The challenge becomes how to take the story around the dream that’s happening before, during and after it, and make sure that you’ve given—or at least insinuated—the particular impulses and drives and repressed memories necessary to make that dream, however strange, seem significant.
LLR: Okay, but that seagull in “The Meteorologist”? What an image. Can we pick your brain a little here? Drug induced slipping through memory curler-making baker commits murder, sure. But that seagull is there the whole time! Can you discuss the way animals or the natural world functions in your work?
DR: Ha ha, yeah, I really like that seagull! W.G. Sebald gave some advice to students once: He said you should try to put a ghost in the room of every story. And he meant it figuratively because obviously Sebald wasn’t like a particularly speculative writer, but I do think his work always feels haunted.
And to me, animals take a primacy over anything because I just feel like they perpetually remind us of the haunted world around us. At any given moment, you might walk through a forest, and there are thousands of animals, and you’re not aware of any of them.
But on a more particular level, that seagull is kind of a displacement for something that can’t be put into words. I mean, literally: meaning carried by silence. The seagull is doing a lot of work, in other words, for the story. Or it was for me. The seagull is a kind of presence, that ghost in the room. The seagull doesn’t speak, but it’s witnessing everything. And I suppose in this particular story, at least my own impression was that the seagull seemed to know everything that was going on, seemed to understand and was pretty objective about the world it was witnessing: it was just life, in that room.
I’m fairly allergic to archetypes and symbols and anything like that. So I never put animals in with that in mind. But the seagull came later in the drafting of the story. It entered the room of my process, you know, several drafts later, and it was just fun to see it fly in and watch me write.
But returning to silence: I think there’s a kind of silence that I admire in animals. Generally, when an animal enters a story of mine, it’s there to, I suppose, give its own impression of silence. I don’t imagine I have any stories where animals make sounds. And I’m drawn to a kind of silence. This expression of solitude that I’ve felt all my life. Animals are totems for that feeling. They’ll always express some kind of affinity I have for solitude.
LLR: In “The Meteorologist,” the actual act of baking to move the reader through the story felt particularly charged on a sentence level, especially when the crack pipe came out. Can you tell us a little bit about your approach to movement and pacing in a short story?
DR: Yeah, I actually tried a couple of experiments with this that I don’t know are interesting enough to get into here. But I set a constraint in one particular draft to try to make the sentences move along with the second hand of a clock, more or less. So you’re sort of motoring along with the moment. As if watching it in real time. That might have some indication of why this moves the way it does. A clock is ticking—this is absolutely the experience of baking. Everything is contingent on timing. Everything is so mindful. Anything can fail if you don’t attend to ‘time’ correctly. You have to honor time, to take care. If you’re even a couple of minutes off, you can ruin a whole production run. 10 seconds off either way in the fryer and the screen can be ruined. If yeast rises for too long it might deflate, but will definitely take in grease. If the cake mix is too “wet”, or if it’s sat for too long, it will also take in grease.
I mean, to this day I move through time like this—it just altered my brain permanently. Timing things, looking for simultaneities that work well, avoiding others that won’t.
But the other thing I tried with the story was scansion. Just something that no one will ever notice. I’ll measure the beats of a particular line—for instance the opening line, or a line that describes some crucial moment. And then I’ll use those poetic ‘feet’—the iambs and trochees and anapests etc.— to reshape other crucial sentences. It’s meaningless, but maybe it plants a rhythm in certain places. I like ‘haunting’ the text with these kinds of things. So that, ideally, you can’t say why you feel the way you feel when you’ve finished with a story. But you’re feeling something.
LLR: How has teaching creative writing impacted your own work, and vice-versa?
DR: They’re so intertwined at this point. I started teaching pretty late, and what I wanted to do was teach in a way I’d have liked to have learned. But this also meant trying to convey things that were useful to students—prompts based on things I’d actually had some breakthrough with in my own work (rather than the busywork a lot of prompts seem to come to). So having to think internally about process was good for the process itself. And then, just the amount of reading and deeper thinking you have to do. It’s so helpful to engage. And I think there’s a whole social component that feels somewhat miraculous. I’m surrounded by people who are engaged with the same things that engage me. It’s really something. I feel very fortunate. But, yes, in terms of my writing. I have no idea where it would be had I not begun teaching a while back. I suspect it would not be what it is.
LLR: What’s next for you and your work?
DR: I’m finishing two drafts of two different novels. And then I’m going to write another one. But I’m also slowly pulling together a new collection of pieces. More lyrical essay than ‘story’. More like the piece “Alligator” in the book Alligator. But the pieces all deal with the word “last”. The meanings of the word “last” flip, depending on whether it’s an adjective or a verb. And that’s something I wanted to open up—you have the adjective “last”, which means ‘a terminal point’, right? But the verb means the opposite. The verb “last”: something lasts, is lasting, spans a duration that doesn’t necessarily end. I want to collect a bunch of prose pieces that navigate between an end and what Bergson called Durée. I’d like them to be engaging, but hard to nail down and more spontaneously honest than a staged story.
LLR: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers?
DR: It’s interesting; there’s so much said about how writing and reading are less important. Reading and writing are ways of playing out scenarios, creating and solving problems, learning to empathize with people we’d never have known otherwise. In times where everything feels somewhat doomed, they’re ways of contending with that doom, processing it. It’s astonishing to me how often this is neglected or diminished. For instance, when people talk about the death of reading and writing. Reading, and I’d argue especially writing for me, are the most powerful ways we can negotiate with the outer world, throw trouble at an internal model of it, and thereby understand why our existence, for the briefest time, is meaningful.Maggie Armstrong’s debut collection of stories Old Romantics was published by Tramp Press and Biblioasis and nominated for Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Kate O’Brien award. A former journalist, she has written fiction and essays for the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Irish Times, Banshee, Paper Visual Arts and more. She lives in Dublin.
David Ryan
Photo Credit: Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet and photographer, and is a proud member of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She is the author of the published children’s book ‘A Heavenly World’. Her personal experience of pet loss would later become her first children’s book ‘A Heavenly World’. Her poetry and photography have been published and featured in various literary publications, and her Dragonfly photography was featured at Agora Art Gallery, New York City, for the ‘New York, I Love You’ Exhibition October 2025.
