Ryan Heryford, with Interview

November 27th, 2006

Artwork (Detail): Ernesto Riveiro

Despite his interview answers, Ryan Heryford is a kind and fun-loving fellow, and tries to maintain a generally positive attitude regarding most things that come onto his plate. If you have pretty blue eyes and a warm smile and want to go to a Thai restaurant for the Tofu platter, he’ll tell you that he’s a vegetarian for sure. Otherwise, he likes steak and potatoes. He hopes that all his thoughts and writings printed on the Internet will be acceptable for his mother’s perusal, as she has continued to be a remarkable influence on his development in all areas. If at any point he starts to sound narcissistic, verbose, or generally overwhelmed and depressed, please just write it off as “growing pains.” In real life, he enjoys jokes and going out for brunch, meeting the mascots at Disneyland and trying to smile always. I’m certain of this. He is disease free and hopes to stay that way.

I used to joke with Ryan that he was completely delusional, but it wasn’t until he was diagnosed with full-blown schizophrenia that the joke became funny. But, Ryan’s magic isn’t delusion; it is a tailored sense of imagination, synthesizing all the possibilities of what could be into the soul of what is. A good friend of ours, Greg Wolff—another talented author worth reading, once said Ryan values eloquence over everything. The subtext of this comment was that he values eloquence over truth as well, and perhaps this is part of what makes him an incredible fiction writer. Our entire friendship is based on a heap of well-told lies, but at least we’ve learned something about fiction. In all seriousness, Ryan is committed to process of becoming, evolving in and through his work, and his genius is not in his eloquent mendacity and delusions or even his imagination, it is in his ability to employ all his facilities in exploration and development, to deepen mysteries and truths, to broaden hearts with stories and characters so brazen, they enter through your front door, lay out on your couch, drink your wine or ice cold apple juice, and talk in a way that makes you listen. Above everything, Ryan’s work, for all its triumphs and flaws, is wholly present and wholly presented, which gives it the nearly impossible quality of sincerity— a quality the author has managed to live by himself.

Here is an excerpt from Ryan’s as of yet untitled and finished first novel; followed by an interview:

It was almost dinnertime, when we came back to Mr. Adams’ house, but no one had eaten all day. Mango was sitting outside on the stoop with Jason in her lap and Hannah running in circles around the sidewalk squares. She was calling for me, but I pretended not to hear her. I walked into the lobby and turned on the main light switch. I walked toward the big red curtain in the left corner and let out my nastiest smirk ever. Deep down, I knew that the only thing that could make me smile would be watching Mr. Adams’ face turn lime green and sour as I told the whole world that his museum stories were all a bunch of horse shit and that he was the most miserable man who had ever set foot in Shittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

But there she was.

In a little white dress with her wings spread outward and wide, like Marilyn Monroe on the crucifix. She didn’t have a beak, but the wings were tough and leathery and they had little hairs on them like real animal skin. Next to her was a tortoise. It had been dead for several years, but it was stuffed and on display, accompanied by a video recording of its first live performance of Henry Ibsen’s Doll House at Carnegie Hall in the nineteen-fifties. And next to the tortoise was an eyeball with what seemed like a billion pupils. And in the center was a miniature cherry tree with a life-sized statue of George Washington, who was holding an axe and wearing a sneaky smile. The dark hallway seemed to stretch forever with all sorts of things I could never even begin to name. At the end was a stairway leading up with a sign that pointed to more exhibits, and a stairway leading down, blocked by a red curtain and a sign that said: Do Not Enter, Please. I pulled back the red curtain and marched downstairs. I was hoping that I might find a little old man behind the great wizard, something to expose Mr. Adams for the miserable lunatic that I knew him to be. But the room didn’t have a single power switch. The only light came from a window that faced out toward the backyard and a glass casket in the center of the room that was glowing, bright and green. I walked closer.

She was floating, surrounded completely by the green liquid. Her hair hadn’t changed one bit, and neither had any of her other parts. She was still wearing that same dress from the last time I had seen her. Her mouth was shut and her eyes were halfway open. I could see her pupils. They were staring straight into mine.

I ran backwards until I tripped over a dustpan, buried in the shadows of the room. I fell halfway to the ground and caught myself on the window’s ledge. I saw the Lone Ranger walking across the back lawn. I banged on the window and screamed for him to come and help, but he couldn’t hear me over the clanging of his silver pail, which he had been carrying back and forth, hand feeding the reindeer, who was bent over, taking a shit in my direction.

© 2006 Ryan Heryford.

Artwork: Ernesto Riveiro

Madison Smartt Bell once described the voice of this narrator, Harold, as something like “Holden Caulfield on acid.” How would you describe it? How do you feel about such comparisons?

RH: The real answer to this is wrapped up in what I imagine I’ll be responding to in your second question. But we can get to that later. Except to say, that Harold is an angry, young white boy, and since the days of Holden Caulfield, angry white boys have become a cliché and a market gimmick at that. If, three years ago, I might have gone back and chosen a more subversive character, perhaps I’d feel kinder with myself right now. But I’m a white boy, and as distorted and decontextualized as it sometimes may feel, I do get angry. And maybe that’s the one thing for which I won’t apologize. I have a friend who doesn’t get angry. Of course, I haven’t known him that long, and I’m working overtime on it now – dropping nicotine gum in his soup bowl, blowing my nose on the scrambled eggs – that sort of thing. But he doesn’t feel that it’s dignified, the anger. He calls it a base emotion, uncivilized. It’s the first one, he says, our first emotional reaction and exploration of the world. It’s the one that gets things going and it’s the one that we can ultimately overcome. He might be correct, he does seem to know quite a bit about these things.
Well, fuck him anyways.

And you see… that was anger. I just got heated there. But if my friend is lock and target on all this, well then I would hope all the more to never stop being angry. I mean, I’d much rather be out exploring the goddamn whole of it than setting up shop somewhere with a basket of joy and sadness and all the rest. And that’s the other important difference between Harold and Holden. Holden Caulfield, whether he likes it or not, is setting up shop. He’s in a therapist’s office for the entire book. We’re diagnosing him as he speaks to us. And, I’ll leave some of my own opinions aside here, because we may be correct in doing so. Because in some aspects of it, he really is sort of crazy, or, at least, unfit for 1950’s New York City. I hope that Harold isn’t read in this way. I would hope that Harold isn’t diagnosed as being a wack. I mean, Christ, what would that mean for me?

To me, for what its worth, he is merely experiencing a holy disillusionment. And I say holy, because I hope that the questions that might arise concerning Harold’s mental state are actually realizations that disillusionment can, no matter how ideologically atheistic, be wondrous. I mean, it’s no mistake that the word sounds so like “delusion.” But disillusionment, in and of itself, is a re-exploration of the world for the first time all over, and it’s a lonely process, one that needs an active feeling to befriend it, the basest of emotions – anger. And Harold and I will continue to be so, until the rest have stepped out from behind the masquerade, healing and parading its blemishes, finding wonder and hope for all that is here, on earth and inside of us. I guess that you could call me the man in blue, if only because black’s not my color.

Recently, as you’ve finished this novel, you’ve felt less connected to it, as if you’d grown beyond it and now somewhat repudiate it. Do you feel the novel was integral to that growth? Do you feel that it still has something to say to youngsters out there?

RH: It’s hard writing a novel when you’re young. For me at least, no good stories come through divine inspiration. What I mean by this – you have to have a plan always, an architectural framework in so much as writing is forever a craft and not a Sunday afternoon opium session where one plants their fingers on the keyboard and sees what happens. Well, it’s been three years now since I first made my plan for this book, and I have changed quite a bit. The foundation of the story itself has been reprocessed in my mind so many times over that it’s sometimes difficult to remember what I felt so passionately for in the first place. My only hope is that as I have continued to grow, my story and Harold’s story have grown as well; if I’m lucky, the two have been synchronous. But that’s not for me to evaluate. I can only keep my fingers crossed.

Ryan Adams has this lyric: “Fortunate and angry just like a child.” It echoes inside every now and then, and that can be disheartening. The book, the whole of it, it’s all white people. I’m tired of hearing about white people, and I’m sick with myself.

Your short stories and poems and personal essays use the word ‘tit’ a lot. How do you feel about the word, ‘tit’ or ‘titties’?*

RH: It’s a brutal word, and dangerous at that, which is why I would never use it on the subway or in my mother’s living room. In fact, I would hope never to use it anywhere outside of the page. Because on the page, I can reframe and recontextualize it, so as to take back its brutal nature and highlight the history from which it was derived and through which it continues to develop. I hope to take it away from the barroom beer time sunnydale dudes who perform its utterance with no less nonchalance than taking a shit after a meatball sub. I mean, isn’t that the point of all this anyway? Isn’t that why we still feel the vigor and the urgency for what it is we do? Of course, that’s all up for debate. And if anyone wants to have it out with me, they’d be welcome to come over to my place for a glass of milk - from my huge, lactating…

Can you tell me a bit about Elvis Presley and his connection to your work? How do other icons and what they represent, such as Mickey Mantel and Clint Eastwood, factor in to the development of your characters’ imaginations and hopes and possible redemption?

RH: I’ve been listening to a lot of Gram Parson’s records these days. Clapping my hands together at the Emmylou show by the bay. Driving through the desert, singing the chorus from “1,000 Dollar Wedding”…because it should’ve been a funeral. I drove out to Joshua Tree not too long ago and stayed in the motel room where he kicked it for good. I hiked over the cliffs by the Salton Sea, drank spiced tequila, and played guitar along the swimming pool in my boxers, in the dark and chill and starbright shine of the desert, because maybe that’s what he would’ve done. A young couple runs the place, a pair of sweethearts in their own right. Needless to say, my behavior was expected. “I’m going to be famous too someday,” I told them with my cocky crooked-toothed grin. “But I’m not going to die here tonight.” - and maybe that’s just it.

Language is important of course, and beautiful in all the ways which it others us from the rest of the natural world. But with it comes a wound, one that spreads wide and cuts a canyon down to the marrow. This wound, thought maybe, our ability to step back from masked conceptualizations of “human progress” and see the ultimate and beautiful chaos that is the natural world, all that we’ve done to separate ourselves from it. Gram Parsons came to Joshua Tree with a lawn chair and backpacks full of hallucinogenics. In the desert, he might see UFO’s and visions of Krishna, God perhaps. I could’ve done the same, but I didn’t. In spite of it all, there was only sand, beautiful sand and rock and cacti all around, whose wondrous composers and formations all amounted to nothing more than my own absorption of it all. I could have dressed the wound, which is what we’re all doing anyways, isn’t it? Religion, drugs and alcohol, individualism, the American Dream – band-aides, all of them, band-aides. I want to help you take them off, I want to take my own off, I want to expose this wound and let some air come in. But you can’t do that through force or arrogant certainty. I don’t want to write some verbose theory manual that will only be read by a few disheartened youth in Marxism 101. I want to expose the wounds of my mother, my friends, my loved ones. In that sense, making forward attacks on any of these great ideological bandaides would be a waste of everyone’s time. But maybe, through celebrity fetishism, through the tearing apart of Gram, Clint, Mickey Mantle, Marilyn Monroe and even the king himself, Elvis Presley, by stripping them of all that they might embody, I can begin to make visible these well concealed wounds. I wouldn’t say that any of my characters have ever experienced redemption. But they have abandoned their idols, or at least learned that they can survive without them. And in this sense, maybe the most important sense, they have rediscovered purpose and the hurt that makes them human.

*Question number three was asked in jest, but Ryan took it seriously. I liked his answer so much I’ve left it.

—matt ashby
Reads. Writes. Wishes for watermelons.