Reimagining the Novel: A Conversation with Ron A. Austin

Ron A. Austin's short stories have been placed in Pleiades, Story Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar, his first collection of linked stories, won the 2017 Nilsen Prize and was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Austin's work has garnered a 2016 Regional Arts Commission Fellowship and a special mention in the 2015 Pushcart Prize Anthology. He, his partner Jennie, and son Elijah live in St. Louis. 

On February 5th, 2020, Ron A. Austin visited Interlochen Arts Academy, and Interlochen Review editors Miracle Thornton, Enzo Gangi, and Seth Kirby joined him for a conversation about the development of the distinctive voice of his narrator, Avery Colt, how comic books and horror movies have shaped his vision as a writer, and the incorporation of artifacts in his debut collection.

Enzo Gangi: How does your relationship with folklore and mythology inform your writing?

Ron A. Austin: Oh, that’s a hard question. Alright, I’m gonna hit this from this angle: there’s this experimental hip-hop group called Death Grips and they have this song called “Takyon,” and there’s a line, a verse where it’s something like “you tap energy from everything on and off the map…” Generally, I’m influenced by everything when I think about it. When I’m drafting I might try to focus on like one or two things, be it a movie, a song, something I’m reading—but preceding that there’s a phase where I’m dry if I absorbed a lot of media. There's also the consideration of the definition of what amounts to mythology or folklore, there's cultural/historical mythology or folklore and there’s personal mythologies… It’s hard to pin down, because I think I naturally start pulling the story out of most anything, so—yes, I’m heavily influenced by mythology and folklore, but it’s also part of a continuum of things that feed my interest.

Miracle Thornton: Could you identify for us some of the things that you were consuming possibly while you were writing the book or even the things that interest you? We know you’re interested in comic books, and I’m wondering if there’s anything else that’s inspired your work.

RA: Probably the most interesting influence would be horror movies and the whole horror genre in general, and not just in terms of slasher/supernatural horror—I prefer supernatural vs. slasher—but also horror that finds a way to produce dread or anxiety, and then anything that is able to explore tension. Besides what would be classically defined as horror, a lot of science fiction where you might have body horror or the meeting of an alien or something like that, there’s that sense of dread or tension that I find really interesting and exciting. That’s something that can be applied to all kinds of fiction or writing, because there needs to be some kind of energy or momentum, and generally speaking, though not always, there has to be some kind of conflict. Mining what makes horror interesting and what keeps you on that wire of suspense, I like taking that. 

EG: We read the graphic translation of “Freezer Burn,” and I was wondering if you could tell us about the process of collaborating with a visual artist to tell that part of Avery’s story? Do you have any surprises, discoveries that emerged?

RA: Actually, the way that this panned out, the person who did the cover and has done subsequent work, Ian O’Neill, he is my dream collaborator and it took me a little bit to get a chance to work with him. 

I’ve always wanted to write comics, or write graphic novels or adaptations, and it is actually one of the things that inspired me to pursue writing. When I was about eighteen or nineteen, I worked for a small press comic book company and I actually read a lot of scripts, I did some editing, and being a partner, we turned out at least five issues of a comic book. It was a vampire comic that actually never saw the light of day because the company folded. Through that experience, I realized how hard it is to actually collaborate with people, and I was like, “Well, I like writing these scripts but I should focus on my prose, because that way I can stand on my own, and once I get to a certain point I can try collaboration again.” 

With “Freezer Burn,” I put out an ad on a comic books forum and some other places and I found an artist in Brazil. I enjoyed working with them, and it was very easy to work with them. But, adapting the flash-fiction “Freezer Burn” into a comic was a big experiment for me. I had studied a lot of sequential storytelling, read a lot of stuff, but I was like, “Well, let me see how this actually works and get a feel for it.” Ultimately, I was happy with the results, but I’m just like, “Ah, there’s some things I would do differently next time.” The collaborator that I worked with, I felt he wasn’t as invested in it as he could have been, ‘cause I think he was more concerned with getting the job done and, you know, making the page great. After I had that experience I was like, “Okay, well, I think I’m in a good space, and I think that if I find someone I like to work with, I’ll see if they’re interested in reading some more work, and if we build a relationship that way.” 

With Ian O’Neill, who has done the cover, he’s done a lot of promotional material, he’s done flyers, and he’s done a comic. I actually worked with him on a logo at first, and the process of working on a logo was so smooth and fluid and also creative that I was like, “Um, you know, I’m working on a story collection and I have a lot of stories laying around, would you want to read some and we could work on some other stuff,” and to my surprise, he was like, “Yes!” To my greater surprise, he actually liked all the stuff and he was like, “Let’s get to work.” 

Collaborating with artists has been really great, but there are pros and cons to collaboration, not just in the sense that you have sole control of the vision if you’re working it by yourself, but it’s just a matter of figuring out how to meet people in the middle, figuring out what they’re interested in, and how there can be give and take. When I work with Ian, I’ll throw out a suggestion and I’ll give him a framework and the things that he adds to it that I wouldn’t even have thought of make it that much better—which is nice, that’s the perfect thing you’d want out of collaboration. Whereas if you work with someone where their interest level is different instead of being something that adds to the vision, sometimes they can take it in a different direction. But mainly it’s fun. 

Seth Kirby: Do you have any advice for people looking to see if they could turn their fiction  into a graphic novel?

RA: The most important part I would say is work on your storytelling skills alone for a while because that way, ideally, if you get your storytelling strong enough, you’ll be able to attract someone that will collaborate with you. And honestly you just have to pay people for their time and their labor. When I was previously working with people on comic book projects, I was just writing the script, and I was fortunate enough to find people who’d say, “Okay, I’ll do some art for it.” But those collaborations can be tenuous as they might get distracted or, reasonably, they might get someone else that pays. 

Collaboration can happen organically at the start of your artistic practice or process if you just have people around you that are interested in making stuff. I think that’s honestly very rare, as a lot of artistic pursuits and practices tend to be solitary. The other way that [collaboration] happens, it tends to happen on a level of platform, when you have essentially proven yourself to a certain level on your own and had your own successes, and then you partner up with someone else who has their own artistic practice, and you get those platforms to overlap. 

Seth: One another question, kind of related to what we were talking about earlier with inspiration, we realized while reading the book that a lot of the locations surrounding the story are immediately visceral and realistic, especially with the grandparents’ corner store, which is a big part of the story. What was it like translating these fragments of your experience into Avery’s stories?

RA: Having the concrete, physical, visceral, in your writing is just kind of a central element of building a world and also storytelling. There are different forms of storytelling, and I guess the most practical concern would be scene vs. summary, the exterior vs. the interior. In this collection, and in my writing in general, I try to pay close attention to what I’m doing on the sentence and line level, and exactly when I need to express a physical or concrete reality and when I can bridge into the interior, or when I need to have some deft summary to aid the flow and effectiveness of the storytelling, and when it needs to get more into physical realities. Sometimes I think when you’re writing stories, the same way that a visual artist would sit down and just paint a setting for practice, I think it’s the same with writing. If you sat down and you were like, “this is a studio, here’s what I notice,” you get those physical details. Some of these physical details just set up the surroundings and scene, they’re just functional, but you might find something that’s interesting or strange or odd, or that can become a central idea and drive some momentum into the narrative.

MT: In our discussion so far, you’ve brought up a lot about image when it comes to the comics and understanding landscape. There are also moments in the book where you pull in the note or the text is mimicking what you’d see in a comic, with capitalized letters and things like that. Can you describe why you decided to incorporate artifacts like the note and how you thought they would influence the reader’s experience?

RA: At my base level as a writer and creator, I would say that I work at the level of high-concept, and I’m always looking for things that are bold or audacious to do. Part of the challenge of writing this collection, which was very formative for me in pursuing my writing craft, was that I needed to make sure that anything that I could do that was interesting [was also] functional, and in a place that added to the storytelling. What I like to say about this collection is that it’s my best attempt at American realism, which I mostly pulled it off, but there were places where I took my liberties to do different things as sort of incorporating surrealism or postmodernism, which are complex traditions within themselves. In those traditions you can warp what is considered to be reality, but in order to effectively use surrealism or postmodernism you need to have a baseline of reality. That kind of ties into the idea of how I’m using physical, visceral detail and I’m trying to play within the bounds and the rules of realism with scene and summary and what a conventional story is. 

A good example would be where the letter appears sort of at the climax of the story or the part that precedes the climax. I had written a version where he just had the letter, he shares it, the sister reads it, and then they go about the business and there’s the revelation. But at that point I figured, this is a moment where I’ve set it up for them to talk about the letter, the letter has been mentioned, it’s the focus, so I could actually put the letter into the text there. My goal was to kind of break that fourth wall, break the boundary a little bit, and also provide more of the mother’s voice in a unique or interesting way while also staying true to the fact that the whole collection is functioning as an extension of Avery’s voice. Sometimes it’s his voice being right in the moment that happened, in which it feels like it has that momentum of something that’s currently happening, but also zooming out to that perspective of him telling that story when he’s older. 

Another way to look at it is, those kinds of artifacts [that] are included, whether it be a note on the back of a gas station receipt or the news clipping at the beginning, have a lot of gravity if you think about storytelling in terms of gravity—you mention a certain detail or you have a certain scene, and it’s something that either arrests the reader in the moment or it sucks in a lot of their attention. At that point, since I’d set it up, I figured I could really get a lot of momentum just giving this letter in a different format and then moving into the proper climax and conclusion of this story.

MT: You talked a little bit about how the novel as a whole is sort of unconventional, and I was wondering whether or not you consider Avery Colt is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar to be more of a novel or a series of interconnected stories. How would you define this book or would you not define it at all?RA: To be fair and rigid, I would say it’s a story cycle. I really enjoy writing stories, and as far as literature goes, and also just writing in general, there’s the tension between which form has “supremacy,” so some people would say, “Novels, you have to write novels.” There’s a practical, professional component to that, because people will buy novels. That’s all it comes down to. And there’s also the idea that as far as realism goes, whenever philosophers are talking about realism in writing, the novel superseded everything else as the form that could most effectively frame realism, because you have more room to give more details. 

But I think it was Nabokov who said he wanted to be able to write something in such a way that he could do in two lines what a novel could do in five hundred pages. The reverse of that, the other side of it is that some folks would say that writing in the shorter form is the more difficult and, I don’t know, noble practice. I mean, for me personally, when I tend to write things, I don’t hold those boundaries clear in my mind that “this is a novel” or “this is a story.” I think there are certain things that a novel can do more effectively, but the short story can do particular things, they all have their pros and cons. But as far as this book goes, I would definitely say it’s a story cycle. It has been called a novel, but generally people who like to write novels would be like, “No, it’s a novel” and I’m like, “Sure.” Also, I have tried to sell it previously as a novel in stories, but the agents weren’t as quick to make that allowance, lol. 

EG: Talking about the publishing process, were there any difficulties or sacrifices you had to make in terms what this collection represents?

RA: Not really, but that's mainly because of the approach that I took to the publishing process altogether. I think that as a writer and as a collaborator, I'm pretty flexible, but of course there are points where I can be rigid. The one thing I wanted to make sure of is that as I was pursuing publication, I was working with people who just had really great insight. It's almost like I'm asking someone to let me use their venue. It’s their venue and I want to add something to it. I'm contributing to it and I have to work with them and respect their insights that they have. Any editorial work is almost like an extension of workshopping. 

One goal that I always have in mind with my projects is that I want to get it to a place where I'm really happy and comfortable with it, where I know when I send it out somebody will pick it up and it's strong enough on its own and somebody good will see the merit. Working with the people at Southeast Missouri State University Press, with James Brubaker, everybody over there is amazing. The process was really great, really warm, really comfortable—they want the best for you and your work. At the same time, I knew once I finished the book it wasn’t like, “Here you go guys, do whatever with it.” I knew that I still wanted to do revisions. Along the path, I probably reread and revised the entire book maybe 4-5 times as I was putting it together and incorporating even just line by line changes. If you find people that are interested in your viewpoint, believe in you and believe in the work, and you meet that energy, you keep giving, there's a great possibility you’ll put out a good project.

MT: This is sort of jumping back a little bit to the idea of this being a story cycle. How has that influenced your work with Avery's voice? Especially because this seems like a bildungsroman, we’re watching him grow throughout this and so I was wondering how that's influenced your understanding of his voice? 

RA: I appreciate this question because it’s a very technical concern but it's also kind of emotional and spiritual. Looking at it from the technical concerns, the point of view that you write a book from, whether it’s first, second or third person and all the different variations of third person, they have a big effect on what you can technically and structurally do within a certain form—also, what you can access. I like working from all the different points of views and all the different angles that they offer up, but I knew that I would be able to get deeper into the world and into a character if I used the first person point of view. 

As I was conceiving Avery, I had to think of what qualities would be part of his character that would allow me and allow him to express stories in a particular way. It took a lot of calibration and modulation. Whenever you're developing a particular character voice, you have to think about how they would actually tell a story, what kind of influences that you can see in their character that would allow them to tell a story. 

I worked with Avery's voice for so long and now I’ve switched over to writing stories in the third person. It might not be immediately noticeable to everybody else, but it's a big difference to me, because when you write even in a close third person you have way more options then what you do with first person. In the story collection, you have immediate access to the interior, so you also have a lot of access to emotions. The emotions and the mood can color exactly what's happening in the story or what the character is focusing on, whereas in third person you can't do that as easily. But the trade-off is that you can talk about more external things and it's a different kind of synthesis. 

SK: Were there any decisions you made specifically for how these different stories were supposed to be read or interpreted?

RA: Most of the editing was just consistency. I use italics in a particular way. If I'm building a setting or doing some summary and I want to have some voice in it I'll add a snatch of dialogue as if it's part of the setting in italics. And the publisher noticed that that could be confusing, so we met somewhere in the middle. I'm reading a book right now where anytime the narrator talks, he never puts his speech in quotations unless he’s saying something that's not true or he's imagining what he’ll say. It's a really small thing but it makes a big difference. 

The only kind of big revision that was requested at one point was in “The Gatecrasher of Hyboria.” There is the part where it's focusing on Conan the Barbarian and Avery reading the comic books. Someone on the editing team suggested that maybe I could tighten the story around this comic book format or Conan the Barbarian. I liked the idea but thought that would kind of defeat a lot of the other things are going on in the story. 

I was super fortunate because first/second/third book stories are not always as rosy. Whenever this book got accepted, I was asking people around me who recently put out a first book what their experience was like and they had a lot of stories to tell me. I was actually scared for a moment, but I was very fortunate. James Brubaker does a lot of really great work at SEMO Press. I can always text him and ask stupid questions. This first major publishing process as been more than I could’ve hoped for. It’s great when you find a group of people that you really enjoy and you want to support them and they support you. 

MT: Lastly, you were telling us that you've been writing in third person recently, so I was wondering if you could tell us what you’re working on currently?

RA: Right now I’m working on another story cycle which will precede work on a novel. With these projects I like to challenge myself to do something new technically. With Avery Colt, as I was getting towards the end of the collection—it's also kind of is what let me know that I was drawing towards the end—with the “Freezer Burn,” I’m using flash fiction that's a bit of a different format than what I normally work in, and with the talking crows, that kind of pushed the bounds of what I could actually do with realism. I wanted to adopt a different format 

In my next project the story cycle is working with magical realism and for me is the challenge of the different ways that I can manifest magical realism, what can I do with it. I'm also telling the story from various different perspectives. The working title right now of the next collection is called Catacombs Incorporated. The impetus: East St. Louis is a kind of a boom-and-bust town, then some of that has affected North St. Louis, where I grew up. Big industries came in at a certain point and brought a lot of jobs and prosperity and then once those corporations moved out they just left behind those communities. In the story cycle, I envisioned what if a new corporation moved in and was creating jobs and opportunities, but there's a whole lot of other things going on with the corporation and it may not be the best thing for the community. I'm also working with higher concepts. There's a bit of a crisis with housing in North St. Louis and also abandoned houses, so I'm trying to think of solutions for some of those concerns. In one story, I have someone selling these magic bricks—if you take the iconic red brick that St. Louis is known for and plant it, they grow into a house.