Written Author Interview
- Tell us a bit about yourself. What sort of things do you enjoy doing outside of writing?
I have a few assorted hobbies that I dabble in. I collect old photographs. I like playing the piano. Chopin, Rachmaninoff. I kind of live to travel. I grew up in California but then moved all across the country for school and work. Living in my sixth state now and have visited twenty-four others. Been to twenty-one countries and counting. I can’t imagine life without travel. It’s nice to see how strange yet familiar the rest of the world is. I love to cook too. Not a baker—that’s my wife— but a cook. If I could do it all over again, and if I wasn’t bit by the writing bug, I might have been a chef of some sort. Cooking is a lot like writing actually. The creative process behind combining flavors is not unlike crafting sentences. There’s an instinct and a magic to it.
2. What is your most recent book about?
I had this idea many years ago about writing a modern-day Don Quixote story. I love Quixote. That book is as important now as it was 500 years ago. Anyway… I’m a glutton for campy 1950s sci-fi movies, so many years ago I decided to fuse the Quixote motif with my own obsession and write a story about a boy with a cosmonaut helmet grafted onto his head—maybe it was a freak accident, maybe he was born that way, maybe he’s a Russian spy, or maybe it’s just a fishbowl he put there himself—who watches too many of these trashy B-movies and believes he is an alien. Then he builds a catapult in the middle of the desert trying to launch himself into outer space to reunite with the mothership. And that’s pretty much the novel. Except that I wrote it in the form of 95 obituaries. So, every chapter is a brief obituary about someone in this small, Utah town who knows the cosmonaut boy and has an interaction with him. On the one hand, it’s the story of this town and all the misfits, perverts, and prophets living there, and spliced into that is the story of the cosmonaut boy. Oh, and for good measure I put in about fifty vintage photographs to play with the fine line between facts and fiction, teasing the idea that the events of the book really happened. And that’s the origins of Necronauts.
It’s probably the oddest things I’ve ever written. But, then again, I only write weird stuff so hard to say.
3. If there was someone famous that you would recommend to read your book, who would it be?
My first thought here was Kafka or Nabokov, two of my favorite writers. But, there’s also a section of the book where I talk about a Karl Marx reenactment pageant in Utah hosted by a local toilet paper factory, so maybe I’d want Marx to read it. Not that I’d care what he’d have to say about the book so much as I would enjoy seeing the look on his face when he read that part.
4. Do you have a favorite spot you like to sit and write?
I’m not a big believer in writing rituals, actually. I don’t have a set time or place where I write, and I don’t make rules for myself to write a certain amount of words each day or impose on myself writing time constraints. I do write daily— sometimes longhand, sometimes on the notes on my phone, sometimes on my laptop—but without rigid stipulations. But here’s a fun story: I used to write in church all the time. I would go every Sunday with my yellow legal pad and write in the pew. I wrote most of my second collection of short stories that way. Sunday after Sunday, longhand. It was fantastic. The sermons were a kind of white noise in the background that functioned like a creative laxative.
5. Did you experience any form of writer’s block while working on this piece? If so, what tips do you have for other authors that are struggling with writer’s block?
Yes and no. I mean, Necronauts took me seventeen years to write. Was that due to writer’s block? I wouldn’t call it that. At least not in the sense that I was creatively paralyzed and couldn’t get the story out. I couldn’t get it right, and that’s a different problem. Most of those years I was trying to figure out what the story was exactly and how best to tell it. Getting stuck is part of the writing process. Nobody
moves smoothly through creativity. The false starts, dead ends, brick walls, discarded pages, and labyrinths are just a natural part of being creative. I wrote four or five drafts of the book, hundreds of pages, and then abandoned it because I could feel it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to. And then I would come back to it months, years later, and extract those parts which were effective and start up all over again. I think the problem some writers have is that they assume they’re supposed to sit there and be stuck, or remove that difficult moment, or maybe plow through to the end and say they’ll fix it later. None of those strategies work for me. I abandon projects all the time. Sometimes when I get bored with them, other times when I can’t figure out how to make something work. That’s when I start something new. Then when I finish the new thing I’ll go back to the old, stuck thing and it’s like magic: I can see the problem from before but now I know how to write my way through it. And if I’m still stuck then I leave it abandoned until I rediscover it and know how to fix it. Which is to say, I’m a very, very slow writer who leaps from one project to the next finding my way through like a blindfolded nun in the Playboy mansion. I write in piecemeal. Vignettes, anecdotes, dialogues, compressed scenes. Then I go back and try to shape it so there’s some continuity, some fluidity to the whole story. Of course, sometimes you don’t need to let the work sit—you need to get up and move around. I love long walks. Wandering, meandering, getting lost. It works. Walk and talk to yourself about the writing. Vocalize it. When you say it out loud it becomes real, which means you hear all the bullshit; you can’t lie to yourself when you say it out loud. Even in the dead of winter, take walks. It’ll do wonders for your writing.
6. What time of day is most productive for you to write?
Like I was saying before, I don’t really have prescribed writing rituals. I teach, have four kids, and am still trying to figure out this thing called life. My day-to-day feels like perpetual chaos, so, I write sporadically. That means thinking about stuff. Letting it stew in my mind and take shape. Jotting down notes. Writing a few paragraphs when I’m waiting for my daughter’s piano lesson to be over. I used to be more disciplined and ritualistic. But life gets in the way. The important thing is to make time to do the work, however you can make it work. And when you’re doing the work, be present in it. My wife and kids know that look on my face and don’t bother me when they see it.
7. When you are writing, what are you typically listening to in the background? Silence? Favorite playlist? Podcast?
Total silence. Always. I can’t concentrate on the words in my head and getting them onto the page if I have music in the background. I’ll get too distracted by the music. The music will overwhelm me. That said, I’ll often listen to music before I start writing to capture a mood, an ambiance, a vibe. Music is like a primer for me. The fuel I need to tell a particular story. I can tell you some of the music that primed Necronauts: Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir.” Beck, “Lost Cause.” David Bowie, “Loving the Alien.” Alela Diane, “Pieces of String Too Small to Use.” The Smiths, “How Soon is Now?” Ricky Nelson, “Lonesome Town.” Tom Waits, “Time.” Steve Miller Band, “Serenade.” And Spacemen 3, “Lord Can You Hear Me?”
8. Is there a particular scene or part in your book that you are incredibly proud of?
I try to take the advice of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that it is best to never re-read or talk about or even think of your work once it’s finished and off to the press. Too much regret and angst in thinking about it that way. If I start thinking about the scenes, I’m going to want to rewrite all of them. But, I suppose what I’m most pleased with is finding a way to make the form work. I never thought I’d write a novel in the form of 95 obituaries, and while writing it I wavered between this is pretty great and this is the dumbest thing ever what the hell am I doing? so I’m pleased that I was able to stitch it together. It’s not a perfectly polished book. It’s fragmented and chaotic and botched, but I love the idea of an imperfectly perfect thing. Like the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic where art embraces its inherent impurities and inevitable ruin; or how the Navajo weavers will deliberately stitch mistakes into their rug designs. I’d like to think of Necronauts on those terms. I’m happy it turned out a little ruined.
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About
Ryan Habermeyer is the author of the forthcoming novel Necronauts and the short story collections Salt Folk and The Science of Lost Futures. His award-winning stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, and others. A Fulbright scholar who has lived, taught and studied in Poland, Scotland, Spain and Mexico, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University.
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Author Website: ryanhabermeyer.com
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