Coyotes, Lizard People, and an Interview with Ryan Rivas, Oh My!, by Alex Gurtis
Continuing my thread of examining those walking the delicate balance between writer and publisher, I reached out to Ryan Rivas whose latest book, Lizard People, came out with 30 West last fall and previous book, Next Door in Colonialtown came out with Autofocus. Ryan has championed many writers’ careers as the editor of Burrow Press including Ariel Francisco, Alysia Sawchyn, Marisa Siegal, Shane Hinton, among others while being a literary tour de force in Orlando, where I’m based. Here is the conversation we had over email at the end of May.
Barrelhouse: For those that don’t know you, can you talk a little bit about your writing journey from your early days as a flash fiction writer who in 2012 was included in Best American Nonrequired Reading to founding Burrow Press around the same time to this tour de force return with both mixed media/poetry(?) collection Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus, 2022) and most recently with your novella Lizard People (ThirtyWest, 2023)?
Ryan Rivas: I was writing short stories in a writing group with Burrow's co-founder, Jana Waring, right before we decided to start the press in 2010. Between founding Burrow and working for a children's literacy nonprofit, I think flash fiction was all I had time for. That mode really stuck as a creative outlet for much of my time running Burrow. Not to say Burrow itself isn't a creative outlet, but it's not the same as writing. I recommitted to my own fiction writing around 2018 and since then it's just been about keeping to a routine as much as possible.
Let’s talk about your latest project, Lizard People. Lizard People is a novella about a man who has grown up his whole life thinking he is Iizard person. After an incident at work, this character is sent to a coastal rehabilitation facility, where, between pool time and a reappearance of an ill intended love interest, his therapist tries to set him on a journey of self-reflection involving this particular self-identity. One of the most brilliant parts of this story is around the climax where you have this seamless turn from story into an almost philosophical musing involving the therapists notes back to story again. How do you approach balancing the needs of the story, pacing, and accessibility with inserting deeper, more intellectual sections?
The narrator of the book is more unreliable than usual for obvious reasons, and in much of the story you can see the lengths he goes to rationalize his belief that he's a lizard person. And yet this is really the only odd thing about him. He's otherwise a well-adjusted dude. I think the contrast creates ambiguity for the reader. But the story is in first-person and ultimately his beliefs are a closed system, so the narrator is not capable of letting the reader into any larger story world or context, which is where the excerpt from the therapist's research proposal comes in. One reason for including that was just to ground the story and suggest a different interpretation.
Can you talk a little bit about your writing process for this project? If I remember correctly, you once said you knocked out the initial draft over a long weekend.
The book started with freewriting one scene after having a conversation with a friend about hypno-therapy. In that scene the narrator recovers an early childhood memory that suggests his mother might be a monster of some kind, something with claws. The story grew from me trying to figure out what I could be trying to mean by that scene. When the idea that the mother might be a lizard of some kind came to me, the idea of the lizard people conspiracy theory followed, and so on. The thought process wasn't that linear, I don't think it ever is. But once I realized the narrator thought he and his mother were so-called "lizard people," some other details fell into place, and I discovered that I had a kind of concept for the story. This helped the plot come into focus. I wrote an incomplete 6,000-word short story pretty quickly. I sent that draft to some people and over the course of a few months the size had doubled and it was more or less in its current form. The whole book came together quickly because I could actually see the whole story, its structure and beats, very early on, which kept the writing momentum going. That doesn't usually happen to me, but I would donate a kidney for it to happen consistently.
How did writing flash prepare you for writing (relatively) longer works?
Writing flash is an act of extreme distillation. Every word counts. Every image and gesture is imbued with meaning. I think first and foremost practicing flash fiction helped me as an editor of other people, to be unsparing on the sentence level. And that carried over into my longer works, which as you point out is a relative term. Lizard People is 12,000 words –– a novella but really a novelette if we're talking to people in the genre world, where that length is more common. And I've been submitting a 33,000-word novel that many people would call a novella. They're all novels to me. I don't know if flash fiction caused me to write shorter works, but I think it helped me hone in on writing specific scenes. And when it comes to revision and making line-level changes, the impulse to be precise is still there.
After being the editor for so long, can you talk to the experience of having the role reversal and being the one being edited?
I really enjoyed working with both Autofocus and Thirty West on my respective books. It was the same kind of collaborative experience I aim for when working with Burrow authors, and the kind you often see in the small press world. I'm just glad that I found a couple of folks -- in Mike Wheaton at Autofocus and Josh Dale at Thirty West -- who are great to work with. The biggest difference I noticed between being editor and writer is that as editor I have total confidence in the books I publish and am happy to tell everyone how incredible they are. Whereas when I'm the writer I become overly self-conscious and obnoxiously modest about the work. Apologies to anyone who has encountered this side of me.
One of the notable traits your books share is the use of hybridity: photos and the juxtaposition of collaged Next-Door comments in Next Door in Colonialtown and this brilliant blend of traditional story that gives way to a section of manifesto/psychology report in Lizard People. Can you talk about how form and hybridity come into your work? Do you start with a concept first or does the story/writing process influence form?
I think the results of both projects come from an openness to using different materials in writing, like photos, documents, diagrams, illustrations. Steven Dunn's water & power is a brilliant example of a novel that hasn't forgotten the almost unlimited kinds of material a novel can contain. But the photos that appear in Nextdoor in Colonialtown started as a low-stakes creative outlet while I was working on a novel. The whole book came about almost as a challenge from the publisher to add nonfictional text. That forced me to think conceptually about what I was doing with the photos and led me to Nexdoor.com. And as I mentioned, even with more traditional prose like Lizard People, I kind of stumbled into a concept out of interpreting a freewrite. I'm often working from a broader concept or idea or premise, but I usually don't know what I'm doing at the beginning of a project other than writing a prose narrative. There's an energy in the unpredictability and spontaneity of early drafts that, if I'm lucky, will still be there in the final product. But to wrangle the writing into a story and finish it, usually a big part of that revision work is interpretive. Re-reading myself and trying to understand what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it. A better understanding of the story leads to the right form. And the form can almost function as a constraint that helps me focus and finish the work.
How has running a press influenced your work/or writing process?
Well, I wrote before the press and I'm still running the press, so I don't really know. My publisher brain is often thinking about all the other aspects of a book -- cover, copy, promotion, events -- while it's in progress. It can sometimes be hard to turn that off when working on my own stuff, and that's not really what you want to be thinking about in the middle of a project.
How have the writers you have worked with at Burrow Press influenced your work?
I think editing other writers has helped me identify some of my own bad habits. Same goes for working through problems with structure and other craft stuff. The muscles editors use are the same ones writers use in revision, so it's all a kind of practice -- the only difference when you're editing is that you get to make the suggestions and then go about your day untroubled.
Animals plays a role in your books. First you had coyotes then lizards, how do see the role of animals in or in association with your books?
You forgot humans. The majority of animals in my books are human.
Where do you see your work going from here? Any new projects on the horizon?
I'm working on two novels at the moment while submitting this other one. Still thinking about whiteness and identity, the gothic, and Florida history.
What advice do you have for writers that want to get involved in the publishing aspect of the writing industry?
Familiarize yourself as much as you can with what's available online. Try to get a broad outline of how it works from big 5 to small press. Identify some publishers that you admire. Look for internships. Consider volunteering with a small press if you can afford to. Reach out to people in the industry. If you're committed to the small press world, check out CLMP.org. I got a lot of great advice, especially from small press publishers, early on. If you know what you want to ask and are respectful of people's time, you'd be surprised how generous some folks can be.
And last but never least, what’s your favorite Patrick Swayze Movie?
The one with all the white people LOL which I guess is to say all of them.
Ryan Rivas is the author of the text-image book Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus, 2022) and the novella Lizard People (ThirtyWest, 2023). He is the Publisher of Burrow Press, and the Coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University’s creative writing program. A Macondo Writers Workshop fellow, his work has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Necessary Fiction, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and elsewhere.
Alex Gurtis is a poet and critic whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Autofocus, Barrelhouse, Hobart After Dark, Rejection Letters, and The West Trade Review among others. A ruth weiss Foundation Maverick Poet Award Finalist, Alex received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.