Our spring launch of Ryan Habermeyer's playful and atmospheric debut novel, Necronauts, is on the horizon! Written in the form of ninety-five newspaper obituaries and interspersed with vernacular photography, Necronauts is a loosely reimagined Pinocchio tale and ode to campy old sci-fi films. By turns philosophical and whimsical, savage and sentimental, Ryan Habermeyer’s funhouse ride through the American West is also an intimate portrait of fathers and sons and a searing satire of 1980s Americana—where addictive religious paranoia and suspect science blur into a quixotic fever dream full of reckless fantasy.
To provide readers with a little more insight on the author, Stillhouse Press talked with Ryan to get a peek into his writing process, hobbies, and more.
Q: What’s your favorite way to get in the zone of writing?
A: I would say long drives, because highway hypnosis is a real thing and I love it, but walking does the trick too. Wandering, meandering, getting lost. It’s like stepping outside of yourself and freeing your brain from the drudgery of your own life. One walk in the morning, one in the evening. I’m out there walking and talking to myself. It helps to vocalize it so you can hear the words and ideas take shape inside you. Long walks are great for working out story problems and generating new possibilities. But the writing itself? That’s just work. You sit down and do it. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. But I do love some dromomania.
Q: Outside of teaching and writing, what do you enjoy doing?
A: I got the travel itch. My wife grew up a military brat and was something of a nomad, so she got me hooked on never wanting to stay in the same place too long. We’ve lived in five states, visited another twenty-four, and been to twenty-one countries. I can’t imagine life without travel. I do a lot of cooking too. Sometimes I think it would be bliss to retire and become a BBQ pitmaster. There’s a strange alchemy to BBQ. I’m fascinated by anything that is a fusion of art and science.
Q: What was the inspiration behind Necronauts?
A: Oh, this is a dangerous question. So many different inspirations over so many years. The obvious one is I really love campy 1950s sci-fi movies. There’s something oddly magical about them. They’re so bad they’re good. And I wanted to pay homage to that genre and time period somehow because I hadn’t seen it done before (but it probably does exist out there somewhere). But I’m not a fan of hard sci-fi with the space opera and expansive world-building and techno-gadget obsession kind of thing. I like lo-fi sci-fi—where there’s a surreal science fiction premise but the focus is on the gritty realism of that otherworldly thing. I think Kate Folk does this better than anyone I’ve seen in Out There. So, I had this idea kicking around my head for years about a kid with a cosmonaut helmet grafted onto his head who watches too many of those campy sci-fi movies and starts believing he’s an alien. And then the cosmonaut boy builds a catapult to launch himself into outer space to reunite with the mothership. I thought it was a pretty good idea. But it took me forever to find the right stylistic vehicle to tell that story. It wasn’t until I started writing the book as a series of obituaries, and then localized the story in the Utah desert, that I was able to stitch everything together.
Q: What kinds of books do you enjoy reading? Any favorite books or authors?
A: I’m a fan of old school fabulists like Borges, Calvino, Kafka, Angela Carter, Lenora Carrington, and Bruno Schulz. And stylists like Nabokov and McCarthy. Lately, I’ve been drawn to experimental fiction. Books that blend fiction and non-fiction; books that take lyrical risks with language; books that experiment with form. László Krasznahorkai. W.G. Sebald. Thomas Bernhard. Olga Tokarczuk. Benjamín Labatut. Robert Walser. I secretly think I was born in Eastern Europe and smuggled out. I love satire too. Rabelais. Sterne. Swift. Don Quixote. Viktor Pelevin’s Oman Ra. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Hrabal’s I Served the King of England. I wish real literary satire would make a comeback.
Q: What times of day would you say were the best for writing for you?
A: With teaching, four kids, and juggling life…I write when I can. I do a lot of thinking and note-taking during the day, and then the writing comes easiest at night after it’s been stewing in my head. I used to write every day, but now I write in bursts. Like a volcano of pressure bubbling inside me until I have to write it all down. I don’t like this habit, to be honest; I much prefer the old days when I would write out everything longhand, multiple drafts of just pen and paper, but life is life and it often gets in the way of writing. You make time when you can.
Q: Did you ever experience writer’s block while writing Necronauts? If so, how did you navigate it?
A: Does taking seventeen years to write the book count as writer’s block? Yes and no. The first time the cosmonaut boy appeared in anything I wrote was this terrible novella I submitted to workshop the last semester of my MFA program. My professor at the time, Chris Bachelder, told me the story was a mess but there was something about that cosmonaut boy worth keeping. I’m glad I listened to him. But I wouldn’t say that writer’s block in the traditional sense was the struggle. I loved the idea I had, this boy watching too many sci-fi movies and believing he was an alien, but I was never satisfied with how I was telling the story. For me, writing is a matter of form and voice. If I don’t have those, I can’t move the story forward. So, I wrote bits and pieces on/off again for over a decade. Vignettes and anecdotes. But I couldn’t figure out the right voice for the cosmonaut boy and I disliked writing his story in the conventional novel style with character arcs and dramatization and plot points, etc. After a close friend died, I had this epiphany of sorts at the funeral that I should revisit the book but tell it through a series of obituaries. Maybe this sounds batshit nuts, but it really felt like my dead friend tapped me on the shoulder from beyond the grave and gifted me that idea. In a way, he became my cosmonaut boy and guided me through to finish the book.
Q: Do you have any superstitious things that you have to do or have with you when you write?
A: I’m superstitious in other aspects of my life, but not with writing. I don’t have any rituals or habits. I hear cocaine and Chivas regal worked for Hunter S. Thompson. Maybe I should give that a try and the next book won’t take so long to write?
Q: What’s your favorite snack to accompany your writing?
A: I used to eat pistachios pretty regularly while writing, but then I got fixated on those infuriating ones that won’t crack open. Schrödinger’s pistachio, I called them. I had to stop all snacking while writing. I often get distracted by metaphysical conundrums.
Q: How often would you write? Did you set time aside each day or each week?
A: With Necronauts, after fifteen years of those false starts and dead-ends, it took me about six months or so to do a complete rewrite start to finish. Then I had a sabbatical from the university where I visited Utah and wandered about the desert for a few weeks. That really gave the book its flavor. When I came back, I was writing pretty much every day for three months until the sabbatical finished. Living inside the book like that day in and day out was pretty intense. I’d never written like that before. It felt like a fever dream.
Q: How did you get into the mindset of your characters?
A: I think I’m like most writers in that I often pull little details and tidbits from my life or the life of family members and friends and insert them into my stories. My brothers like to read my stuff and hunt for these Easter eggs, trying to see if there is family lore that makes it into print. But creating a character often starts with me. Whether that’s channeling something from my own experience, or exploring some anxiety, trait, habit, desire, or curiosity I have. I probably struggled most with figuring out the cosmonaut boy in the novel. Here’s this kid—might be human, might be an alien, nobody knows—wearing this helmet that makes it so nobody hears what he might be saying. And he tries to use sign language but nobody pays attention or takes the time to learn his language. So, there’s this constant miscommunication the whole book. Every conversation he’s in there’s this slight disconnect where people are talking over each other and not quite hearing him and he’s not quite hearing them. And the root of that, if I’m psychoanalyzing myself here, came from having a daughter born with some hearing disabilities coupled with my own mid-life hearing loss. But obviously much of the story is invented and imagined too. My characters are also completely unlike me. I do a lot of eavesdropping in public, so my characters often begin as someone I’ve been watching and listening to. I’m a voyeur. Writers have to be. Most characters have a starting point in reality and I invent from there. I like starting with something real and then pretending. I’ve been pretending at pretty much everything I do all my life. Husband, father, son, professor, writer. It’s all pretend.
Q: Did you do anything specific to get into a scene that you were writing? If so, what is it?
A: To piggyback on what I said before, getting those cosmonaut boy scenes right with the disjointed dialogue that miscommunicates and disconnects was sometimes a struggle. But what was more challenging was finding the right style for writing the obituaries. I needed a certain degree of realism and verisimilitude. I needed each obituary to feel like an actual obituary even if it wasn’t, even if it was really a micro-narrative part of a longer novel. That’s the tricky thing about nesting a fictional story in a nonfiction form. It has to look and feel like the real thing even it’s a kind of fakery. It was a juggling act but also a kind of sleight of hand. I did quite a bit of research on the obituary style. And I must have read a few hundred actual obituaries and death notices going back as far as the 18th century. They have this long, fascinating rhetorical history. They used to be these spiraling narratives written in an ornate style with literary flourish and include random details and digressions, especially in the 19th century. Other times, they were brief to the point of being absurd. And I loved those contradictions about the form. So, I borrowed here and there and experimented until I found what I felt was the narrative voice.
Q: What’s your favorite thing about being a professor?
A: The power, for sure. Being a professor is like being a cult leader. You have so much cultural influence and prestige and public adoration and they give you one of those tweed jackets with the elbow patches so the kids become your devoted zealots. I’m drunk on that power. And the grading. Nothing says professional bliss like reviewing freshman composition essays and the occasional student fanfic erotica.
Q: What’s the coolest thing you saw while you lived abroad?
A: The Kafka museum in Prague was fantastic. And the bog bodies in Copenhagen. At the train station in Kraków—which is one of my new favorite cities—a man stopped me and said his name was Cosmos and wanted to know if I would ride to Jupiter with him on a flying carpet. This happens to me more often than I would like to admit. My wife can vouch. Random people often approach me when we’re traveling with questions, ideas, rants, sermons, who knows. Another guy stopped me outside the grocery store in Poland and tried to sell me his wellness book about how eating twenty-three eggs a day will basically make me immortal. Maybe I have a face that screams weirdos welcome. I also nearly got stabbed in Morocco by a guy quoting Kerouac. He was trying to mug me. That was cool because I didn’t die.
Q: Does your writing process change depending on what you’re writing?
A: Yes? No? I haven’t thought about it before, honestly. Not sure my process changes, but I do feel a shift between genres. I find nonfiction, especially lyric essays, far more liberating and easier to write. I can slip into that style and voice much quicker than I can a character in a fictional story. I think my brain works better in fragments and anecdotal segments, writing that builds through associative leaps. In many ways, nonfiction is more pleasurable to write these days. I don’t feel as constrained or self-conscious. And the act of research is a delight. But it’s more exhausting, too, maybe because I’m often culling details from my own life and experience and finding ways to splice those into some other narrative. And that drains me emotionally. With fiction, I feel the stakes less, which is maybe why I’m prone to being a bit more savage in my fiction than with nonfiction (at least, this is what my wife tells me). I’m more detached when writing fiction. I think the pleasure of fiction is pretending, but the satisfaction of nonfiction is discovering.
Q: What inspired you to become a professor?
A: There’s the romantic idea of being a literary professor where all you do is sit around and read and write all day and drink gin from a flask and enjoy the life of the mind. And that’s a nice fantasy, certainly one that captivated me when I was an undergrad, but the reality is much different. It’s not Dead Poets Society. It’s a lot of meetings and politics and nitty gritty bureaucracy. I studied microbiology and zoology as an undergrad for three years before shifting to literature. Clearly, I became a professor to disappoint my mother who wanted a doctor in the family.
Q: How do you come up with ideas to write about?
A: Living. Reading. Listening. Traveling. Watching movies. Staring out the window. Paying attention. Especially the last one. I often tell my students that one of the things I can’t teach them is intellectual curiosity. If you’re not curious about things, if you’re not obsessed with stuff, if you’re just sort of floating through your days without noticing the shape of clouds, or wondering what Prague smelled like in 1732, or hypothesizing which way the toilet water will swirl on Mars—if you’re not curious you’re not going to have any ideas. With my first book, there was a story in the collection about an enormous foot that washes ashore in this small town. And it kinda terrorizes the town and they terrorize it back. The idea for that came from a newspaper headline I saw about severed feet washing ashore in in the Pacific Northwest. That image struck me. But I didn’t have the story until I took the “What if?” leap and made it a gigantic severed foot and wrote it in the 1st POV plural with how the town was fascinated and terrified by this foot. So, it’s that combination of curiosity and imagination. I feel like being a writer is noticing what others overlook. So, I try to be curious. And do a lot of daydreaming. To come full circle: that’s why I love walking. I’ll just walk and walk and let my mind wander into weird territories. It’s almost like the stories are waiting there and I have to walk my way into them.
To preorder Necronauts, click here.
