Photo by Jennifer Goldring
Ron Austin
In Avery Colt Is a Snake. A Thief. A Liar, Ron Austin’s descriptions are so alive—like the baby possums, “curled into big Cs like overcooked prawns” in “a nest of splinters and pulp”—that you have to play the parlor game, sifting writer from subject, teasing out the process. His began years ago, while he was working in communications and writing when he could, a story at a time. He received a 2016 Regional Arts Commission fellowship. In January 2017, he was at work when the phone rang: Austin’s as-yet unpublished manuscript had won the Nilzen Prize. He fought back tears, he says, not sure his colleagues would understand how important this was. Not the prizes or publication (the book’s out October 1, published by Southeast Missouri Press) but “genuinely creating something to connect to another person.”
OK, so just how much of Avery Colt is you?
One time I left my family home, came back, and found a baby possum underneath my desk. Well, that’s curious. There must have been a pregnant possum in the attic. Years later, I heard someone talk about finding a possum in the attic, and somebody asked what he did, and he said, ‘Well, I shot it.’ And I thought, That’s something my grandfather might do. So that was the leaping off point to understand certain personality types and build relatable situations. I’m building these situations and dropping people into them to see how it plays out.
And fiction gives you that freedom.
Yeah. I like the storytelling mode of fiction, the way you can use it to create the best situations and characters to speak to your themes. In memoir or personal essay, you are looking for patterns. In fiction, you have a little more room to create those patterns. A lot of really great stories are a combination of a lot of different stories, stitched together. It’s an effort to understand a setting or situation or the way communities function.
What is it about adolescence that makes the coming of age novel so compelling?
You’re naturally in a mode of observation. As a writer, you are detailing and cataloging experience. At certain ages, when you are set into a pattern or routine, you are probably not going to use those observational skills as much. But when someone is going from adolescence to adulthood, they constantly have to weigh the examples set in front of them to start getting a sense of who they are. There’s a lot of tension there. At what point do you conform to expectations, and where do you break away from that, and ultimately where does that leave you? If you conform, there’s a certain ease. You are fitting yourself into a mold, and you don’t necessarily have to think as much. But depending on who you are as a person and how you conceive of yourself, at a certain point, it might make sense to take some risks and build your own mold. Tension and conflict naturally lead you to having realizations, because you need those realizations so you can make the best decisions.
You write so well about your grandfather, who could “turn solid coin out of crushed beer cans, squeeze water from stone, resurrect busted engines with a thump and growl, honor old covenants of earth, blood, and motor oil. He could sew a loose stitch into a suit and clothe a naked man, roll breadcrumbs into a loaf and fill empty stomachs. But only a fool would mistake his kindness for weakness.”
My grandfather was the example of traditional manhood. Where is the tipping point when it becomes toxic masculinity? Growing up, I saw him fairly quiet, but he was just as likely to deal with a situation by speaking through it as by acting. The news clip in the book, from the robbery? That actually happened at my grandparents’ corner market. Instead of calling the police, he would fight people to defend his storefront. That’s the example I grew up with. There are positive aspects of that—wanting to be a guardian, a defender, a provider. But at what point do you do damage to yourself or destroy connections that you could have made? I wanted to remember a little bit more of the sensitivity. If he could be tough or even cruel, those were behaviors he needed to express in order to survive in the environment at the time.
To what extent are you the rebellious Avery who “refused to thumb through boring-ass baby books,” preferring comics that were “musty and pulpy and dusty and bloody and lewd.”
I’ve never been classically rebellious. I don’t even want to say that I’m necessarily stubborn. But I like to learn by doing, and I’m fine with experimenting and taking risks and failing. In fifth grade, we had a reading requirement, and I just didn’t like those books. I didn’t find them interesting. But I was reading comic books and fantasy novels. I’d go to school with a backpack of books and sit there and read those all day during school. I started to fail out of the reading requirement, so I was pushed into remedial reading. At least those books were more fun. When it came down to it, my parents intervened and said, “He reads all the time. There’s no way he can’t read.” So I had to go to Sylvan Learning Center, and I tested at the 11th-grade level.
Now you’re all grown up with a fancy MFA. Comics or prose?
Depends on which medium you’re most comfortable in. There are plenty of intelligently written, expertly crafted graphic novels. I thought about taking some of the stories in Avery Colt and turning them into comics. When you are writing prose, you have syntax. It’s the same thing with sequential art, but instead of words as the unit to build meaning, you have the panels. If you write really rich, dense text with a lot of strongly rendered details, it’s going to slow the reader down, and they are going to be absorbed into that structure, just as if you have elaborately detailed panels. It’s a consideration of the audiences you want to reach. My goal is to honor some real emotions, even if that means pushing things other place where it becomes uncomfortable or unsettling. And with a visual medium, more people would find an access point to consider some of the experiences and ideas I want to explore.
Would anything be lost if you switched to a graphic novel?
Some of the richness might be lost. I don’t know that I would ever write something purely as script. Writing is my way of processing and seeing and feeling and experiencing. With prose, you have the immediate access to the interior. Not even just what someone is thinking, but a viewpoint of the character’s inner world. And it’s easy to go from past to present. What is this character thinking might happen? With any visual medium, you are generally relying more on external action to tell your story. Writing prose, the contract you build with the reader through the syntax in your sentences, the movement from thought to thought, building that connection, it’s hard to say how much of that would translate. But it would depend—if I know how to render things well in prose, can I see things visually and create the same emotion? I think if I were careful I could create the same nuance. The challenge would be half the fun.
What inspired you to write?
At 15 or 16, when I decided to start taking writing seriously, I had a high school philosophy class where I read Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I liked Victor Frankl; I could easily relate. But Black Boy was very mysterious to me. I was used to being able to read a book and figure out what the plot was. Black Boy felt intimate and familiar, but it was also very challenging to me. I told the instructor, “I really like it. It feels like it’s speaking to me. But I don’t feel like I understand it.” She said, “If you just keep rereading it, you will start to understand his patterns.” That was one of the things that gave me the confidence to pursue writing. I did some research on Richard Wright, that sense of mystery. Sometimes when people want to practice writing, there’s a sense you are supposed to understand everything a text is doing and you notice how a plot is developing. I think what’s more exciting is when you read something and it has an effect on you and you don’t know why. And then you can pursue those techniques to understand the effects they have. It’s like when you read a good book and the character starts speaking to you: You start seeing them and hearing them and being interested in their actions and what they think.
You write about the father who gambles tells his innocent, worshipful son how “smoke and whispers soak up hours, them free drinks make your brain nothing but a wet sponge, your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth like salt water taffy, and you bet and bet until your pockets are bone dry, then you bet some more...” Inhabiting a character that fully means risking failure. How'd you get comfortable with that?
Frustration is natural. Trying out something that doesn’t work is natural. It’s in failure and experimentation that you hit upon things that are cool and different and interesting and unique. My second project is magical realism, and I’ve made it a challenge to myself to write more stories from the third person point of view. What I’m able to actually do on the page is just different, and it probably took me like four months just to say what am I actually trying to do. It was a lot more freedom than I was used to. You get to know a character really well. You get a sense of how their voice operates. You also know some of the things you don’t have to describe, so you are putting in things the reader can take more meaning from. In third person, you have to build a new narrative voice, and you have a lot more ability to consider what other characters are thinking.
You’re now teaching as well as writing?
In Washington University’s college writing program. Once I won this book prize, I thought I should probably take another run at academia. Now I’m excited to see how people react to the book, but—you’re so invested in a project while you’re working on it, and there’s a point when it all clicks into place, and there’s also a weird effect where, later on, the book is its own thing. I want it to go out and exist in the world, grow its own arms and legs and voice, and have the effect it has on readers without my hand on it.
Did you have an agenda for the book when you started?
I have a pretty good idea of why I wrote it. St. Louis is an interesting city in the way that it’s divided, and why. Folks in a city, they’re going to have a certain idea of a certain part of town and the folks who come from that part of town. I could talk to people and they would say, “Where did you grow up?” I’d say, North Grand, and they’d tell me I didn’t. Some folks would really dig in. They would question it—what street? What high school? I guess they must have had a certain image of a person who comes from a certain part of town, and I didn’t match, so they would have real, discernible shock… When you are reading, there’s a certain amount of kindness in that act. If Avery Colt gives someone some kind of catharsis or courage to move forward, that is my goal. My goal is to present hope.
Ron Austin will discuss and sign Avery Colt Is a Snake. A Thief. A Liar on October 10 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Left Bank Books.
