Ryan Call, author of the short story collection The Weather Stations (Caketrain, 2011) and MFA alum (2008) just received a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award in fiction. The Whiting foundation recognized his writing as “new…unlike anything else being published.”
Ryan’s personal story begins with him as the son of an Air Force pilot. His family’s attention often focused (and still does) on the weather and his father’s safety in the skies so “all this concern and interest in weather has been with me since I was a kid.” Ryan admires the work of Luke Howard, whose terms for various cloud shapes, or “modifications: as he called them, revolutionized meteorology. A chemist by training and Puritan by upbringing, Howard was devoted to the clouds. Ryan recalls, “ it’s fascinating how those two worlds work together in his writing about weather…I admire him because his language directly influenced the scientific world, and to a greater degree, because his language completely changed how people experienced the world, especially the sky above.”
Ryan wrote about weather for the first time in a class with Mary Kay Zuravleff, in which he had to write a novella. After brainstorming a list of words that were interesting to him, he found many of his interests were related to weather or “other things skyward: clouds, birds, flying machines, etc.” So, he wrote, hated all but one section of what he wrote, took that section and developed it into a story, and started writing other stories like it. Ryan also read. He read books that “did what I wanted my writing to do: Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times, Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String, Italo Calvino’s Cosmiconomics and Invisible Cities, the stories of George Saunders, Aimee Bender’s as well, and so on.” Ryan found liberation through his reading. He discovered that he could write about weather however he wanted and he hopes that his writing will liberate someone else sometime as well.
Reading more than liberates Ryan. It inspires him to write. “Reading others’ language in action and moving forward. Reading how others have turned sentences against each other and off each other in exciting ways. Reading new combinations of words that when taken together lead me to great excitement. This kind of reading is encouraging, and it inspires me to try to write new and exciting sentences as well.” For Ryan, usually everything starts in the sentence. What created the sentence? He’s not sure, but writing ideas start with a sentence or clutch of language that sets up a new turn, a turning back on the sentence in the next sentence, and so on. Memories, experiences, thoughts about his life can all become sentences for Ryan. “Thankfully,” he remarks, “ I’ve gotten good at realizing what actually deserves to be created into a sentence and what ought to remain wordless.” In looking for these sentences, Ryan drafts. He writes for awhile and saves the draft. Then, he rewrites the draft into a new document. This rewriting allows him to reenter the language and regain the sense of story. Sometimes the changes in the rewrite are small and sometimes the retyping completely alters the draft until he has an altogether new story. Throughout the writing though, he looks for the sentence that leads to a new sentence and a new turn, and onward and onward and so on.
Most at home at his house, writing as his desk, Ryan writes when he can and realized long ago that he wasn’t the sort of writer to write every day. His days are filled teaching 9th and 10th graders at Episcopal High School in Houston, TX. Ryan came to Episcopal after working at the University of Houston as a Houston Writing Fellow from 2008-2010. While teaching at UH and exploring new possibilities of teaching as well as scholarship in the field of composition pedagogy, Ryan became a better instructor. He admits that the workload has been extremely demanding but he loves interacting with his students and finding moments when “everything clicks. The feeling is magical.” Ryan also helps with the cross-country team at Episcopal and is proud of their individual and team accomplishments. He is involved in the literary scene, online and in Houston, as much as he can be with his busy schedule. Online, he helps Blake Butler and Gene Morgan, two good friends, run HTNLGIANT, a literary blog that’s been causing a stir for its content, sometimes controversial, and its contributors’ success. Ryan stops after commenting on the publication success of Blake Butler, Amelia Gray, and Tao Lin , stating, “that kind of news, publishing news, is just one of many kinds of indicators as to how successful a ‘scene’ is ; I could praise a lot of other authors in that scene for other things: their friendship, their advice, their intelligence. I guess I’m just trying to say it is an exciting time for that community.”
This is what makes Ryan so special to Mason and its community of writers. He values his friends and fellow alum. He praises Joe Hall’s Pigafetta is My Wife as one of his favorite books of 2010 and eagerly awaits his forthcoming The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean Press, 2013). But, more than praise for the publications, he cherishes his friendships and the advice of writers like Joe Hall, Mike Scalise, Matt Bell, Blake Butler, Doug Powell, and others. Not part of a writing group, Ryan prefers “a looser sort of existence, one that depends on friendships rather than the actual exchanging of work. If that does occur, then I find the back and forth that follows to be more organic and relaxed.”
Ryan has also found inspiration working with his sister, a talented artist and writer, on Pocket Finger, a collaborative pdf chapbook. Her striking images pair with Ryan’s written responses in the book. The idea for the book started when Christy Call sent Ryan a drawing and he decided to respond with a paragraph. She sent another image and the story grew. Ryan hopes to work with his sister on future projects.
The community of writers at Mason is proud to include Ryan Call. His spirit, determination, and talent are remarkable and his recent success is well deserved. It is an exciting time for the community as we celebrate Ryan’s success.