Roxane Gay

Patrick Earl Ryan discussed If We Were Electric with Roxane Gay, hosted by Tom Lowenburg of New Orleans’ Octavia Books.

Roxane

So this must be a bit bittersweet in that typically we would be in the store and having a face-to-face conversation. How is it touring a book virtually?

Patrick

It’s required a lot of flexibility on everyone’s part. I think just taking a breath and realizing we’re in this together. It’s my first book. I had a lot of hopes about what I would do with it, like driving across the country, reading at bookstores, and meeting readers. I just had to kind of say, well, that’s not going to happen, but what can I do to make the most of it? It’s required a lot of self-promotion, a lot of figuring things out on my own, making phone calls when I don’t like making phone calls. I’ve practiced tai chi for about 25 years, and honestly, I’ve really needed it lately. Tai chi helps me to take a step back and remember that it’s a joy just to be able to do this… even virtually.

Roxane

This was the first book I selected for the Flannery O’Connor Prize through the University of Georgia Press. You read a lot of words when you judge a contest, and not all of them are memorable, but from the first word to the last, your short story collection really grabbed me. I was particularly enamored by the second line of the first story, “I could smell him on my fingers, hours after we done it.” I knew in that moment that wherever the story was going to take me, I wanted to go. So I’m really curious, how did the story come about? And why did you decide to open the collection with it?

Patrick

“Before Las Blancas” frightened me with how it might be taken, because dealing with adolescent sexuality is touchy in American society. But throughout this collection, I paid homage to writers who had an influence on me, so something about Evie’s story bounces off Nabokov’s Lolita. I’m not a big fan of Nabokov, but I wanted to tell a similar story to Lolita that showed a boy’s sexuality in a positive, natural way, that really captured the essence of falling in love when we’re that young, when we have all of these ideas about what romance or sex should be. I wanted to turn Lolita on its head a bit. The senses are essential in understanding Evie… how and what he smells. Because that’s what he remembers.

Roxane

Absolutely. Throughout the collection, it’s a very, very physical read. It’s very visceral, like you can taste and touch and smell and feel everything that the characters ex­per­i­ence. How did you develop this ability to bring about the sensory in your fiction?

Patrick

Well, I started as a poet. When I first started writing in my early 20s, I wrote poetry for two or three years. I fell in love with words. The language that I choose always has to do with the way the words sound out loud, how particular words feel when they come out of my mouth. Writing itself is very visceral. I don’t know which other writers might do this, but when I write, I read it out loud. It’s imperative that I speak out the words I’m writing. I think I’m that way because of Baldwin and how I first read him aloud. The reason I started writing fiction was because of James Baldwin’s novels. He had his oratory style in fiction, where you could really hear it, even when you were only reading the words to yourself. I wanted that skill in some way in my own writing. I think when we first start writing, we mimic the other writers that we love. So I wrote the collection constantly reading the stories out loud. I’d have a certain cadence, a certain rhythm that I wanted, regardless of whatever meaning I conveyed, and I’d replace and rearrange words and sentences many times based on that cadence.

Roxane

You know, it’s interesting, reading aloud is part of my process as well. I can’t move forward with a story if I don’t know what it sounds like. That’s how I figure out what’s working, what’s not working, whether the reader is going to enjoy it… cadence is the word exactly. So it’s interesting to hear another writer talk about the sound of the work, because the sound of the work really gives me quite a lot of narrative direction.

What are some of your other narrative influences... because I noticed throughout this collection, and this really drew me, you don’t have a singular narrative style. There was a lot of play, not only in narrative style, but also in setting, in the types of characters you wrote about. How do you develop that?

Patrick

I really feel that even though the stories might vary one to the next, that they’re cohesive together, that they work as a collection; when you move from the beginning to the end, you actually go on a journey. It’s something that feels whole, aside from the individual stories.

My characters dictate the language and the style of the prose, so I just follow along with what makes sense for them. I tried to capture a very imaginative, creative, wiser-than-his-age voice for the young narrator of “Before Las Blancas,” but then in my shorter pieces—I call them my little voodoo shorts—like “Feux Follet” or “Labor,” I write in a fable form, where the language and the third-person narrator reflects something more classic. I’ve had so many influences… the last story in the collection, which has now become a novel, functions as a wu xia novel, a Chinese martial arts novel in the Louisiana swamps.

Roxane

What are you most proud of in this book?

Patrick

Wow…well, I’m proud that it’s actually a book first and foremost… right? If I had to pick one story that I’m really proud of, though, I would say “Where It Takes Us,” a story that is largely influenced by my personal life, but is fic­tion­al, if that makes sense.

Roxane

Absolutely. I know that every writer to one extent or another draws from their real life. How do you decide what to take from your real life and how to fic­tion­al­ize that?

Patrick

I get asked that a lot. Writers get asked that, did that happen to you? or is this about you? and we have to have an answer, especially when you get asked by readers who might not be writers themselves or who might not read a lot of fiction. The way that I think about it is that I approach fiction like a dream. In dreams, we have all of these things that might have happened in real life, the images and sounds pulled from our day, the things we saw on television, memories, whatever it happens to be, and these get jumbled into our dreams. That’s how I approach fiction versus fact, with this dreamlike version of my personal history. I pick and pull from different things that have happened all throughout my life. Then I try to arrange them in a way that makes sense for the type of story that I want to tell. There are certainly themes that occur in my fiction again and again… themes made from major events in my life, my traumatic ex­per­i­ences… which I processed by turning them into slightly different stories with happier or more interesting endings. I don’t think I would find it as beneficial if I just wrote my story truthfully out as an autobiography. There’s this playing God in fiction that’s more helpful.

Roxane

I think the playing God aspect of writing, especially fiction writing, is one of the most seductive aspects, because you get to control the entire world. And especially when you’re drawing from your real life, you get to reimagine these ex­per­i­ences in ways that are interesting. I wrote a novel once called An Untamed State about a woman who’s kidnapped, and to this day, people ask me how I’m doing after the kidnapping. I’ve never been kidnapped. It’s literally a novel. It’s made up. And in one sense, I feel like I did my job, because it was so believable that people are worried about my well being. It’s interesting to hear how you blend that reality and fiction.

I think one of my favorite stories in the collection was “An Undisturbed Dark Place,” which was just so crisp in terms of the language, and the narrator is a little unreliable. It’s a story that I keep thinking about, and I’m just like, oh my God, why are you doing this to yourself? Unrequited love. There’s a lot of queerness in many of the stories here. How important is it to you to be able to tell queer stories.

Patrick

I am queer. So I think that it’s just me being me. If I can’t put myself on the page, then I’m not being an honest writer. That honesty is important, because we need to see queer people, we need to see positive examples of ourselves.

Aside from sexuality, I am still a queer person, in the sense of being a person on the edges, the oddity who isn’t quite the same as everyone else, who feels a little bit different from everyone else. One of my favorite writers, one of the most influential writers on me, was Carson McCullers. That loneliness goes through her work as well, the outsider condition, where we don’t fit in easily, where we’re the ugly duckling. That’s there even in the stories that might not read queer, like in “Labor” or “The Tempest.”

Roxane

Who are some of your other influences? You’ve mentioned Nabokov, Baldwin, and now Carson McCullers. I’d love to know other writers that have helped you develop your voice.

Patrick

I’m very much a classicist, a modernist. Paul Bowles was a big influence for me. If you read “The Cargo” you’ll see him in there. Gabriel García Márquez and Albert Camus were both hugely influential for me. Yukio Mishima, too, the queer Japanese writer. His Confessions of a Mask is a really beautiful book. His samurai books, too. Those influences give an old-fashioned quality to my writing. But I do read modern writers. In fact, reading you helped me so much. I had written the collection before I read your books, but a few years ago I read two of your short story collections. I think that seeing ourselves in someone else’s writing, in art, in books, is incredibly uplifting. Reading Difficult Women and Ayiti inspired the bravery in me to send my story collection out, because I found a resemblance in how we dealt with trauma in our fiction. I had put these stories aside, they’re not new, they’re stories I’d written over a long period of time from my late twenties to my early forties. They required a certain bravery for me to put out into the world in a larger context than just college workshops. I’m reading a lot more nonfiction these days, but those are the fic­tion­al influences that come to mind.

Roxane

Why are you reading more nonfiction now?

Patrick

I think because I’m writing more again. I went through 10 years of what I call a literary depression, not writing anything at all, because I’d had a very hard time finding any success in the publishing world. I completely gave up on it. I was also dealing with unresolved trauma from my earlier life, so once I started dealing with that, I came out of the depression. I thank my therapist. We did a lot of hard work together. I’d backed entirely out of the literary world for a decade. I couldn’t even read fiction. But once I found my bearings again, got my confidence in it again, I started writing fiction again. Now that I’m writing, I’ve turned to reading nonfiction for the first time in my life. I feel like it’s important now to really know what’s happening in the world. Ta-Nehisi Coates is someone that I really admire. Isabel Wilkerson, too. I think it’s important to be reading these voices, to stay informed, to know where you fit.

Roxane

You mentioned that you almost gave up, and that at a point, you did give up. I think most writers have been there. When I struggled to sell my first book to a larger press than the micro press that published my very first book, with 50 copies, 50 whole copies, I did give up. Fortunately, I had people in my life who were like, well, you’re being ridiculous, keep writing. I don’t know how well that worked, but it kind of helped, nonetheless, because I had really given up. What made you decide to submit to this contest and get back to it, because it’s really hard to get past that feeling. It is hard in the literary community. There are a great many writers and even though there are lots of opportunities, it can be really hard to find your way into what seems like a very insular community. How did you come to this contest?

Patrick

It’s been a long journey. I went through an MFA program. I graduated in 2001. I did really well in that, and felt really good about prospects, but then I stepped into the real world where these massive failures happened again and again. I had also been through an abusive relationship for eight years. I needed to deal with that pain, but I didn’t for a very long time. I also ran Lodestar Quarterly, which was a queer literary journal, for quite a number of years, and I gave a lot of my energy to other writers and editing. I found myself really empty, not really knowing what to do with my own writing, not really knowing what to write to get people’s attention, which is obviously not the way to approach it, but that’s what I was feeling, because everything I’d written from my heart had been rejected. So I entered therapy a few years ago. I found a really good therapist. After a year of work with him, I felt better about myself and I came to the decision that I was ready to step back into the literary world.

I want to also say—for the longest time, before these last couple of years, I equated my success in the writing world with my own success as a person. I linked those two things… where my whole self-worth depended on whether I got that book published. What helped me really in the last few years was to see that it doesn’t have anything to do with that. If your book is good, it might go into the right person’s hands, it might not, but it has nothing to do with your own self-worth. That was a hard lesson for me. To get that really helped me as a person. Now I’m a much happier person. I don’t know if that’s gonna have a negative influence on my writing, since it’s often more interesting, easier even, to write from a place of suffering. But I’m happier.

Roxane

I’m glad to hear that.

Patrick

So… I don’t believe in just sending your work out to every possible place. I believe in really seeing how you connect with what’s out there, looking at who’s taking what, who’s looking for what, so you begin with a close connection. With the Flannery O’Connor Prize, being a Southerner and a short-story writer, I immediately felt a connection with her. There are problems with Flannery O’Connor, of course, and her racism, but she’s still a huge writer in the canon. I read her numerous times in school. Everybody reads her in school. There’s something about her work that deals with the degenerate, not just the tragic, but with an odd twist to that tragedy that felt familiar to my stories. I saw your name as the judge, and I have to admit, I was like, wow, I just read her story collection and loved it. Sometimes these chances fall into your lap. I had a really good feeling about it. I said, I’m just gonna do this. You were the first award I submitted to… the Flannery O’Connor award was the first one I sent out.

Roxane

Oh, wow.

Patrick

I had submitted the collection to two other awards after that, but I had to withdraw them once I got accepted by University of Georgia Press. So it was really fascinating to see that happen. I don’t know, maybe it was putting that positive energy into the submission, into the world. Whatever it was, that worked.

Roxane

I am really glad. Contests can be hit or miss. You never know… because it’s so arbitrary. It’s so based on individual preference. So I’m really glad that yours rose to the top. And I do see, not similarities, but a voice, the way you tell a story, that felt familiar. You like the kinds of stories you like, and these are the kinds of stories that I like… and actually love.

You mentioned that you were the editor of Lodestar Quarterly. I’ve edited off and on over the course of the past 20 or so years, and I have found that editing can be really beneficial to my writing for a lot of different reasons. Did editing ever inform your creative process and your writing?

Patrick

Mmm… I would have to say that it’s the opposite ex­per­i­ence.

Roxane

Oh, wow.

Patrick

Editing drained my creative energy because I gave it everything. What I would say is that the editing that I did sharpened my skills, so that when I came back to my own work, I was able to look at it and be more objective and to cut things that I might not have otherwise cut because I was so in love with the language. That’s one of the negative points of being so in love with language, that I love words, but sometimes those words get carried away. I go a little bit overboard with them because I like the way a word sounds. I think that in that sense, editing jobs were positive, in that they gave me a sharper editorial eye. Copyediting my own work was easier from the editing work that I did on others.

Roxane

You mentioned the novel, I would love to know what kinds of things you’re working on right now.

Patrick

Oh, sure. One of the things about being 50 years old now…

Roxane

Oh my God, you’re 50?

Patrick

Yeah, I turned 50 this year. So to be called a new writer, a lot of people think, oh, I must be just coming onto the scene, but it’s not that at all… I’ve been writing for 30 years. I’m new to the publishing world. I’ve been working on three novels that are still in drafts. Some are more polished than others. The last story in the collection, “The Tempest,” the martial arts story, has become a novel called The Jade Fish of Perpetuity. My first new project since therapy is more autobiographical than anything I’ve written, filled with a lot of my own family stories. I come from a family that is unique, I think. You look at me, and I’m a white boy. But my heritage and class is much more complicated. My father was a janitor, my mother was a nanny. I grew up poor. When you go back to my great-great-grandparents, my family actually comes from five different continents. But I can’t say that I am mixed. I don’t feel like I have that right to say that I’m mixed. But I feel those generations in me. I have a very strong connection to my blood, to those seven generations in New Orleans... not just European mutt, but Filipino, West African, indigenous Chilean, and Native American, too. I grew up looking and feeling white, but I was given a hard time. Others kids would tease that I must have a black granddaddy with my big lips and frizzy hair. I didn’t match. I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t look like the other white boys. That’s what I’m working on now. That’s a long answer. But yeah…

Roxane

Doesn’t matter. An answer is as long as it needs to be.

New Orleans is such a character in so much literary fiction, what influence did New Orleans have on your writing?

Patrick

I’ve been in San Francisco since 1995, but no matter who I speak to, or introduce myself to, I am a New Orleanian. The city’s in my blood. I go back often… I feel so bad this year, because I can’t. It’s a really deep grief to not be able to go back to New Orleans right now. I’m an introvert most days. A lot of writers are introverts. But as soon as I go back to New Orleans, I’m no longer an introvert. I get in the back of an Uber, and I’m just so chatty with everyone. Once I’m there, my accent comes back, my openness comes back, and I feel so comfortable. I always write about the city. I always come back to New Orleans when I write. We talk about how New Orleans is often a character in literature, but being in New Orleans, you realize the city really is a character. You go there and you feel New Orleans rubbing against you.

Roxane

How did you make decisions in structuring the collection and story order? I know you mentioned earlier that you wanted to sort of take the reader through the collection. How did you make those decisions?

Patrick

It felt very natural to me to begin with “Before Las Blancas,” because it deals with childhood more than any of the other stories. In terms of just the age of the narrator, you have that story first. There is also a less-linear thread through the book, stories that have to do with cars, stories about electricity, about trauma. There are some stories that are very heavy and violent, like “The Cargo” or “Between Here and There,” that I didn’t want up front defining the collection as all gory or sensational. And I always feel like the longest short story should end a story collection, maybe that’s something I picked up from James Joyce, but “The Tempest” is also purposefully last because it ends with hopefulness, where in the other stories before it, there’s a loss at the end, someone forced to face that they’re not going to get something they wanted. At the end of “The Tempest,” there’s empowerment by their coming together.

Roxane

You’ve mentioned trauma a few times, have you ever considered writing a memoir?

Patrick

I think that what I’m working on now is the closest that I will get to memoir. It’s creatively autobiographical. I grew up in a family that told ghost stories, and mostly ghost stories about our family. I always remember a story about how my Nan haunted her boyfriend after she died because he stole $200 out of her coat pocket the night she died… $200 that was supposed to be left to my dad. Nan’s ghost came back to his bedroom window three nights in a row moaning his name miserably before he returned that money. So, you know, growing up with those kind of colorful, spiritual stories, I think that’s what I’m drawn to…

Roxane

That makes sense. Because of the songs your characters mention in the stories, one reader has been listening to the tracks on Spotify. Could you talk about how pop and alternative music finds its way into your stories?

Patrick

Music is such an important part of my life. When I write I listen to music in my headphones. I grew up in a musical family. My dad was born in 1911…

Roxane

Wow!

Patrick

Yeah, I was born when he was 59 years old! He passed away when I was 15. He would be 109 now. In fact, the story collection came out on what would have been my dad’s 109th birthday. He was a vaudevillian. He actually performed in vaudeville in the late 20s and 1930s as a singer, comedian, and adagio dancer. One of my brothers is a professional jazz musician. He played on Bourbon Street for many years before Hurricane Katrina. Music is always around me. It’s another way that I remember things. The songs in the stories have strong memories attached to them. In “I Wouldn’t Say No,” the name of the story is from a Smiths song. That one song represents a whole era for me in the early 90s.

Roxane

You mentioned earlier about queerness as separate from sexuality, as being an outsider, can you talk more about how being an outsider has influenced or guided your writing?

Patrick

That I’m a writer at all has to do with my understanding of myself as queer and outsider. By the time I was thirteen, I knew I was gay. I was drawing pictures of what I imagined all the boys in my class looked like naked. It was pretty obvious. I didn’t really give it a word. I thought I was the only person. But in the library I discovered the ancient Greeks, and I felt a connection. It was the first time that I saw anything that approximated what I was feeling inside. I have four older brothers, all very straight, no sisters. I was in a household of five macho men and a meek mother. I was very much a mama’s boy. I was drawn to the feminine, and I think… because of my mom and her Catholic example… the feminine meant to be quiet and submissive… where you kept your real thoughts to yourself and always gave in to men. I became much more introverted in high school. I really settled into that sense of being an outsider. No one acted the same as me. As early as 10 or 11 I was writing short stories, little poems, class plays, song lyrics, a way of creating a world in my own mind where I could be comfortable. I didn’t really fit in otherwise. Writing gave me that world that I fit into. That creative queerness really saved me.

Roxane

I think a lot of us who are queer writers can say that, because we find some way of connecting to the world around us through words. I know that writing saved me on so many different levels. It’s always comforting to know that I’m not the only writer who found solace and connection and salvation through words.

How grateful we are that you found your way through words, Patrick, because it was a true privilege to be able to read and choose the collection for the award and to have a small hand in bringing it into the world. I hope it flies, flies away into the hands of many, many readers. Thank you so much for this really great conversation.

Patrick

Thank you, Roxane. It was really nice to talk to you, and thank you, of course, for choosing the book.

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