Now

Today, hex literary speaks with Ryan Habermeyer, a Maryland-based author. A selection of his work, “A Necronautical Field Guide to Utah,” appeared in hex this spring. Ryan is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University who has previously published the short story collections Salt Folk and The Science of Lost Futures. His most recent work and debut novel, Necronauts, was released this March. Necronauts is written in the form of 95 obituaries and follows the story of a young boy in Calypsee, Utah, with a cosmonaut helmet grafted to his head. The boy’s obsession with old campy sci-fi films leads him to believe he’s an alien, and he undertakes a quixotic quest to return to the stars. 

hex: Now that Necronauts has been out for a few months, what has the early response looked like?

Ryan Habermeyer (RH): Hard to say, really. I’m going to disappoint you a little, unfortunately, because I make it a habit not to read reviews or get caught up in the buzz of book releases. I know they exist, but I don’t want to know they exist. I don’t think anything good can come from a writer reading reviews. Either you get that dopamine hit from a laudatory review, or you get annoyed and frustrated by a negative review. Both will warp your perspective going forward. Better to just ignore them entirely. Writing is hard enough and I already have to get out of my own head because I frequently get delusional with thoughts that either I’m brilliant or a fool. That said, I’ve been fortunate to do a mini-book-tour of sorts and travel to quite a few places reading from the book and my feeling is most people come away curious and enticed. The book is unusual. People are intrigued by the obituary style; they’re intrigued by the photographs; they’re intrigued by the wild story premise; they’re intrigued by the book being about Utah and Mormons. The book will find its audience eventually. If it were up to me, I would prefer it remain relatively anonymous and acquire an underground literary cult following. Forget literary fame when you’re alive—cult icon when you’re dead is much better. 

hex: We’ve seen you mention in previous interviews that Necronauts began in your MFA program workshop and that a large-scale rewrite took place after a period of writer’s block. What ideas did the rewrite introduce? 

RH: That is a pretty accurate timeline. First draft in 2007. What a disaster. But all first drafts are. It was my first real attempt at long-form fiction, a novella about this family living in a boarding house at the edge of nowhere. And all these visitors and travelers just drop by and weird shenanigans ensue. A terrible mess of a book. The cosmonaut boy was just one of those random visitors and he appeared for three or four pages. At the suggestion of a professor, that was the only thing I kept from the early draft. The other 75+ pages went to the dustbin. Then fifteen years of on-again, off-again writing and never quite figuring out how to make the book work. There were lots of iterations of the book, but the core story always remained the same: boy with cosmonaut helmet grafted to his head watches too many campy 50s sci-fi movies and, believing he is an alien, tries to launch himself into outer space. That was always the essential story. How I told it was the struggle. That’s what I could never get right. Then a friend’s death inspired a creative burst of energy. Six months of intense, fever dream writing and travels to Utah on a kind of reconnaissance mission to capture the vibe for the book. That’s when I made the shift to the obituary style which allowed me to balance the cosmonaut boy’s story within the framework of a panoramic overview of this small town. Once I understood obituaries were the stylistic vehicle and that everything was happening in Utah things fell into place rather quickly. But those two big leaps took a while to figure out.

hex: Why did you make the choice to structure the beginning of the novel as a fictional editor’s note? Some of us typically skip the editor’s note—do you think readers who skip the editor’s note are missing an important part of the story?

RH: We live in strange times where the line between facts and fictions is pretty thin. I don’t think we’re too special in that regard—reality has always been contested socially and politically, only now there are many more voices arguing over it than in the past and the intensity is amplified. As a writer, as an academic, I’m interested in that space between fact and fiction—what we call folklore. The realm of unofficial communication: half-truths, exaggerations, rumors, gossip, embellishments, falsehoods, and conspiracies. That’s my creative territory. All my books explore folklore in one way or another. The Editor’s Note for Necronauts was just one way of doing that; the obituaries do it too. Fiction dressed up as nonfiction. Not trying to trick the reader with that sleight of hand but to provoke the reader to be more cautious about what is and isn’t trustworthy in the context of the book. I was hoping to make the reader question what is true and what is false; what happens when you float in the space between fact and fantasy? Because the book is exploring the very notion of belief—how much faith is a good thing? Can too much faith bring undesirable consequences? These are questions I’m interested in. Not sure I answer them in the book, as I’m reluctant to pontificate in my writing, but I’m certainly trying to explore this murky, troubling space between what is real and what is imaginary. So, yes, the Editor’s Note is absolutely integral. It may seem irrelevant—because like you, most people don’t bother with these kinds of prefaces—but there are a lot of important details and contextualizing happening in that intro. Not least of which is what you mention in your question: the fact that the Editor’s Note frames the book as a story of fathers and sons. Sure, you’ll pick that up when reading the rest of the book (hopefully), but it’s there in the very beginning.

hex: Were your obituaries created in response to certain photographs you found, or did you go looking for fitting pictures to accompany particular obituaries?

RH: Yes, I do collect vintage photographs. Something of an obsession of mine. And I get asked this question quite a bit about what came first, the stories or the photos. And the answer is yes and yes. Sometimes the obituary came first and I went looking for a photo that would either compliment or subtly undermine the text. Other times, the photo came first and it served as inspiration to the text. But I was never looking for photos to just substantiate the text. With photo narratives, I believe there has to be a tension between word and image. The image can’t just be proof of the text; the image has to do some kind of aesthetic work. Otherwise, what’s the point if the image is only supplementary? That’s journalism, not fiction. Images tell stories too. But the story an image tells doesn’t necessarily mean it is corroborated by the text. You’ve got to be a careful reader and think about when are the words lying to you, and when is the image pulling the wool over your eyes? Like I was saying before: we live in strange times where facts and fiction are perpetually blurred. 

The most difficult images were the cosmonaut boy. I had to doctor those (with Wite-Out) because it’s not like there is a vast repository of kids with space helmets in vintage photographs. Plus, I was really reluctant about whether to even include those photos. It’s like the monster in a horror film—once you show it, it loses potency. You don’t get to imagine it anymore. When it lives solely in your imagination it feels more alive. But when you show it? It becomes this tangible, disappointing thing. But then I found these double exposure prints and other “botched” images and thought it would be interesting to use those for the cosmonaut boy. If you listen to his story in the book—and because he “talks” with a kind of makeshift sign language nobody does listen to or understand him—you’ll see there’s a reason why I put so many double exposure prints of the cosmonaut boy. It’s not haphazard. There’s an intentionality there. But it probably requires a double-take. You might not catch it on a first passing. It’s a book that rewards re-reading to sort of piece together the puzzle of this boy. 

hex: There is prevalent use and abuse of drugs throughout Necronauts. Why did you choose to include these elements?

RH: It’s something of a shortcut. I’m not really interested in drugs and drug abuse so much as the concept of addiction. I foreground the drug use because when we think of addiction we typically only ever think of illicit drugs. It’s the easiest thing to notice. But addiction is much more expansive, much more complex, much messier. It’s not difficult for readers to notice the drug addictions, but I hope careful readers think about the other kinds of addiction within the book. Because I’m exploring quite a few. So many of the people in these obituaries are addicts of one kind or another, each in a small and subtle way. And then there’s a line in the book, something to the effect of, “We all got to worship something.” Worship. Addiction. Is there any difference? The relationship between those words was on my mind while writing and rewriting the book.

hex: You previously studied microbiology and zoology for the first three years of your undergraduate career before switching to literature. As STEM students, we are curious to know whether this background has impacted your identity as a writer.

RH: I love this question because in another life I’m not a writer at all but a zoologist studying jellyfish and there’s part of me that wishes that was the life I chose. I’m fascinated by the natural world. Maybe that’s why I feel such an affinity for writing about the desert. I grew up just outside of L.A. and lived close to the beach, but then also took frequent trips to the Mojave desert, then summers in Lake Tahoe and all over Utah. Those landscapes shaped me. And Necronauts is obviously very rooted in the desert of the American Southwest, and I spent a lot of time evoking it on the page, but so was my previous short story collection, Salk Folk, which are stories about Utah’s past, present, and sideways future. So, I’ve been writing about the desert seriously for the last ten years. But I think the way my (failed?) scientific background manifests in my writing the most is with my creative nonfiction. I’ve written essays about jellyfish, anthropomorphic taxidermy, the Truckee River, tardigrades, cloudberries, blue whales in the Great Salt Lake, embryology, orcas, and uranium glass. I often bounce back and forth between fiction and nonfiction because it works different creative parts of my brain, and I think at some point I’ll put together a collection of essays exploring the strange, wondrous ecology of Utah. But I definitely wouldn’t be the writer I am without those undergrad years of close, scientific study. 

hex: You have previously described yourself as an ex-Mormon. What is an aspect of Mormon culture that you have taken with you, or has that had a significant impact on your writing?

RH: Well, this is a little tricky. I do and I don’t think of myself as ex-Mormon. I recently wrote a little article for the Association for Mormon Letters about how I will always be a relapsing Mormon. For someone like me who was not only born and raised in the faith but comes from a multigenerational Mormon family going back five or six generations—all the way back to the origins of the faith in early 19^th century America and even ancestors who crossed the plains with Brigham Young and helped colonize the American West—I’m not sure I can ever be “ex-” or “post-” Mormon. You can’t so easily amputate that genealogy from yourself. Too much of Mormon history and culture is ingrained in me. I’m no anthropologist, but I think of Mormonism as an ethnicity. There’s a distinct tradition of music, food, clothing, social norms and mores, and even language/verbiage to Mormonism. It’s all rattling inside my head still. I’ll never exorcise it fully. Maybe mute some parts of it, but it will always be with me. In the same way that there are cultural Jews who were born and raised Jewish but do not practice the faith, I too am a non-practicing Mormon saddled with traditions, beliefs, and ideas I can’t quite escape. And that’s okay. The biggest one, and the one that shapes my writing, is Mormon folklore. Mormonism has a rich and fascinating folkloric tradition. Whales in the Great Salt Lake, magic underwear, secret angelic handshakes, Bigfoot, interplanetary colonization. The list goes on and on. It’s probably safe to say that Mormon folklore is what kickstarted my own imagination. I grew up hearing all sorts of wild stories that blurred together facts and fiction. (I’m sensing a pattern). Spinning yarns is baked into the culture. Mormonism gave me, for better and worse, a very magical worldview but also an existentially absurdist one. I use those philosophical prisms to see and interact and understand the world, and they’re omnipresent with me when I write.

hex: You’ve mentioned living in several different countries, as well as all over the United States. How have these experiences with travel influenced your writing?

RH: I have had a rather nomadic life. I’m quite fortunate in that regard. It was Mark Twain who said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” and he’s right. It’s good to step outside your comfort zone. It’s good to fumble your way through another country hardly speaking the language, relying on the generosity of strangers, seeing weird things that give you pause, feeling lost and confused and a little uncertain. That’s all part of traveling. Which is to say, if you’re traveling the right way then you’re feeling uncomfortable. And that’s good for your body, mind, and soul. We live in an age of supreme convenience. The whole idea of America now seems to be this nightmarish corporate daycare where you never have to experience anything disquieting and you can exist in a nice, safe bubble where drones bring you coffee, and your music is curated just for you, and your movies stream on-demand, and the algorithms on your social media let you live in an echo chamber. Travel blows all that up. It forces you to step outside yourself and become another person. Travel forces me to think differently, see differently, feel differently. And that’s vital for a writer.

hex: The characters in Necronauts, aside from the cosmonaut boy, are referred to solely by their careers. Was this a commentary on the relationship between work and identity?

RH: I’m glad you noticed this! Originally, when I started writing the obituaries all the characters in the book were Habermeyers. It was a pseudo-genealogical book. Like a catalog of all my deceased ancestors. I imagined interrogating my family history so I used real names and even some real family oral histories. But then I ran out of real ancestors and had to make things up, and that was fun and interesting, but I realized what I was doing felt incredibly narcissistic. Who cares about all my dead relatives? Why is this so focused on me? I worried that if all the emphasis was on my ancestral dead then the cosmonaut boy’s story might get lost in the mix. Like maybe the reader would get too distracted by the nonfiction and forget the fiction. So, I had to simplify things and didn’t want to strain the reader with so many character names to remember, especially if the characters are only making a single appearance. It made sense to refer to characters via their occupations. That’s something you read in every obituary. So-and-so was a painter, a doctor, a firefighter, a therapist. And so on. So much of our lives are defined by work. Even in death we can’t escape it. I don’t know how much of an explicit commentary I’m making on labor and identity, because like I said I’m loath to pontificate—unless they’re false sermons, I do like those—but I think the book is wrestling with a feature of small-town, secluded life where friends and neighbors are defined by the labor they perform on behalf of the community.

hex: Your novel is written in a very unique structure. Are there any other authors you’re excited about who are pushing the boundaries of the novel form?

RH: Lots and lots. I tend to read a lot of Eastern European writers. I think in some other life I was born there. The first who comes to mind is Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer who has written a few “constellation” novels, as she refers to them. Plotless novels composed of fragmented consciousness, essayistic musings, fictional vignettes, and miscellaneous anecdotes. Flights and House of Day, House of Night are two of my favorite recent books. László Krasznahorkai is in vogue now because he just won the Nobel Prize, but I’ve been reading him for twenty years. The Melancholy of Resistance is a great book. He writes these long, dense, complicated, surreal, single-sentence novels that are very difficult but marvelous nonetheless. Viktor Pelevin is fantastic. Justin Torres’s Blackouts is incredible. I love Lydia Davis and think Lance Olsen has quietly been writing some of the weirdest books in recent memory. I love Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental short fiction and think In the Dream House is a fascinating memoir that blows up the genre. Then there’s the old guard of experimental writers who continue to inspire me: W. G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Bernhard, and Fernando Pessoa. I could go on, but I won’t. 🍄