But That’s Not as Much Fun: an Interview with Ron A. Austin
At AWP ’19 in Portland, I went to a reading at a Western-themed bar to see a friend read poetry. The lineup was long, as anyone who’s been to AWP offsites can attest. You often have to steel yourself against such a lineup—it can be a grind. This reading had some decent energy, but just as it started to dip, a writer named Ron A. Austin stood to read. He commanded the audience with a fast, emphatic style, giving his words the texture I would later find they had on the page. His story had people laughing, thinking, paying close attention, and then wanting more. It was great. And hey, my poet friend was great too, but I left that reading determined to pre-order Ron’s book, Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar. I spent the next six months awaiting its arrival.
Winner of the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel from Southeast Missouri State University Press, Avery Colt immediately confronts the reader with its form. It’s a novel-in-stories following the titular teenager, Avery Colt, as he navigates his family and neighborhood. The stories are serious—about violence, death, abandonment, drugs, gambling, and what it means to be a member of a community—but they are always, paragraph after paragraph, infused with delight. It’s Austin’s writing that does this, the way he fills sentences to bursting, the dialect his narrators and characters unapologetically wield, the textural flourishes that pepper the so-turnable pages. The book contains photographs of crumpled notebook pages, giant text, hybrid forms, endless surprises. Avery Colt has a loud, beating heart, but it’s also got a warm, raucous laugh. All of this is evidence that Austin has as much fun writing his stories as he does reading them aloud.
I needed to know more about how he did it, so I sent him some emails over the course of the last months of the decade.
Tyler Barton: I’m gonna share with you my favorite sentence in the book. It’s from the first page of “The Gatecrasher of Hyboria”: “The dialect I spoke at 10 years old was three licks neighborhood slang, two licks swear words Mom and Dad used when no one important was listening, and one lick southern drawl I gleaned from neighborhood elders gossiping on front porches.” What’s your favorite sentence?
Ron A. Austin: Ah, this is tough. I don’t know if I could find an absolute favorite, so I’m going to cheat a bit and offer two that show a range of qualities I try to incorporate in my prose. The first is from “Nothing Uglier Than Gold on a Corpse”: “Anxiety made the summer light harsh and gave scrap mythical aspects: ruined trucks were the exoskeletons of giant beetles, engine blocks all heads lopped off a hydra, dust-licked and rotting.” The second is from “Garden of Fire and Blood”: “That lot would likely yield more bottle caps than green beans—even a blind man could see that—but Grandma thought she could punch seeds into the earth and bully out a garden, fat tomatoes hanging low, waxy peppers shining, buttercups popping, all lush and good smelling.”
TB: What makes a sentence great? How do you know when you have one?
RAA: Good sentences are one part science and one part magic—the hard part is that all of the necessary elements that make an interesting sentence have to be conceived simultaneously. Concerning the two sentences I chose to highlight, in general, I’m happy when a sentence does one of two things. If it succeeds in rendering or transforming the mundane world in an interesting way, or if it carves an opening for linked thoughts, emotions, or observations to spill out. With all that in play, the most important element of good sentences is considering how they work together to build either a mood or larger narrative. When I think of my sentences on the page, I like to imagine them as a bestiary: thoroughbreds, hawks, and sly canines prowling, each of them fearsome in their own right.
TB: It seems like Avery has the love of his family, just not their respect (in the sentence I began the interview by quoting, his parents talk when “no one important is listening,” but Avery is listening, which implies he’s not important). When it comes to love and respect, does Avery know the difference? Could the book be about his discovery of this distinction?
RAA: Yes, I agree—it seems that love and respect should go hand in hand, but oftentimes they can find themselves at odds. In familial and compassionate love, it could even seem like a mandate or obligation to love someone you don’t respect overall or in the moment. Avery can be seen attempting to earn his family’s respect, but this also applies to them as well—his mother, father, grandparents, and most of the adults he encounters are all working incredibly hard to gain respect from each other and the world at large. Moving away from how love and respect bond folks to their communities and family units, another question that comes into focus is how and when does a person come to love and respect themselves above all else.
TB: Is there a defining moment in the book where Avery is forced to make a decision that will teach him to love/respect himself above all else?
RAA: Ah, the narrative pushes him in this direction, but I don’t know if he figures it out. The climax comes in the last paragraph, where Avery has to choose between his family, community, or himself. From the beginning of the book, the reader sees Avery’s family fiercely defending what they have made. By the last story, you might wonder whether or not it would be better, practically and emotionally, for Avery to let go of the corner store and move on. Whatever last bounty the store has to offer might be better off being redistributed. And this leaves Avery with a few choices—if he shoots the gun, what is he protecting? If he brings trouble upon himself, would it be worth it? If he doesn’t shoot the gun, is he giving up, or is he letting go? If he lets go, could he find a way to reconcile himself?
TB: Do you think Avery is made to grow up too fast? Is everyone in this part of North St. Louis forced to grow up this fast?
RAA: How age is viewed and applied to black folks is an interesting concept to reckon. Starting from a more global viewpoint of society at large, it would seem that the viewpoint of a black person’s age, especially a young black man or woman’s age, is amorphous, and can be changed to suit the needs of persons in power. In vicious turn, teenagers become full-grown men capable of striking fear into the hearts of trained police officers. Then full-grown men become infantilized, unworthy of respect and responsibility.
Considering Avery’s age, how he responds to upsetting events forms an implied narrative arc throughout the collection. In the first set of stories, Avery is more able to turn away from calls-to-action and seeks to escape as best he can. As the stories progress, he finds himself in difficult situations that he can’t run from, and in this way, he is given the opportunity to make the decisions that will define who he is or who he wants to be.
TB: I’m interested in how these stories fit into or don’t fit into a traditional “novel” arc. What was the process like of taking these stories and arranging them in a way that added up to a novel? Or, did you always have this episodic structure in mind from the beginning?
RAA: Honestly, I had the most fun arranging the collection near the end. When I drafted the stories, I wasn’t sure of how I wanted to organize them thematically, and the stories, at first, covered different periods of time. After I had about three or four solid stories, I decided to start linking together the stories that were close enough in time frame, and then thinking about what spaces I wanted to fill in. As I wrote more stories, I’d periodically take a month to stop drafting, and instead do mass revisions. So I’d take the first handful of stories, find places where they overlapped, or where I might need more info in a place for stronger setups, and add in those details, while also working to edit for the sake of line-by-line consistency. Along the way, before I decided on a chronological forward progression and landed on the final arrangement, I experimented with arranging the stories in different patterns for chapbook submissions. In this way, there’s a bit of carryover, as the stories reveal different moods and themes if they’re read in different orders. Reading “Gatecrasher of Hyboria,” “Nothing Uglier Than Gold On A Corpse,” and then “Teeth’s Story”—or reading “Neck Bones,” “Garden of Fire and Blood,” and then “Shine”—should highlight different themes and hopefully create different effects. I didn’t explore this too much in depth, but in the future I’d love to create a collection that offers a few surprises when read in alternate arrangements.
TB: What were some models (literary or not) that you used to help you structure, plan, or outline the book? I felt like the writing was so colorful and action-packed that maybe you’re a fan of comic books? Maybe it’s the cover that gave me this idea too.
RAA: One of the main influences for my arrangement was poetry collections, including Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair, The Moon Reflected Fire by Doug Anderson, Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson, When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz, Hum by Jamaal May, and The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay. These collections showed me how thematic and technical elements could be combined to create dynamic narrative arcs, both explicit and implied.
But what had a bigger influence on me were hip-hop concept albums. I considered how Man on the Moon by Kid Cudi, To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar, Rodeo by Travis Scott, E.1999 Eternal by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, XXX by Danny Brown, Ex-Military by Death Grips, and plenty more created dominant narrative arcs. I thought about how those arcs could possibly be more succinctly expressed. The song “Man on the Moon” could’ve come much sooner in Cudi’s first album, and I wonder if “Enter Galactic” and “Is There Any Love” could have been left behind. Would that give the album greater thematic cohesion? Should there have been more interludes? The album that spoke most to me as a blueprint was Bryson Tiller’s Trap Soul. Technically and thematically, it delivers, and then some. For me, it might be one of the most precisely arranged and satisfying hip-hop albums of the last decade. Plus, rearranging it, listening to “Overtime,” “Exchange,” “Intro,” and then “Right My Wrongs,” tells a different story than the given arrangement. Also, I just love Bryson Tiller’s viewpoints of craft. He’s all about process!
TB: I love how the book is made textural by things like photos, crumpled notebook pages, hybrid forms, large text, and other ephemera. Were these techniques added in revision or did they naturally come about while drafting? Did editors at different magazines or even editors of the book push back about these elements?
RAA: Including different textual elements stuck from the drafting phases of the stories and grew more robust with revisions. Working in text elements came from the work I did in a graduate workshop and seminar on Post-Modernism. We read Rivka Galchen and so much great work. Here, I was encouraged to explore taking bigger risks and experiments which resulted in a story that used an assignment sheet covered in doodles and a mock essay as a frame. The most important concept I took away from the course is that it can be fun to challenge the reader and engage their expectations with a certain amount of playfulness. And you should treat your work as a living, breathing organism that will grow feathers and scales and talons and live a life of its own. I mean, it could also grow hands and normal appendages, but that’s not as much fun. As I worked on Avery Colt, I aimed to work in these post-modern techniques in a way that heightens the storytelling without taking over with stunts for the sake of stunts. But then again, I can’t really front—I love a good, bald-faced stunt or two.
TB: I’m sure you have other projects you’re thinking about and working on. Feel free to tell me about anything you like. I’m wondering, though, about risks you want to take or rules you want to break or experiments you want to try in the future. If you can, tell me about a big swing you want to take as an artist.
RAA: My current project is called “Catacombs Incorporated.” I got the idea when I was researching some of the challenges North St. Louis faces and how much I wish I could snap my fingers, say a prayer, or offer up a vial of blood and magically change the conditions. To this end, I decided to write high-concept stories that center around Catacombs Incorporated, an enchanted commodities manufacturer that offers budget-friendly miracles and spiritual programming. Of course, the price is always a bit more than what it seems (!!!). I’ve been cranking away on the project in earnest during the last year, and besides making the most of the mythical, post-modern, and magical realist traditions, I’m aiming to make world-building as exciting as possible. I’m leaning into this drive to build a world and offer details up in the methodology of a historian and just getting back to swinging wild and seeing what connects.
TB: I like to end interviews with this question: What’s something you used to believe about writing that now, after having published your first book, you no longer believe to be true?
RAA: I don’t know if my beliefs have changed so much as they’ve gotten stronger. I grew as a writer when I understood that I needed to let the characters and the readers in on the fun I was having with the narrative, and now I feel that’s even truer. Sometimes when you’re drafting, revising, polishing, and layering a story, you’re not always sure what the reader will engage with and to what extent. Since Avery Colt has stepped into the world, I’m much more inclined to walk away from a story with a stronger sense of faith that the characters and narrative world will stick with them in ways I wouldn’t have even imagined. I feel like following this faith will allow me take even bigger risks and tackle meaner, uglier challenges.
Ron A. Austin’s short stories have been placed in Pleiades, Story Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar, his first collection of linked stories, won the 2017 Nilsen Prize and has been longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Austin’s work has garnered a 2016 Regional Arts Commission Fellowship and a special mention in the 2015 Pushcart Prize Anthology. He, his partner Jennie, and son Elijah live in St. Louis. He can be reached at ronaaustin@gmail.com.
Tyler Barton (@goftyler) is a cofounder of Fear No Lit, home of the Submerging Writer Fellowship, Page Match, and Try This: Free Workshops. His collection of flash fiction, The Quiet Part Loud (2019) won the Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest from Split Lip Press. Find his short fiction in The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Find him online at tsbarton.com.