Gina Nutt: For a story set in one place, a motel, “Trust” is expansive. What appealed to you about this setting? Where did you find that expansion happening?
David Ryan: Years ago, I had a job where I traveled a lot and stayed in places like this every day. Sometimes for ten months out of the year. I was drawing from memories of this kind of space, just recounting the draw of that environment. There’s a kind of dissolution that begins to take you apart when you’re away from home, your real home, like this. When you recognize that this is your life. It’s made more uncanny because the rooms look alike, wherever you are. No matter how far you are today from where you were yesterday. All the different chains get their furniture from the same supplier, the same warehouse. So you travel for hours and then find the same bedspread and chairs and desk, the same faraway moan of a truck on the highway beyond the window, the algid bloom on the tarped swimming pool, the ice machine chuckling down the hall.  

And it’s an unintentionally weird space. It’s absolutely banal, assertively neglectful. These spaces are designed to be somewhat transparent, aesthetically silent. And so the expansion in the story comes from the smallest movements and details that rise up from that silence.  

But the world inside the character, Mannie, is an expansion, an infinitude. That staging we turn to when the external world seems to be foreclosing on our options. So the story’s eye atomizes things on the television, studies the room and the squeaky wheel outside of the cleaning cart. But it also turns inward, toward an interior expansion—a compensation for the limited interest around him. Even when he closes his eyes, the narrative eye is attending to sounds and things that are there/not there. And though it’s left mostly unsaid in the story, his motives in travelling with this woman, Sophie, run much deeper and darker. It’s alluded to only a bit. I think my intention was to let what they’re both keeping from each other exist unsaid for as long as possible. That pure potential that lives in what hasn’t happened yet. How it shapes the prose, the voice. And here, in the white space, the consequences of the inferences are enormous and grave.  

But Mannie also appears to be losing his eyesight. And so the story-eye is desperately trying to take whatever it can from the remaining visual world. The reflexive lens of his life before and beyond each moment of now. That limbic attention to every detail of his current environment. How long will these things be real like this?  

Finally, this story is culled from a section in a novel I’m writing. So the narrative here is, in a sense, singing into the past and the future. I do this a lot, reconstitute chapters or sections of longer things into short stories. Just to see where they might go. I rework them, so they have their own arc, their own unity, often vastly different from the larger piece. So maybe this adds to this expansive sense—a halo effect from an unspooled story floating beyond what’s here.

GN: There’s a deeply rooted feel to this story, yet the transient motel setting, Mannie’s vision dragon, and a new relationship evoke disorientation. How did you press into those stranger moments while maintaining the story’s grounded foothold? What’s hard about getting weird in fiction? What are your anchors?
DR: I like that you feel the story feels rooted. Maybe hope is a foothold here? I feel that way about life. It’s the mediator between the life drive and death drive. In life as in this story. Hope that there’s love, possibly. That Sophie may be something important in his life. That there might even be a family in his future. Elsewhere in the novel, you can see that Sophie hopes for these things, too. Hope is sometimes the only grounding we’re given—it’s the last gasp when we’re most desperate. The world can be crashing around you, and you can still hope that things will work out. The motel’s transience is, maybe, also a metaphor for the fact that nothing is permanent, nothing exists in stasis. We move on: this moment is likely not permanent. So, thinking it out a little, this new relationship with this near-stranger, and this new uncertainty about his eyesight are the limbic world of the story—the death drive. And the motel is a moment, a perch for now. They’ll never have to live here. And, then, look at all the things that could happen that aren’t terrible! Toward the very end of the story, you see this fulcrum of his positioning there on the balcony. He had closed his eyes to walk, to practice being sightless. The risk is that he might fall down the concrete stairs, and he’s willing to see if that happens. And it doesn’t, and Sophie’s below. Already the moment has moved into another register.

Technically, of course, the weirder the event or situation, the more concrete and real the anchors need to be. So we turn to the prose, getting the details right and precise, conveying a realistic emotional center, making the environment believable alongside the human response to the weirdness. And I guess I feel like the real world is just too weird when you look at it closely enough, to leave unnoticed. I love that we can write that world. But we can also be selective. We can avoid the clichés that are unfolding around us, the daily news cycle, and things like that. We can show an original humanity that has a deep, ideally affecting, verisimilitude. Beauty. Henry Green was once asked why he wrote. He said, without even thinking about it, ‘to make something beautiful.’ That’s an amazing power to be allowed. It’s up there with the hummingbirds and God.

GN: The voice here also creates a sense of casual ease, perhaps even familiarity, as with the repetition of “or whatever.” How do you approach the sentence in terms of voice? Or is this the other way around for you, with voice steering?
DR: Voice probably most often steers the words first, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t have a set method. But ideally, the voice kind of tumbles the words out; it constitutes them, rather than the other way around. But for some stories, I might start with a metaphor rather than a voice, and that will determine a lot. In revision, there’s always a lot of work I’ll do. It’s where I first begin to look at something like how the prose sounds. But so many big discoveries about the voice might come later, once I’ve seen what a mess it’s made of itself. I love those slight moments of distortion in the telling, a kind of subjective free indirect narration that slips deeper into a stream of consciousness and even, momentarily, into a different POV—a voice half-in, and half-out of the natural mind of the subject. How we think to ourselves, how we narrate each moment we experience. The metaphoric “I” we live with constantly. Ourselves as we live in our interior mind, as if separate. To have a relatively straightforward 3rd Person POV that somehow says things that even free indirect discourse doesn’t normally do—that’s a lot of fun to write. Even a simple “or whatever” in the syntax can be quietly surprising, because the narration’s mirror of the character suddenly strays. The voice begins, here and there, to move with its own agency. There’s this moment in this Bunuel film, Los Olvidados, where a woman is lying on a bed and, for just a millisecond, Bunuel overlays this faint image of a skeleton rising from her body. It’s a blip, gone before you might notice. Its presence is so ghostly and quick that Bunuel seems to have intended for it to pass subliminally. Felt but not seen. That brief slippage is so powerful. I guess my point is that I like a voice that does that. I like sentences that do that—that have a bit of a soul that parts from the way the syntax bends, here and there.  

The other thing about voice is that its persuasiveness often depends on how well it imitates the subject, the person we’re watching and living inside. And, I’d say, you get a certain energy in occasionally letting the narration, the voice, shift. The moment we decide to work in the 3rd Person, we’re deciding that every word will have an uncanny double. The text is no longer pretending to be a 1st Person direct voice transmitting to the reader. It’s now two voices: the interior voice of the character, but also the implied other of the narration. A ghost, a soul. Normally, there’s a real fidelity between the doubles. They don’t betray each other. They don’t rub against each other. So the casual tonal register here is Mannie’s, even though the free indirect teller of his life is a 3rd Person. I like inserting things like “or whatever” because it’s halfway the voice of the ghost, in a quietly odd way: a voice that seems to have these slips of the tongue that reveal itself, that reverberate against the concrete, conscious text, even when that text is clearly also the mind of the character.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
DR: Memory is probably the dominant light in my creative mosaic. It’s what I turn to and try to shape into individual pieces. And if I’m being honest, it’s my daughter and my wife who seem to energize my drive to write. So many other things, of course, books, music, that whole list, shape me, shape the creative impulse. But I’ve never felt such a primal drive to write so profoundly as now. When my daughter was born, I suddenly understood this urgency that other animals must feel. A kind of lower-register rumble, a fundamental impulsion. That’s my own fascination, I know, but it’s the most available, immediate energy to keep writing. Because I never understood love like this.

Beyond that—and depending on the moment: whatever author I’m currently obsessing over; films, absolutely, maybe even dominantly; visual art, yes. My wife’s a painter, so I’ve learned so much from her. Because I grew up playing music and studying composition, I still lean into it, always, for structure and form. I might consciously edit something with the overlay of a fugal form. It’s just another way of haunting the lines. Or use scansion to shape a repetition in the syntax. There’s that funny story about Satie—a critic once said his work was “formless”. And so he wrote Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear. And you see it in the notation on the page; the notes on the staff move in the outline of a pear. But to listen to it, you would never know this.

And ephemera, yes. I recently transposed a dinner plate’s design, that kind they call Blue Italian—with those lovely blue pastorals on white porcelain—over the description of my own backyard in a story. I love taking anything and using it as a prompt, a scaffolding, a metaphor, a valence. Like Joseph Cornell’s picture boxes, this accumulation of fragments of found life as artifacts of memory. How to thread them through narrative time. Because that’s all we are composed of, these artifacts of memory, of events and people we’ve encountered. We’re living, breathing embodiments of memory. And this story has felt to me like one of those weird picture boxes. The motel is the kind of box itself, with floors on which these objects—these people and circumstances and my own threading past—are positioned. And the hope is that the arrangement takes on a strange beauty that maybe can’t be explained, but is felt all the same.