Ryan Masters's Blog: Notes from Way Outside
March 24, 2021
The Wig
What’s The Wig?
A random dump of my words, music, and other questionable "art". It also contains my ongoing blog about living with wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains and enduring the Santa Cruz County Fire Fighter Academy as a volunteer firefighter for Zayante Fire Protection District. I created it as an alternative to the toxicity of social media. Open it. Delete it. Forward it along to some weirdo who might like it. Unsubscribe at any time.
Find it here: https://ryanmasters831.com/the-wig
A random dump of my words, music, and other questionable "art". It also contains my ongoing blog about living with wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains and enduring the Santa Cruz County Fire Fighter Academy as a volunteer firefighter for Zayante Fire Protection District. I created it as an alternative to the toxicity of social media. Open it. Delete it. Forward it along to some weirdo who might like it. Unsubscribe at any time.
Find it here: https://ryanmasters831.com/the-wig
May 4, 2020
September 10, 2019
Providence Mining Corporation
Read my short story, "Providence Mining Corporation," in the new issue of Catamaran Literary Reader:
https://catamaranliteraryreader.com/
https://catamaranliteraryreader.com/
April 30, 2019
"No Whispering, No Secrets"
Read my new short story, "No Whispering, No Secrets," which placed third in Bookshop Santa Cruz's 2019 Short Story Contest:
https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/no-...
https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/no-...
March 25, 2019
March 13, 2019
Kirkus Review: Above An Abyss
In this debut book, two novellas focus on loners whose seemingly unremarkable lives simmer with darkness.
In Trampoline Games, 12-year-old Jake Lore and his mother move to Sandy, Utah, in the summer of 1986. His father remains in California on business while Jake adjusts to an almost exclusively Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints neighborhood. He’s immediately smitten with Debra Hanson, the girl next door who’s the same age, but even more drawn to neighbor Finn Levy. The two boys jump on the Hansons’ trampoline when the family attends Sunday morning church. But their activities become increasingly riskier and more violent: poltergeisting homes (nightly invasions to move around or take small items) or throwing lawn darts with little warning to others. In the more mysterious The Moth Orchid, Alasa Memnov raises orchids in Fairbanks, Alaska, and periodically visits her mother, Bebe, in a nursing home. That’s where research physician Dr. Rene Funes approaches Alasa. Evidently, Bebe had given Funes her daughter’s genetic material years ago, and Alasa is susceptible to the same rare form of dementia afflicting her mother. The doctor suggests Alasa return to her hometown of Lotus as a “cognitive exercise.” Though the intent is to aid her memory, the trip may instead prove too revealing for Alasa. Masters skillfully puts ordinary characters in troubling and sometimes-dire circumstances. Jake, for example, is a typical tween (he gets gum in his hair) while Finn introduces precarious elements into the boy’s life, like ingredients for a bomb. In the same vein, Alasa’s hometown excursion is nostalgic but also becomes a struggle to remember her past. Both disconcerting novellas have startling turns, including a sudden physical assault in Trampoline Games that may be the book’s most horrifying moment. Though Orchid relies heavily on a late twist, it doesn’t make its coda any less unsettling. The prose, like the stories, is somber but lyrical: “Bright, crisp stars shone like tiny holes poked in oilcloth, as if the night sky had been draped over an adjacent world made of blinding light.”
A pair of quietly disturbing tales that will surely resonate with readers.
Read the review at Kirkus Reviews.
In Trampoline Games, 12-year-old Jake Lore and his mother move to Sandy, Utah, in the summer of 1986. His father remains in California on business while Jake adjusts to an almost exclusively Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints neighborhood. He’s immediately smitten with Debra Hanson, the girl next door who’s the same age, but even more drawn to neighbor Finn Levy. The two boys jump on the Hansons’ trampoline when the family attends Sunday morning church. But their activities become increasingly riskier and more violent: poltergeisting homes (nightly invasions to move around or take small items) or throwing lawn darts with little warning to others. In the more mysterious The Moth Orchid, Alasa Memnov raises orchids in Fairbanks, Alaska, and periodically visits her mother, Bebe, in a nursing home. That’s where research physician Dr. Rene Funes approaches Alasa. Evidently, Bebe had given Funes her daughter’s genetic material years ago, and Alasa is susceptible to the same rare form of dementia afflicting her mother. The doctor suggests Alasa return to her hometown of Lotus as a “cognitive exercise.” Though the intent is to aid her memory, the trip may instead prove too revealing for Alasa. Masters skillfully puts ordinary characters in troubling and sometimes-dire circumstances. Jake, for example, is a typical tween (he gets gum in his hair) while Finn introduces precarious elements into the boy’s life, like ingredients for a bomb. In the same vein, Alasa’s hometown excursion is nostalgic but also becomes a struggle to remember her past. Both disconcerting novellas have startling turns, including a sudden physical assault in Trampoline Games that may be the book’s most horrifying moment. Though Orchid relies heavily on a late twist, it doesn’t make its coda any less unsettling. The prose, like the stories, is somber but lyrical: “Bright, crisp stars shone like tiny holes poked in oilcloth, as if the night sky had been draped over an adjacent world made of blinding light.”
A pair of quietly disturbing tales that will surely resonate with readers.
Read the review at Kirkus Reviews.
February 22, 2019
Author Interview
An Interview with Ryan Masters
Author of Above an Abyss: Two Novellas
By Jack Messenger
Q. Ryan, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today. It’s a great pleasure to find out more about you after reading your wonderful book Above an Abyss.
A. Thank you!
Q. It’s tempting to wonder if stories like ‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever’ and ‘Trampoline Games’ are inspired by experience. How much do you draw on your own autobiography for your fiction?
Absolutely. I lived in Sandy, Utah [‘Trampoline Games’] from sixth grade to eighth grade. I went to graduate school in Fairbanks, Alaska [‘Moth Orchid’] in the late 1990s. I also worked archaeology in the Great Basin [‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever’] for a number of years as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon.
Q. It seems to me that your fiction inhabits the rather lonely meeting point of geography, history and identity, both personal and cultural. Would you agree?
That’s a fair assessment. The characters in Above an Abyss and some of my other fiction are lost in very large, stark Western landscapes. They feel isolated or actually exist in some state of seclusion or isolation. Consequently these characters inhabit very insular physical and emotional places that also happen to be limitless and huge. This is a very American state of being. The enormous expanses of land swallow us. Maybe it is also because we routinely project our own fears and dreams on others rather than going through the trouble of getting to know them and discovering who they truly are.
Q. There is much more of a mythic/symbolic dimension to territory in the United States than there is in the United Kingdom, certainly. Probably, that has a lot to do with the difference in scale and history of the two countries. Do you investigate the history and formation of a place before writing about it?
A. This question makes me think of the William Burroughs line from Naked Lunch: ‘America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.’ America is awash in so much myth because we’ve only had a couple hundred years to invent it. It’s generally a dark mythos, too. Some form of the devil or another lives in Hawthorne’s woods, in Melville’s whale, even in Steinbeck’s fields. And yes, I research places extensively before I write them. I studied under a writer named Frank Soos (Unified Field Theory, Unpleasantries) for a few years. He was adamant about the need to understand the landscape your characters inhabit to understand the characters. Usually, I have lived in a location for some period of time before I choose to write about it. That said, I have also written ‘imagined’ versions of places, but these stories tend to swerve into magic realism.
Q. You certainly like to reveal how abnormal the normal can be. Something strange can lurk beneath the surface of appearances. In ‘Trampoline Games,’ for instance, I was struck by Jacob’s thought that normality is really odd, and how the reader is enabled to share that feeling of oddness. Is this something you cultivate or have experienced yourself?
A. My life has been remarkably odd. I assume I’ve cultivated that to some degree. I am attracted to weird people and strange places. Yet it doesn’t take much investigation to discover that everybody on this planet is odd in their own way. The human experience is utterly trippy and baffling. If we were always conscious of the fact that we are stumbling blindly around this planet in bags of blood and bones with no discernible purpose, we’d probably all just sit down and freak out. But our brains normalize this experience. As a result, human beings repress all the terror and uncertainty of being alive and it resurfaces in this incredibly rich tapestry of idiosyncrasies and bizarre behaviors.
Q. What are the challenges of writing shorter forms such as the short story and the novella?
A. Nearly all of my short stories and novellas were originally much longer works. My process of revision is always one of reduction. Editing consists primarily of finding ways to powerfully suggest rather than say. Can I defend each paragraph as either (a) driving story; or (b) maintaining the integrity of the piece’s overarching themes? The challenge of the shorter form is maintaining discipline of efficiency.
Q. As a writer myself, I am often surprised how characters and situations are apt to exert themselves in the process of composition, taking me to places I had no intention of visiting. How would you describe your own writing process?
A. That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? I grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. While it wasn’t a wildly remote upbringing, it was far enough from town that I spent a lot of time entertaining myself, creating stories, wandering through the woods. Writing continues to be like that for me. It’s a great gift to retain that wonder and amazement in the world.
Q. Perhaps the strangeness of the everyday is linked to its precarity. In ‘Moth Orchid,’ maintaining the hot and humid environment in which orchids can flourish is totally at odds with the outside world of extreme cold and snow. It can all collapse in a moment, and yet we persevere. Perhaps it’s rather like writing itself. What do you reckon?
A. Exactly. Alasa maintains the orchids in subzero Alaska to avoid facing a brutal reality. Words, as you’ve suggested, are my orchids, in one way. In another way, words are also my Dr. Funes [from ‘Moth Orchid’]. They force me to recognize and accept that reality.
Q. What should we expect from you next?
A. I’m working on a collection of short stories, a novel and a collection of poetry. It’s hard for me to tell which one will be finished first at this point. Even after all this time, the process of writing is still kind of a mystery to me. I just keep sitting down and working. What happens, happens. Inshallah.
Q. Well, whatever you finish first, make sure you send it to me for a review.
A. I will!
Author of Above an Abyss: Two Novellas
By Jack Messenger
Q. Ryan, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today. It’s a great pleasure to find out more about you after reading your wonderful book Above an Abyss.
A. Thank you!
Q. It’s tempting to wonder if stories like ‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever’ and ‘Trampoline Games’ are inspired by experience. How much do you draw on your own autobiography for your fiction?
Absolutely. I lived in Sandy, Utah [‘Trampoline Games’] from sixth grade to eighth grade. I went to graduate school in Fairbanks, Alaska [‘Moth Orchid’] in the late 1990s. I also worked archaeology in the Great Basin [‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever’] for a number of years as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon.
Q. It seems to me that your fiction inhabits the rather lonely meeting point of geography, history and identity, both personal and cultural. Would you agree?
That’s a fair assessment. The characters in Above an Abyss and some of my other fiction are lost in very large, stark Western landscapes. They feel isolated or actually exist in some state of seclusion or isolation. Consequently these characters inhabit very insular physical and emotional places that also happen to be limitless and huge. This is a very American state of being. The enormous expanses of land swallow us. Maybe it is also because we routinely project our own fears and dreams on others rather than going through the trouble of getting to know them and discovering who they truly are.
Q. There is much more of a mythic/symbolic dimension to territory in the United States than there is in the United Kingdom, certainly. Probably, that has a lot to do with the difference in scale and history of the two countries. Do you investigate the history and formation of a place before writing about it?
A. This question makes me think of the William Burroughs line from Naked Lunch: ‘America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.’ America is awash in so much myth because we’ve only had a couple hundred years to invent it. It’s generally a dark mythos, too. Some form of the devil or another lives in Hawthorne’s woods, in Melville’s whale, even in Steinbeck’s fields. And yes, I research places extensively before I write them. I studied under a writer named Frank Soos (Unified Field Theory, Unpleasantries) for a few years. He was adamant about the need to understand the landscape your characters inhabit to understand the characters. Usually, I have lived in a location for some period of time before I choose to write about it. That said, I have also written ‘imagined’ versions of places, but these stories tend to swerve into magic realism.
Q. You certainly like to reveal how abnormal the normal can be. Something strange can lurk beneath the surface of appearances. In ‘Trampoline Games,’ for instance, I was struck by Jacob’s thought that normality is really odd, and how the reader is enabled to share that feeling of oddness. Is this something you cultivate or have experienced yourself?
A. My life has been remarkably odd. I assume I’ve cultivated that to some degree. I am attracted to weird people and strange places. Yet it doesn’t take much investigation to discover that everybody on this planet is odd in their own way. The human experience is utterly trippy and baffling. If we were always conscious of the fact that we are stumbling blindly around this planet in bags of blood and bones with no discernible purpose, we’d probably all just sit down and freak out. But our brains normalize this experience. As a result, human beings repress all the terror and uncertainty of being alive and it resurfaces in this incredibly rich tapestry of idiosyncrasies and bizarre behaviors.
Q. What are the challenges of writing shorter forms such as the short story and the novella?
A. Nearly all of my short stories and novellas were originally much longer works. My process of revision is always one of reduction. Editing consists primarily of finding ways to powerfully suggest rather than say. Can I defend each paragraph as either (a) driving story; or (b) maintaining the integrity of the piece’s overarching themes? The challenge of the shorter form is maintaining discipline of efficiency.
Q. As a writer myself, I am often surprised how characters and situations are apt to exert themselves in the process of composition, taking me to places I had no intention of visiting. How would you describe your own writing process?
A. That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? I grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. While it wasn’t a wildly remote upbringing, it was far enough from town that I spent a lot of time entertaining myself, creating stories, wandering through the woods. Writing continues to be like that for me. It’s a great gift to retain that wonder and amazement in the world.
Q. Perhaps the strangeness of the everyday is linked to its precarity. In ‘Moth Orchid,’ maintaining the hot and humid environment in which orchids can flourish is totally at odds with the outside world of extreme cold and snow. It can all collapse in a moment, and yet we persevere. Perhaps it’s rather like writing itself. What do you reckon?
A. Exactly. Alasa maintains the orchids in subzero Alaska to avoid facing a brutal reality. Words, as you’ve suggested, are my orchids, in one way. In another way, words are also my Dr. Funes [from ‘Moth Orchid’]. They force me to recognize and accept that reality.
Q. What should we expect from you next?
A. I’m working on a collection of short stories, a novel and a collection of poetry. It’s hard for me to tell which one will be finished first at this point. Even after all this time, the process of writing is still kind of a mystery to me. I just keep sitting down and working. What happens, happens. Inshallah.
Q. Well, whatever you finish first, make sure you send it to me for a review.
A. I will!
January 30, 2019
Above an Abyss: Two Novellas | Ryan Masters | Review
The epigraph to Above An Abyss, Ryan Masters’ marvellous collection of two beautiful and stunningly juxtaposed novellas, is from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ ‘Trampoline Games’ and ‘The Moth Orchid’ approach this idea of existential precarity from entirely different directions, yet the two stories complement one another in breathtaking, unexpected ways.
Read the entire review here.
Read the entire review here.
January 16, 2019
Big Sur and the Oranges of Above An Abyss
Ever been to a bad reading? You know the kind: a bunch of empty chairs, a couple other writers, all the panache of an AA meeting in jail.
I have perpetrated countless bad readings. It's an embarrassing experience for everyone involved. Like a really bad date with four or five other people.
The Above An Abyss reading on March 23 at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur won't be like that.
Why? For one, it's at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. The HMML is less a bookstore or library and more a shrine to the spirit of the great writer. It is one of the most beautiful and hip venues on the West Coast. It's a must-visit for any literary lover. Or any lover of literature.
Secondly, my band The Suborbitals will not only play a couple sets of music, they will also accompany the brief readings from the two novellas.
And third, I will be performing an interpretive pagan dance dedicated to the spring equinox.
Just kidding. I couldn't think of a third. The point is, not boring. See you there!
What: Above An Abyss Reading & The Suborbitals
Where: Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur, CA
When: 3-6 pm, March 23, 2019
Tickets: https://henrymiller.org/
I have perpetrated countless bad readings. It's an embarrassing experience for everyone involved. Like a really bad date with four or five other people.
The Above An Abyss reading on March 23 at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur won't be like that.
Why? For one, it's at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur. The HMML is less a bookstore or library and more a shrine to the spirit of the great writer. It is one of the most beautiful and hip venues on the West Coast. It's a must-visit for any literary lover. Or any lover of literature.
Secondly, my band The Suborbitals will not only play a couple sets of music, they will also accompany the brief readings from the two novellas.
And third, I will be performing an interpretive pagan dance dedicated to the spring equinox.
Just kidding. I couldn't think of a third. The point is, not boring. See you there!
What: Above An Abyss Reading & The Suborbitals
Where: Henry Miller Memorial Library, Big Sur, CA
When: 3-6 pm, March 23, 2019
Tickets: https://henrymiller.org/
December 9, 2018
Radial Books Releases Collection of Novellas by Santa Cruz Writer Ryan Masters
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Radial Books Releases Collection of Novellas by Santa Cruz Writer Ryan Masters
SEATTLE WA >> Radial Books is pleased to announce the release of Above an Abyss: Two Novellas, the debut collection of fiction from Monterey Bay writer Ryan Masters. Released in December 2018, Above an Abyss contains contrasting tales of suspense:
Trampoline Games. It’s the summer of 1986 and all is not well among the sharply defined suburbs of Salt Lake City. A 12-year-old boy arrives in a land of “mountains, Mormons, crickets” to find baffling prejudice, but also intoxicating freedom, lust, moments of heaven and, in the end, a terrible violence.
The Moth Orchid. When a hereditary form of early onset dementia begins to ravage a woman’s mind, she embarks on a desperate quest into her past in hopes of finding answers. Set against the noir backdrop of a sub-zero Alaskan winter, “The Moth Orchid” is a gripping tale of one woman’s struggle with the inevitability of oblivion.
“Ryan Masters writes stories that pull the rug out from under you— and leave you gasping for air. I've rarely been so surprised as by stories like these. Brilliant work.” – Susie Bright
“Come to Ryan Masters for the lust and violence of youth, stay for madness, decay and death. Above an Abyss is a Borghesian tour de force.” - Elizabeth Mckenzie
"Whether he takes you to suffocating suburban Reagan-era Utah or snow-buried and ice-fogged Alaska, Ryan Masters deftly conjures a chilling sense of disquiet and dislocation, and leaves you with a haunting afterimage of the cruelty and chaos that lurk just under the surface of what you think is reality." - Wallace Baine
Ryan Masters is a writer and poet from Santa Cruz, CA. He spent a decade on staff at the Santa Cruz Sentinel and The Monterey County Weekly. He is a frequent contributor to The Surfer’s Journal and former poet-in-residence for the City of Pacific Grove, CA. His poetry and fiction work have appeared in publications such as The Iowa Review, Catamaran Literary Reader and Unlikely Stories. He is the author of below the low-water mark.
For more information or to order a review copy of Above an Abyss: Two Novellas, contact Tricia Yost of Radial Books. For interview requests and to see a schedule of upcoming author events, visit https://ryanmasters831.com or call 831-818-3127.
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Notes from Way Outside
Thoughts on the creation of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. Also, some self-promotion.
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