Ryan Habermeyer: Necronauts

Welcome again to the new interview series at 100 Word Story to promote forthcoming and recently published books by our contributors. Authors answer five questions, each in 100 words or fewer. If you’re a contributor with a new book and you’d like to be included in this series, please reach out to us at hundredwordstory [at] gmail.com.

This week, we’re excited to share an interview with Ryan Habermeyer about his new book, Necronauts, which released from Stillhouse Press on March 17th. Necronauts is Habermeyer’s third book. He is also author of the short story collections Salt Folk and The Science of Lost Futures. His piece “Alone, Together,” which is included in Necronauts, was first published in 100 Word Story.

 

Is there a particular book or books your book is in conversation with?

I stole from Don Quixote, only my book is about a boy who watches too many campy 1950s sci-fi movies and, believing he is an alien, builds a catapult to launch himself into outer space. Like Quixote, it wanders and digresses through misadventures and anecdotes,  philosophizing along the way, but it’s also a Pinocchio story. Only instead of a morality tale about civilizing children, it’s a satire that asks what happens when there is no Jiminy Cricket? When there is no moral compass in the Utah desert full of addicted zealots, how do you become the real version of yourself?

 

How does brevity figure into your book?

The book is written in the form of ninety-five obituaries. Each obituary either tells the story of one of the eclectic citizens in this secluded desert town, or is an episode about the boy who believes he’s an alien trying to get back to the mothership. All the obituaries are micro vignettes, with many of the narratives accompanied by vintage photographs. An obituary is a snapshot of a life, and the novel is like a series of snapshots scrapbooked together into a collage. So, it’s a novel-in-flash. Like a Winesburg of the American West only with an overarching storyline.

 

If you were to offer a recipe for how to write this book, what would be the ingredients? Steps?

Finely grind two pounds of short story about a boy wearing space helmet. Add water until it resembles a gooey novella. Nibble occasionally on fermented narrative goo over fifteen years. Return home from funeral of college roommate and cook furiously, mixing sci-fi, satire, family history, fabulism, fact, and Utah folklore with a pinch of original fermented goo until smooth. Add two cups of boiled abandoned religious faith souring in fridge with heaping tablespoons of absurdity and existential angst. Shape mixture into three hundred bite-size servings. Bake for two years at 500° until all but ninety-five portions have evaporated. Chew slowly.

 

Who might you have been if you hadn’t become a writer?

I studied zoology and microbiology for three years as an undergraduate before turning to literature and writing. So, most likely a scientific researcher of some sort. Maybe infectious disease? Viruses always seemed more interesting than people. Although, I do love jellyfish too. So maybe I’d be floating on a boat somewhere in the Pacific admiring the brainless, boneless, bloodless world of cnidarians. But if I had been born a few hundred years ago—perhaps in the 1600s, which was the last great age when art and science mingled—I would have been a cartographer. I love old maps.

 

What are you working on these days?

Trying to finish a not-quite memoir. More like fabulist autofiction crossbred with lyric essay. It’s a hybrid thing that juggles four braided narratives: the death of my childhood best friend; a man with a literal jellyfish face caring for his abusive, dementia-stricken mother; lyric meditations on jellyfish evolution seen through the eyes of nineteenth-century naturalist Ernst Haeckel; and a marine biologist who may or may not be Ryan Habermeyer wrestling with his Mormon ancestry in the surreal Icelandic wilderness. Let’s call it The Man with a Jellyfish for a Face.