David Ryan, "Holiday"

It’s December 23. David Ryan, author of Animals in Motion, would like to open a chequing account.

How would you describe your story?

DAVID RYAN: It’s something of a weirdly shaped homage to parenting, I think, having written it now—to those holidays where you look back and see this past that feels increasingly familiar and foreign at once. A desire for the ghosts that still exist rather palpably in memory. But the creative impulse seems for me to be looking forward, too. I have a daughter; she’s twelve, and I seem to keep playing out these strange, often impossible, scenarios. I plug in “what if I was this kind of a dad” into them, and they become a creative impulsion suddenly.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

DR: Relatively recently, last Christmas, I think. It was triggered by a Bee Gees song I’d heard on a radio station that had temporarily converted to holiday-themed programming.

What kind of research went into this story?

DR: I don’t know anything about Sacramento, CA, or the smaller towns surrounding it. I noodled around Google Maps for this. Most of this was just confabulation.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

DR: There’s an opportunity to capture some compression of human experience—and a closure to that statement—in this distilled space. I’ve been working on novels as well as stories lately, and the opportunity to push some emotion, like a quick ghost, into the mind of a reader is so appealing. It’s also wonderful to feel a sense of completion in a piece that doesn’t require months to realize.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

DR: My website is www.davidwryan.com.

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

DR: I know how this sounds—but honestly? My wife and daughter. But to consider a more concrete, literal gift, it’s probably a drum set my mom got me when I was a kid.

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