Contemporary Authors

• The Science of Lost Futures ( short stories) BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 2018

• Ryan Habermeyer - https://ryanhabermeyer.com/about/

  About

  Ryan2 (2)Ryan Habermeyer is a native of Los Angeles. He received his M.F.A. from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. His award-winning stories and essays have received two Pushcart Prize nominations and been published in Hotel Amerika, Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, and Phoebe, among others. He lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where he teaches creative writing at Salisbury University.

• Bat City Review - http://www.batcityreview.org/ryan-habermeyer/

  Ryan Habermeyer earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts and is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Missouri. His fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Cream City Review, Carolina Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Chattahoochee Review, Fiction International, Cincinnati Review, and others.

• BOA Editions LTD - https://www.boaeditions.org/collections/ryan-habermeyer

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  Ryan Habermeyer

  Ryan Habermeyer won the BOA Short Fiction Prize for this collection The Science of Lost Futures (May, 2018). He earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri. His work has appeared most recently in Cream City Review, Carolina Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, and Chattahoochee Review. He lives with his wife and children in Columbia, Missouri, where he teaches creative writing and is finishing his first novel.

• BOA Editions Ltd - https://www.boaeditions.org/blogs/main/ryan-habermeyer-wins-6th-annual-boa-short-fiction-prize

  Ryan Habermeyer wins 6th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize

  September 06, 2016

  We are pleased to announce that Ryan Habermeyer is the winner of the sixth annual BOA Short Fiction Prize for his collection, The Science of Lost Futures! The collection was selected by Publisher Peter Conners from 147 submissions. Habermeyer will receive a $1,000 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. within the American Reader Series in spring 2018.

  Of the collection, Peter Conners says: “Ryan Habermeyer is not only a gifted literary writer, but also a yarn spinner of the first order. How else to explain an author who can tell a compelling tale about a foot that mysteriously washes up on shore, '…twice as tall as the nearest water tower, and as wide as a cluster of neighborhood streets.'? Habermeyer mixes the unsettling void of Franz Kafka with the tall-tale skills of Mark Twain, and tosses in a dash of George Saunders’s contemporary satire for good measure. The results are a funny, poignant, and strikingly original story collection—The Science of Lost Futures—that announces the debut of a young fiction writer with imagination to burn.”

  A finalist and three runners-up were also selected: The Secret of Mayo by Andrew R. Touhy (finalist); A More Active You by Meagan Cass; I Cover the Rest by Jenn Stroud Rossmann; and The Visibility of Things Long Submerged by George Looney.

  Ryan Habermeyer earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri. His work, twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared most recently in Cream City Review, Carolina Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, and Chattahoochee Review. He lives with his wife and children in Columbia, Missouri, where he teaches creative writing and is finishing his first novel.

  BOA Editions will accept manuscripts for the seventh annual BOA Short Fiction Prize between April 1 - May 31, 2017. An entry form and a $25 fee are required. Complete guidelines for the 2017 BOA Short Fiction Prize are available at boaeditions.org.

  Congratulations, Ryan, and welcome to the BOA family!

Habermeyer, Ryan: THE SCIENCE OF LOST FUTURES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Habermeyer, Ryan THE SCIENCE OF LOST FUTURES BOA Editions (Adult Fiction) $16.00 5, 8 ISBN: 978-1-942683-60-5
A debut collection melds the European fairy tale with the American yarn into an assemblage of accidental magic, frustrated metamorphoses, and chance meetings with a bewildered divine.
Habermeyer's stories inhabit the automated modernity of the 21st-century world in a way that recalls the lingering magic of the Grimm brothers' deep, dark woods. In "The Foot," an enormous human foot is tugged ashore and immediately becomes a focal point for gawkers, dilettante scientists, New Age worshipers, and feral children all focused on proving this miracle is more than just the sum of its part. In "St. Abelard's Zoo for Endangered Species," a controlling mother is mistaken for a snow leopard until she mistakes herself for a snow leopard and is then unceremoniously dumped back into her ill-fitting human life. Rife with this sort of untransformative metamorphosis, the stories linger in the forgotten spaces of the American mystique--hardscrabble towns that do not assume the dignity of their labor; bland suburbs that do not sanctify the families who inhabit them; miraculous visitations of God's love or wrath that do not clarify the direction of the characters' lives. In many stories ("A Cosmonaut's Guide to Microgravitic Reproduction," "Everything You Wanted to Know About Astrophysics But Were Too Afraid To Ask," "What the Body Does When It Doesn't Know What Else To Do"), Kafka's surreal bureaucracies are blended with the particularly American myth of the homespun, and wholly unqualified, expert. Others ("Visitation," "Ellie's Brood," "The Fertile Yellow," "In Search of Fortunes Not Yet Lost,") delve into the symbolic archetypes of woman as empty vessel, empty egg, source of arcane magic, castrating hacker of turkey necks and stacks of kindling. Crowded with metaphor and only loosely linked events, these stories can overwhelm the reader with the sheer vigor of their worlds; however, the total effect of all this ultrafamiliar strangeness is a provocative discombobulation that repays the patient reader's perseverance.
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A disturbing blend of fairy tale and Freudian strangeness which comments on the outlandish fatalism of the American myth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Habermeyer, Ryan: THE SCIENCE OF LOST FUTURES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650903 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a1e18c0f. Accessed 11 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650903
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The Science of Lost Futures
Publishers Weekly.
265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p45. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Science of Lost Futures
Ryan Habermeyer. BOA, $16 trade paper (216p) ISBN 978-1-942683-60-5
If the Brothers Grimm wrote today, they might turn out something like this imaginative collection, Habermeyer's debut. Habermeyer's biography identifies him as "a scholar of European folklore and fairy-tales." That strain, combined with a puckish attitude towards the bizarre and grotesque, make his an arresting voice. The 19 stories collected here include a fair amount of flash fiction. "A Genealogical Approach to My Father's Ass" begins with this piquant sentence: "Olaf Haber, respected oat farmer, ate raw human buttocks in the closing days of the third Silesian War." The longer stories have similarly attention-getting openings and spool out like macabre fables. "The Foot" chronicles a coastal community's obsession with a dismembered foot that washes up onshore and inexplicably becomes a kind of talisman. The very next story, "Visitation," is about a runaway womb. In "The Good Nazi Karl Schmidt," a typical American family gets a Nazi as a pet. Not all the stories announce their outrageousness right out of the gate, though it's always waiting in the wings. In "The Fertile Yellow," a husband goes through a series of weird rituals to enhance the chance of conception. "In Search of Fortunes Not Yet Lost" puts an impish twist on the myth of the frontier. Habermeyer's stories are consistently outlandish and inventive. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Science of Lost Futures." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 45. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977305/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2ffccf06. Accessed 11 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977305
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• New Pages
  https://www.newpages.com/book-reviews/science-of-lost-futures
  Word count: 971

  The Science of Lost Futures

  Stories
  Image
  Fiction
  Ryan Habermeyer
  BOA Editions LTD
  May 2018
  ISBN-13: 978-1-942683-60-5
  Paperback
  216pp
  $16.00
  Evgeniya Monico

  When first opening The Science of Lost Futures, I was already familiar with some of Ryan Habermeyer’s works, so I knew what to expect. Or so I thought. Habermeyer’s mysterious fiction defied all my expectations. This collection of stories pulled me into the strange world where a woman can turn into a snow leopard, people admire a giant foot, and turkeys take over a house. These strange occurrences, however, become fantastic circumstances for Habermeyer to explore human relationships. In this collection of witty stories, Ryan Habermeyer places humans in bizarre and sometimes absurd conditions which creates a rich world with relationships at its center.

  The book features nineteen stories; each one of them is, paradoxically, both familiar and strange. In a way, they seem to contain magic of old fairy tales, which is not surprising considering Habermeyer’s area of expertise: European folklore and fairy tales. His pieces, however, do not simply follow this genre; Habermeyer’s imagistic writing features a masterful tone, which is often ironic. The strange elements of stories are interwoven with frail humanity, offering not only a ground for exploration of human relationships, but also space for readers to contemplate them. Interestingly, Habermeyer anticipates some push back from his readers. Unlike many other writers, he uses this knowledge to his advantage: he further reaffirms the bizarre circumstances to create the absurd worlds that readers come to accept as true.

  One of the most striking stories titled “The Foot” simply starts: “A foot was recovered from the inlet.” Such gripping sentences often open up his stories, setting characters’ journeys, whether physical or emotional, in motion. Habermeyer further illustrates:

  The foot was enormous. It was at least twice as tall as the nearest water tower, and as wide as a cluster of neighborhood streets. It was covered in a crust of sea slime and severed above the ankle. The foot smelled of ash and cardamom, lacking the odor of decomposition one might expect. It was a left foot and we wanted to believe this was significant. The fourth toe was badly mangled, but whether it had been broken from our dragging it ashore or devoured by sharks was uncertain. The only other visible damage was a circular wound in the heel fouled with sea waste and discolored by sunlight. Most of the foot was wreathed in seaweed.

  The mysterious foot spikes curiosity in visitors: children play inside of it pretending it is an alien saucer, teenagers rush to touch it ignoring all warnings, and some visitors become suddenly aware of not only “the pettiness of [their] own feet” but also “an inexplicable maze” of their own bodies “that would never be solved.” As theories about the foot’s origin continue to multiply, people are anxious to get closure and return to their everyday lives. Alas, they have not been able to find the foot’s “metaphysical significance” as it slowly washes back into the ocean.

  Dealing with loss, the piece titled “Ellie’s Brood” illustrates a story of Harvey and young Ellie, a couple with a thirty-year age difference. After losing what seems to be a miraculous pregnancy, Harvey decides to breed wild turkeys. He does not have much luck at first, so he tries everything including teaching them to gobble and saving a suicidal turkey. Harvey’s efforts pay off, but suddenly his turkeys start multiplying unnaturally fast. One morning, Harvey finds Ellie in the bathroom with a mess of blood, flesh, and cracked eggs:

  Ellie was bent over one of the smashed eggshells. It was only after she looked at him that he realized she had been giving a newborn poult mouth-to-mouth. The thing squirmed between her fingers like a cannoli. Harvey watched as she took a knife from her pocket and delicately nicked the throat before fitting in the straw. She blew hard. The poult’s chest puffed like a sad balloon.

  As turkeys continue to reproduce, both Ellie and Harvey, in their own ways, try to deal with the sudden increase in number. Interestingly, in this story, Habermeyer not only illustrates the absurd, but he also masterfully brings to light the two people’s grief and their coping.

  Habermeyer’s stories also feature different point of views. For instance, “The Fertile Yellow” is told from the point of view of a husband who undergoes different kinds of “ceremonies” to get his wife pregnant. My favorite story, “The Good Nazi Karl Schmidt,” is written from the point of view of a boy who leapfrogged from the fifth grade to the seventh. In this story, the boy’s family adopts “a stray” Nazi, who tries “to have himself punished.” Another piece, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Astrophysics but Were Too Afraid to Ask,” is presented as an address given by a young man at the 226th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Such variety in different points of view does work on its own; it offers an interesting spin on how readers perceive protagonists and their relationships.

  Habermeyer’s witty style in combination with bizarre circumstances that reveal human relationships make this collection of stories a must read. While each story surprises with unexpected and sometimes absurd exposition, it is still impossible to predict what happens next. As Habermeyer notes in his epigraph, “We are the children of chaos,” and he succeeds in taking readers to the strange world of chaos that is both absurd and real.

  Review Posted on April 03, 2018 Last modified on April 03, 2018

• The Writer's Guide
  http://thewriterscenter.blogspot.com/2018/06/ryan-habermeyer.html
  Word count: 1642

  Interview with Ryan Habermeyer, author of The Science of Lost Futures
  By Zach Powers, Communications Manager, The Writer’s Center

  One of my favorite literary topics to discuss is weird fiction. Why are some writers drawn to the fabulist, the speculative, and the strange? I’m certainly one of those writers myself, and so is Ryan Habermeyer, author of The Science of Lost Futures, which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize and was published earlier in 2018. My own story collection was also published by BOA Editions, so though Ryan and I hadn’t met before this year, we’re literary brothers of a sort. When he’s not writing, Ryan is Assistant Professor at Salisbury University on the nearby Eastern Shore, where his specialties include, among many others, “Monster Studies.” Ryan joins us now at The Writer’s Center blog to answer a few questions about authoring far-fetched fiction, his influences, and the writing life.

  * * *

  ZP: I’m going to start with the big, broad question: why weird stuff?

  Ryan Habermeyer
  RH: That’s a little like asking why someone is left-handed. I’m not sure we choose our aesthetic obsessions. There’s a mysterious instinct to it, or so I want to believe. Weirdness is something I feel innately drawn to. That’s not a very satisfying answer, though, so I would add that since I was a child I always wanted to be elsewhere. Someplace different. I daydreamed considerably. I found relief in odd things, grotesque things. My friend and I, for example, used to snap Polaroids of road kill and turned it into a photo album. We were very popular with the girls. Somewhere along the way, subconsciously I think, this leaked over into my sensibilities as an artist. I decided the purpose of art—whether it’s literature, music, painting, sculpture, whatever—is to make life strange. Depict real things, familiar things, but strangely. Estrangement. That’s the key. Estrangement pulls us away and brings us closer in the same breath. I love seeing things, reading things, that wrench me out of my routine. You look away but you can’t look away. Isn’t that what literature is supposed to do? Make us uncomfortable while simultaneously desperate to see the object of our discomfort. That’s what weirdness does for me. The weird is the real. Or in the least it’s what lies behind the façade of realism, of normalcy.

  ZP: There’s a certain dark logic to fairy-tales, and I think I see that in your writing. Instead of moving forward through cause and effect, I feel your plots are often driven by cause and comeuppance. Many of the stories are about paying a price for actions or desires. Is this something derived from fairy-tales? How does a fairy-tale differ from, say, contemporary realist fiction?

  The Science of Lost Futures
  RH: You’re not the first person to point out the lack of cause and effect in my writing. Which is odd because I think of my stories as very much contingent upon cause and effect. What throws people off, I suppose, is that the effects in my stories are quite random, sudden, inexplicable, chaotic, without any correlation to the cause in question. A giant foot washes ashore in town. What do we do? Well, we clean it, of course, and try to assign it an identity, and empathize with it to come closer to this monstrous tragedy. But the one thing that can’t happen in that story (the most natural and normal instinct) is to dispose of it in a biohazardous-friendly manner. You can’t pursue that rational impulse if you’re going to have interesting speculative fiction. Or, in another one of my stories a woman wakes up and discovers her womb has fallen out. Quick—call the doctor? Nope. That story is D.O.A. So you’ve got to pursue a sideways logic. And, yes, you’re absolutely right: such tangential cause/effect relationships are very much a fairy tale motif. It’s the strange logic of fairy tales to defy our rationalist, scientific perspective of cause and effect, which is why I think they’re so lovely. There is a beauty to the randomness of fairy tales, a harmony to their chaos I find satisfying and truthful. With realist stories you're tethered to existing reality. If you write a story set in, say, Iowa, then you had better depict Iowa flawlessly. Those are the rules. But I think there’s more to learn about life, about ourselves, when we deviate from realism by following that unconventional thread of cause and (illogical) effect. Like going down the rabbit hole.

  ZP: What drew you to the fairy-tale form as an influence for your writing?

  RH: Well, I’m not a fairy tale revisionist. I’m not Angela Carter (but I love her work!). Fairy tales manifest obliquely in my writing. I’ve always been drawn to the imaginative quality of traditional tales. I love the imagery, the narrative leaps, the grotesqueness, the playfulness of the genre. I love how fairy tales invent reality and make it seem as if what happened was historical fact. And they’re instructive for writers, stylistically. Fairy tales are not all magical indulgence. They teach us something about creative restraint, which I think is incredibly important for those of us who are fabulists. Magic is used sparingly in fairy tales, and often comes with a price so if you use it, beware. Lately, though, I’ve been attracted to the form of fairy tales more than their content. The flatness of characters. Lightness. Brevity. Compression. The elegant simplicity of fairy tale language. Eschewing showing for telling. My current projects try to capture a mood, an ambiance of fairytale-ness. One of my incredible former professors, Kate Bernheimer, talks about these very elements in an essay she wrote: “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tales.” It should be required reader for anyone serious about writing, especially those aspiring to be fabulists.

  ZP: What other writers of the weird would you recommend to someone who may not be familiar with speculative literary fiction?

  RH: Before I go on endlessly about great weird writers, let me say I benefited considerably from reading realists. Weirdness, fabulism, magical realism, slipstream—whatever you want to call it, is grounded in realism. It’s not a complete abandonment of reality. Writing weird fiction is about inventing reality. Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Amy Hempel, and Joy Williams are wonderful realists. As far as literary weirdos…there are the obvious choices: Calvino, Borges, Kafka, Marquez. Bruno Schulz is one of my favorite writers ever. On this side of the pond: Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Helen Phillips, Kevin Brockmeier and Steven Millhauser do a particular kind of American fabulism. Should I keep going? Read Russians. Nobody does weirdness better than the Russians. Gogol, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Kharms, Krzhizhanovsky, or someone more contemporary like Ludmilla Petrushevskya. She’s amazing. There are times when I lament I am not a Russian—but probably because it is my dream to ride shirtless on a horse reminiscing about my time in the KGB.

  ZP: Let’s talk publishing. If I recall correctly, some of the stories in your book are over a decade old. Can you talk about the long haul of writing and compiling a story collection?

  RH: I wrote the oldest story in the collection in 2004. So, yeah, it took a while. I’m not bothered by that. Hats off to those people smarter than me that figure it out quicker. To be honest, I’m not sure I could have arrived at the collection sooner. I’m slow. I’m meticulous. I’ll sit on a single word in a sentence for two days before going on to the next one. I want the right words in the right places. It took me a while to find my voice, find my aesthetic comfortability. And then it took a while to puzzle out the collection. Compiling a story collection is a strange beast. You want stories that resonate with each other, build off each other, but also dissonance; stories that feel incongruent, stories that clash thematically or stylistically. It’s all about finding balance. I kept plodding along for years, publishing pieces here and there, waiting for the right combination of stories to manifest. Writing is a long, lonely process. It might take me another decade to get the next book out. So be it.

  ZP: What keeps you writing?

  RH: Somewhere, I read Toni Morrison said something like this: if there is a book you want to read that has not yet been written you must write that book. That should be motivation for every writer. It’s hard to argue with Toni Morrison.

  ZP: What’s one piece of writing advice you’d give to an aspiring author?

  RH: Read. You’ve got to be in love with words if you want to be a writer. Otherwise, don’t bother. Read old stuff and read new stuff. And when you read pay attention. Writing fiction is not just about plot and characters. It’s about structure, it’s about form, it’s about style, it’s about voice. Read, because the more you read the more voices you’ll discover and then you’ll borrow and steal from all those writers to create your own voice. So, read voraciously. Oh, and stop writing fan fiction. It doesn't count. Whoops. That's two pieces of advice. Feel free to disregard me entirely.

  * * *

  Order Ryan's book »

• My Life My Books My Escape
  https://mylifemybooksmyescape.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/author-interview-ryan-habermeyer/
  Word count: 1387

  MAY 11 2018
  LEAVE A COMMENT
  INTERVIEW

  Today I am interviewing Ryan Habermeyer, author of the new short-fiction collection, The Science of Lost Futures.
  ◊ ◊ ◊

  DJ: Hi Ryan! Welcome back again for another interview
  For readers who aren’t familiar with you or may have missed our previous chat, could you tell us a little about yourself?
  Ryan: I’m a professor at Salisbury University. I did the academic route in becoming a writer. MFA from UMass-Amherst and PhD from the University of Missouri. Scholar and fiction writer. As a scholar, my academic interests are in transnational fairy-tales and comparative mythology. I teach courses on folklore, myths, monsters, grotesques, etc. My fiction traverses some of that same territory, exploring that which is weird, bizarre, strange, otherworldly, cryptic, absurd, uncanny, spectral or otherwise inexplicable. A rather mundane personal life story, I’m afraid. Which probably explains why my fiction is so attracted to the surreal.

  DJ: What is The Science of Lost Futures about?
  6B2A4E73-D7A6-40AD-A285-E6F7A4EC83DA

  Ryan: The book is a series of short stories I wrote over a thirteen-year period. Predominantly what we would call literary fiction, though the stories certainly have porous boundaries with genre fiction. There’s a lot of strangeness in these pages. Townspeople who discover a gigantic severed foot washed ashore on their beach. A woman collapsing inside the black hole growing on her shoulder. A former Nazi adopted as a household pet. I think of my characters on the fringes of experience: confronting circumstances alien and quotidian, absurd and grotesquely heart-wrenching; characters haunted by the pasts they can’t escape and longing for uncertain futures just beyond their grasp. That sounds eloquent, so let’s go with that description.

  DJ: What were some of your influences when writing The Science of Lost Futures?
  Ryan: There’s a kind of reciprocal influence between what I teach as an academic and what I write. So obviously cross-cultural fairy-tales and mythologies influence my work, albeit in indirect ways. I don’t write revisionist adaptations of oral narratives—like, say, Angela Carter (whose work is wonderful!)—but oral storytelling influences my writing style. It’s more of trying to capture that mood, that affect, that ambience of the folkloric tradition. Often there are allusions to old tales. Like stories within stories. With more contemporary fiction—my tastes tend to skew international. Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Bruno Schulz, Bohumil Hrabal, China Miéville, Nalo Hopkinson. And lots of Russians. I love the Russians. Bulgakov, Nabokov, Ludmila Petrushevskaya. Those writers challenge me, surprise me, provoke me. I suppose my brain has had an orgy with all those writers and my collection is their illegitimate love child.

  DJ: What kinds of stories can readers expect in the anthology?
  Ryan: I write my stories hoping they rest uneasily between genres. So there are echoes of science fiction, echoes of mystery (I think); elements of domestic realism mingling with fantasy. There are some pretty horrifying things that happen to characters, but not “horror” as a genre, per se. I’ve been told my stories are magical realist, but I like to classify my stories as fabulist, which I think is a more encompassing term as they evoke more antiquated modes of storytelling like I said before. Readers can expect a lot of absurdity, a lot of sudden and fantastical metamorphoses, but also trying to interrogate the reality of these intrusions of fantasy on everyday life. I suppose I’m trying to find the human moments within the absurd, the grotesque, the weird. I want to make you laugh, I want to make you cringe, I want to punch you in the heart.

  DJ: Being an author, what do you believe makes a good short-story? How does it differ from wiring novel-length stories?
  Ryan: I think the only way to answer this question is as a narcissist and say that the primary objective of a good story is to make the reader uncomfortable. Because that’s my primary objective. Defamiliarize the familiar. Make you squirm. Disturb the reader without succumbing to the cheap trick of spectacle and the sensationalistic. I want fiction that surprises, but then explores the dimensions of that surprise, or leaves me wrestling with troubling questions at the end. I want fiction that takes some kind of risk and is willing to annoy, piss off, offend, insult a reader. Otherwise, why bother reading? Flannery O’Connor has a quote somewhere (and I’m about to butcher it) saying something along the lines of how violence is inexorably important to her stories; she needed to depict acts of violence so that readers could understand who these characters were. For me, I try to do a similar thing only with absurdity. Donald Barthelme said in order to achieve the impossible you must be willing to attempt the absurd. I like that idea. To me the absurd is a portal into human anthropology. And I think a good story provides an uncomfortable reflection of the anthropologies we would rather ignore.

  DJ: This may… this will be a difficult question to answer, but what are some of your favorite stories in The Science of Lost Futures? I don’t mean what you believe is the best, but perhaps some stories has a particular setting, theme, message, or character that you stood out to you?
  Ryan: That is a difficult question….I’m not very good at pontificating about my stories, or even understanding what I’m doing half the time. I think there is something inherently mysterious about the creation of a story (or any work of art for that matter), and to talk too much about it ruins that mystery. I can say I’m fond of “The Foot” because I think it explores what I was saying before about the relationship between absurdity and anthropology. Human beings are ridiculous creatures (despite our grandiose sense of self-importance), and we try to find meaning and purpose within that ridiculousness, try to gain some proximity to tragedy, but really our efforts just create more layers of absurdity. A never ending cycle. I’m also partial to the story “The Fertile Yellow” because I’m a father of four kids and I like to think I know a thing or two about pregnancy (but let’s face it, I know painfully little). I pity the poor narrator of that story, but I admire him too, and hope the readers do as well. How couples confront and cope with the absurd is a recurring motif in the collection, and that story is probably the closest to home in that regard.

  DJ: What was your favorite part about writing The Science of Lost Futures?
  Ryan: The relief of being finished with it. And I don’t mean in the sense that I’m tickled to have it published (which I am, naturally). Nabokov says in his afterword to Lolita that in starting any book project his sole purpose is to get rid of it as quickly as possible, by which I think he means getting that voice out of his head, getting that narrative told and that story out into the world so he can (like an insane person) start the process all over again. There’s a real pleasure conjuring up voices and characters and scenarios, living with them for so long, and now a nervous anticipation that someone else might be interested in these imaginary creations. But I’m happy to be rid of it, so I can focus on new projects and get those out of my head.

  DJ: Now that The Science of Lost Futures is released, what is next for you?
  Ryan: I’m trying to finish up a novel, or something that vaguely resembles a novel. A bit in the experimental vein, a novel-in-vignettes. Fragments. Anecdotes. Sketches. Most of them a series of visions of an afterlife where the dead are stuck in a hotel simmering in an existential soup. A satire of sorts. Hallucinatory micro-fairytales, I might call them.

  DJ: Where can readers find out more about you?

• Story366
  https://story366blog.wordpress.com/2018/06/28/the-foot-by-ryan-habermeyer/
  Word count: 1492

  “The Foot” by Ryan Habermeyer
  ON JUNE 28, 2018 BY MIKECZYZ
  Happy Thursday to you, Story366! The heat has returned to Southwest Missouri, along with a lot of other places, so I’m happy to be traveling later today, in the AC, as opposed to splitting timbers or tarring a roof or something like that. I will soon be en route to Chicago, where I’ll catch a few games at Wrigley, slinging suds up and down the aisles and making up for my the eight hours on my ass in the AC. I’ve only vended beer at six games so far this year and none in over a month, so I’m pretty eager to see what else they’ve done to Wrigley Field and the surrounding neighborhood—there’d been quite a few changes over the winter—as I’m half-expecting a new skyscraper in left field or a racetrack around the park, something of that order. Not that I’m into racing—of any kind—but I am amused by the thought, people or horses or dragsters circling the stadium during the game, some spectacle to add to the carnival atmosphere. Maybe they could have peacocks race iguanas, something interesting like that. More than likely, another fancy bar with overpriced burgers and craft beers will have shown up instead, as if these people need to drink $13 Blue Moons outside the park when they could be pre-gaming inside instead, buying a $10.50 312 from me.

  Speaking of my vending gig, the world went ahead and did it: The Surpreme Court made the world even shittier yesterday by sticking it to unions—we beer vendors are unionized (it’s Chicago, so of course we are). This on top of the fact that one of the nine—the sensible right guy—has announced his retirement, meaning someone like Jeff Sessions or Voldemort will be nominated promptly. When I said on Tuesday that I didn’t think I’d be writing about politics for a third entry in a row, I honestly thought these knobs would take a day off from the awful and I could talk more about the weather, but like so many times this past couple of years, I was proven incorrect. So, there you go.

  For today’s entry, I read from Ryan Habermeyer‘s 2018 collection The Science of Lost Futures, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize from BOA, and it’s a book I’m somewhat familiar with. A couple of years ago, this book was a finalist in the Moon City Short Fiction Award, so I’d read at least a part of it, though if memory serves me correctly, Habermeyer pulled the book before we finished the judging, as he’d won this BOA award. We couldn’t be happier for him, as we took an extremely awesome book (I think that was the Michelle Ross-There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You year) and Habermeyer ended up on a really awesome, reputable press in BOA. Everybody wins (or at least Ross and Habermeyer, anyway).

  Not sure if I’ve ever made this pronouncement before, but this may be the book that I had the hardest time in picking the story to write about. I read four of the stories in The Science of Lost Futures and I loved all of them, firstly, but all of them are also quite unique, completely different stories in style and theme from one another. The first story I read is the opener, “A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Microgravitic Reproduction,” about this regular Joe who signs up for the Cosmonaut program, goes through rigorous training, only to find that he’s being shot into space with a woman to test for the sexual positions that are most reproductive in zero gravity. Habermeyer has fun with this, as the dude’s log reads like a zero-G Kama Sutra, the whole thing absurd, yet the author makes it strangely moving. The third story in the book, “Visitation,” is about this guy whose wife’s womb falls out, then just kind of hangs around, sort of like if a hot water bottle was a houseguest. I flipped ahead a bit to get to “Indulgences,” in which the protagonist works at a doll factory, in quality control, where every fifty seconds or so, he’s got to strip naked on the assembly line and let the dolls—who have all kind of sensitivities and abilities—stare at him. He doesn’t know why he has to be naked or what comes of it, but nearly six hundred times a day, a piece of robotic plastic gets to eye his junk. And then there’s just a bunch of stories I want to read based on their titles alone, pieces like “Frustrations of a Coyote” and “A Genealogical Approach to My Father’s Ass.” I mean, what’re those about? I’m going to find out.

  Still, I had to pick one, so I picked “The Foot,” the second story in the collection, one that I think is just perfect. In this story, there’s an unnamed, and for the most part, undescribed village, and one day, a giant foot washes ashore. The foot is as big as the town’s biggest water tower, and because it’s been in the sea for God knows how long, it’s covered in seaweed and barnacles and is pale and bloated like, well, a whole person would be if they washed up on a seashore. The story, told (mostly) in first plural, ventures on describing what happens afterward, and like any good communal narrator story, it reveals the reaction of the entire town, what some people think about this, what others think about that. There’s all kinds of theories about where the foot came from and what it means, and eventually, someone wonders where the rest of the person is that this foot belongs to; my favorite line is when one woman tells the crowd to call her when the cock washes up. There’s a lot of humor in this story, some of it tongue in cheek, the rest of it unnecessary to hide in that manner. This is a funny story, because of course it is: A giant foot has washed up on a beach.

  Habermeyer takes us through the town’s stages of reaction, from shock and awe, to curious, to weird, to a whole bunch else. Scientists eventually show up and do all sorts of tests, while at the same time, the people of the town clean and care for the giant foot. Children eventually use it as a playground; teenagers use it as a makeout point. The foot becomes part of the town, an odd fixture like a sinkhole or tire fire, becoming as much a part of the community as anything. One particularly touching passage involves the possible identification of the foot, someone remembering an old folk tale about an orphaned girl named Ada who disappeared, who once said something about feet before she vanished. It’s a passage that comes out of nowhere, writing that gives real depth to this story, proving it’s not quite as light as I’ve perhaps made it out to be.

  I won’t go any further into what happens next, but even at this point, I’m sure a lot of you might recognize this somewhat, as it’s strikingly familiar to Gabriel García Màrquez’s classic “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” which is one of my favorite stories of all time. In that story, a giant man—maybe like a dozen feet tall—washes up on the shores of this tiny Columbian village and before long, the villagers are cleaning him, dressing him, calling him Esteban, and well, you can read that story, too. I’m pretty sure someone with Habermeyer’s pedigree (all kinds of degrees and publications) has read this story and had García Màrquez’s tale in mind when he wrote it. Habermeyer’s story is not a rewriting, I don’t think, but it’s certainly homage, and a fine one at that, worthy of being named alongside that perfect piece of literature.

  I could have written about any of the stories I read in The Science of Lost Futures, as all of the stores were not only a lot of fun, but they worked, as they say, on a lot of levels. Ryan Habermeyer instills depth within his protagonists, surprises just when you think you’ve figured his stories out, and wit that you really can’t learn. This is one of my favorite collections I’ve read this year, but also for this entire project, each piece speaking to me as a reader and a writer. What a talent, what a collection.