Author Spotlight: Ron Nyren

The spotlight is on Ron Nyren, author of The Book of Lost Light (Photography), an historical novel that explores family loyalty and betrayl, Finnish folklore, the nature of time and theater, and what it take to recover from calamity. Find out why Ron decided to write The Book of Lost Light, the role played in the novel by Finnish folklore, his favorite book as a teen and more. Why did you decide to write  The Book of Lost Light ? What got your imagination working on overdrive? I was thinking of turning a short story draft into a novel—a contemporary story in which a boy was being photographed, but I didn’t know why. I read about Sally Mann, whose photographs of her children in the nude caused a stir in the 1990s, but ultimately that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. I remembered another story that I’d drafted years earlier about a boy who grew up being photographed by his father every day of his life in an effort to capture time. Things started to click when I thought of setting the story earlier in the history of photography: Arthur Kylander, a protégé of Eadweard Muybridge, aims to document the growth of his son, Joseph, by photographing him every day, assisted by Joseph’s headstrong cousin Karelia, who herself becomes a photographer in the pictorialist style. Once the 1906 earthquake came to mind, I had a doorway into my story. Finnish folklore plays a role in your novel. Can you tell us how? My own background is Swedish-American, but I grew up reading Tove Jansson’s wonderful, melancholy Moomintroll  books, and so I decided to give my characters a Finnish heritage in homage to her. The only other thing I knew about Finland was a childhood memory of an encyclopedia of myths and folktales that mentioned an ancient Finnish hero named Wainamoinen. Google led me to The Kalevala , a 19th-century collection of Finnish folk poems, fantastic and sometimes nutty stories of duels between chanting sages, heroes who fail miserably at wooing wives, and an epic battle over a magic device that grinds flour on one side, mints coins on another, and produces salt on a third. Karelia reads Joseph these stories when he’s a child, and after the earthquake, when the family ends up living in tents with other displaced artists in a Berkeley backyard, he shares these tales with them, and they turn them into plays to keep their spirits up. Name an author (past or present) you’d like to be stuck in an elevator with. What would you ask them? Bruno Schulz. His short story collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass , were huge influences on me, and I named Joseph after the narrator of these stories, who recalls his childhood growing up with a highly eccentric and obsessive father. I would love to ask Schulz to tell me about The Messiah , a novel that he was rumored to be working on before his untimely death, but which has never been found. What’s your writing routine? I write fiction most mornings while listening to music. For the first draft, I tend to write by hand to keep from getting stuck in a revising loop. I write the scenes I can “see,” and sometimes skip around, but more or less I write the “what happens” draft chronologically. Once I’ve typed up a draft, I might import it into Scrivener for restructuring. What does success as an author look like to you? Being able to write and get the next book published, and the next, and the next…. What does “trust your reader” mean to you? One of the most fascinating challenges of writing a novel is how to invite the reader to ask certain questions—about what will happen next, about who the characters really are, about what’s really going on underneath the surface—rather than telling them the answers. It’s a dialog with the reader, across time and space. Trusting the reader means knowing that if you craft your invitations well, they will draw on their knowledge of human nature to go on a scavenger hunt for meaning, following the clues you’ve left. What was your favorite book as a teenager? One day in my late teens, I was leafing through an encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy authors in my hometown’s public library, and I came across an entry that mentioned a short story that someone had written about an infinite library. I’d been planning to write a novel set in an infinite library, so I was chagrined someone else had thought of it first. I immediately checked out Jorge Luis Borges’s story collection, Labyrinths . The story in question, “ The Library of Babel ,” blew my mind, as did the rest of the volume—I had no idea you could fit so many ideas into a work of fiction and make them gripping to boot. What is the most surprising thing about the writing life you’ve discovered as a published author? When you’ve been waiting for something for a long, long time—I spent more than 15 years writing and rewriting this novel—you wonder how you’ll feel when it actually happens. And because the book came out in November 2020, I wondered if it would feel relevant, given the crises of our time. But having the book find its readers has been, and is, a wonderful experience. What’s your favorite pastime – besides writing? Going to see plays. In the sixth grade, I played FDR in my elementary school’s production of Annie , and ever since then, I’ve loved the theater (although there are songs from that play that I wish weren’t still stuck in my head 40 years later). The pandemic is a huge challenge for theater companies, but I’ve watched some Zoom performances and recorded productions this past year that were so powerful I forgot I was staring at a screen. You've just won ten million dollars in the lottery. How will you spend it? Invest in carbon capture start-ups. Buy an electric car. Shore up our underfed retirement accounts. Repair some things. Take a trip to Greece to research the next novel. Give the rest away to nonprofits fighting for social justice and against climate change.   If you could give an aspiring author one piece of advice, what would it be? Find (or make) your literary community, sharing ideas and books you love, trading reads of each other’s work, helping each other through the inevitable rejections, and celebrating each other’s acceptances and accomplishments.