Author Q&A with John Ryland

Author Q&A with John Ryland

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John Ryland is a southern writer who lives and works in Northport Alabama with his wife, Terri, two sons and a beagle puppy names Perry. He has written poetry, short stories, and novels his whole life, often finding placements for them in poetry pages, journals, anthologies, and other outlets. Through all his works you will often find the enduring theme of ordinary people overcoming extraordinary circumstances. He is the author of a poetry chapbook entitled The Stranger-poems from the chair, the novel Souls Harbor, and the upcoming short story collection Southern Gothic, all of which are available through Gnat Smoke Press on all major outlets.

1. Tell us about your writing/ published books.

My first publication happened way back in 1997 when a small west coast poetry ‘zine called Poetalk accepted one of my poems. Since them I’ve had several poems placed, with the most recent coming in 2019 in The Birmingham Arts Journal and Subterranean Blue. I also published a chapbook of poems looking through the eyes of a man on death row entitled The Stranger- poems from the chair.

In 2019/2020 I’ve been fortunate enough to have five short stories published in journals like Otherwise Engaged, The Writer’s Magazine (England), The Eldritch Journal, among others. I also published my first novel Souls harbor. It’s a story of the strength and resilience of two very different, yet very strong southern women as they battle one woman’s slide into schizophrenia, racial differences, and meth heads in a small southern town named Souls harbor, Alabama.

2. What is you favorite place to write?

To be honest, when the muse is flowing it doesn’t matter to me. I actually wrote the first draft for Souls harbor at our kitchen table with our two sons running around like maniacs. Since then we’ve built an office, so that’s exclusively where I write now. It helps, but the kids are still running around like maniacs though.

 

3. How do you approach writing a new book?

When I first get the idea for a novel it’s a very generalized idea and not very substantive, so I tend to resist the notion of actually writing a new book at first. I like to think about the characters, talk to them in my head. I want to get a feel for them and how they react to ideas I come up with. Once the characters are ready and the idea takes shape, I sit down and start to write. If I had to be perfectly honest, at that point I still just have a general arching idea of what the book will look like. For me, the characters really to decide the outcome of the book. I write them the way they would react, and the story progresses from there.

 

4. How do you chose your book titles?

 I usually have an idea about the title about a third of a way through a piece of work, but don’t finalize it until I’m done. Even then, however, it’s subject to change. For instance, my novel Souls Harbor was originally entitled Finding Caroline, because that’s the name of the character who is having mental health issues. In the end, the story became more about both women’s struggles, so I wanted a name to reflect that and went with the name as a reference to souls finding refuge, which is really the value of the story. Incidentally, I liked the name Finding Caroline so much I later wrote a short story by the name and it will be published in my upcoming short story collection entitled Southern Gothic.

 

5. Tell me about your current work.

My latest work is entitled Southern Gothic, which is a collection of short stories that flirt with my take on the, you guessed it, southern gothic genre. It will be released on October 31, 2020 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other major markets. Some of the stories are right in the genre’s wheelhouse, but some have pressed the boundaries. I don’t consider myself a “horror” writer at all, but I do enjoy the darker side of human nature. Some of the stories in this collection are just down right freaky and weird, but in a way that isn’t completely impossible to believe. Being a southerner, I have a wealth of redneck, hillbilly, backwoods examples to draw inspiration from, and that’s just my family. Not really, but as told in one of the stories, “Southerners are a peculiar people”. In the words of Jeff Foxworthy, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a southerner unless you are one, and I are one.” 

I have also finished a new novel which is probably on the other end of the spectrum. The Man with no Eyes is an action/suspense thriller set along the Yemeni/Saudi border region. Doctor Andrew Harkins is a genius with the uncanny ability to control every function of his body who works at a secretive bio tech lab hidden in the Saudi desert until he finds himself at odd with it’s maniacle, egotistical owner. As punishment for resisting his will, the doctor’s eyes are removed, and his family is murdered. After escaping the lab, the doctor finds an unlikely ally in a Yemeni woman who becomes exiled from her village for daring to challenge for the role of village leader after her father dies. They two set out on a journey to cross the desert on foot to find and destroy the lab and the man behind it. Along the way they have to elude gun runners, fight hired guns sent by the lab, evade the US military who is eager to remove a US citizen before he can cause an international incident, and find a way to survive the elements in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet.

 

You can find John Ryland on Twitter.