Conversation With

Ryan Van Winkle

Ryan Van Winkle is an author, artist and producer based in Edinburgh. His second collection, The Good Dark, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award. He has recently been Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh and the Schools Writer in Residence for the Citizen project at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Writing Scotland. He was awarded the Jessie Kesson fellowship at Moniack Mhor in 2018. Moreover, he is a dear friend of the magazine—it could not have been here without him—and it is an honour and a privilege to have conducted this interview.

You have just completed two years as the Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, what was that like for you? What have you taken away from the experience?

Ah, that’s so difficult! Some of the things you learn you don't know until afterwards. The job is really multifaceted, and I didn't really know what to expect. I knew I'd be working directly with students on their writing offering feedback, and it was wonderful to have that chance to sit down with people. It reminded me that I have eyes for poetry and fiction, and I started to get that muscle back of editing, critiquing. Just getting that piece of paper, scribbling little notes; maybe the piece should start here, maybe the poem should end here. It quickly sharpened me up as I was going through my own editing process for my third manuscript. Like, within a few weeks, I was like, oh, yeah, I need to go back to my own manuscript and revise it because I'm offering critique and criticism almost in a way that I hadn’t heeded in my own poems.

Early on, there was also an apprehension in the back of my head about working intensely with other people’s writing. There was a concern that it would have a diminishing effect on my output, and actually it wasn’t like that at all. There was a lot of talent that I found inspiring and heartening. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe that's just the world, maybe there is a lot more talent and just good writing out there than you expect! 

Also, being able to have conversations with people about art and writing meant a lot to me – those serious conversations in groups and one-to-one were definitely some of my favourite moments across the last two years. I had forgotten how special that is!

So, to go back in time a little, you joined the Forest Collective in Edinburgh in 2001. What did being part of that community teach you?

Friends of mine established the Forest Collective in 2000 and I jumped in sometime around 2001. The idea was a volunteer run, collectively owned, free arts and events, space masquerading as a vegetarian café. We volunteered, and the money we earned through café sales went back into rent, lights, equipment, owning a photocopier etc… It was a special time. There were a lot of people working there and passing through who remain incredibly influential in my life. During my time, we went from a small café on the Grass Market to having a larger premises on Bristo Place. We founded a little publishing imprint and a record label, founded the Forest Fringe and just had years and years of artistic freedom and chaos. I don't think we quite knew how lucky we were at the time. Artists came from all over the world, to play a gig or read a poem or paint the walls or just do something, anything. It was really a great atmosphere because you felt limitless, and the goal of the collective was always to say yes. We tried to have as much interesting – no, not even interesting, we didn’t care if it was interesting or not, we were just thrilled to let people do what they wanted to.

We did have to learn how to manage chaos, to not get ruffled too easy, and to just enjoy throwing the kitchen sink at everything because in that kind of space you didn’t have a lot of control. You could be playing a gig, and somebody would get on stage and steal the microphone from you or whatever. As programmers, we learned that if you had someone doing their singer-songwriter thing, and they didn’t have a whole lot of fans or friends in, they might not get listened to. Maybe if they were really amazing, but like in any bar, if you can’t win over the crowd you get drowned out. When we were putting on events we were all aware that we needed to fill the space out and the way you fill the space out was to just throw as much as you could at it – can we add more artists, more musicians, can we give out free masks or drinks? I did an event called the Golden Hour, which was a kind of literary cabaret, and we would have 6-7 people on the bill each event. Solo singers, poets, short story writers, humorous cartoons and then like a big dancey band at the end. The trick was to ensure you had textures, people could get a break from the serious poetry with some toe-tapping music. It was a place where serious work could be showcased in a fun and irreverent manner. 

Your performance piece, Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel, won rave reviews. How does performance relate to your work? What are your thoughts on spoken word and other types of performative modes?

The idea for Red Like Our Room Used to Feel was a one-to-one poetry performance in which I would invite someone into a room that was done up like a small bedroom. There'd be a bed, and a Christmas tree with some fairy lights, artwork on the walls, I just filled it with stuff; maps, paper bags of hair, ashtrays; and you’d sit down, be given a glass of port or a cup of tea, and some cherries or a jammy dodger and I would read to you for 10 minutes. Then I’d leave the room, in the space with a little background music and then one last recorded poem would play whilst you were sitting there, or exploring the room. 

I really liked leaving the room before the performance was over. By that point in my career I had done a lot of 5-10 minute poetry readings, and you learn, okay, this poem I say before this poem, I tell that funny story afterwards. I talk about my high school job picking up roadkill for the town of Branford, then I read the roadkill poem. Eventually I got tired of doing all the preambles and I just wanted to read the poems. At the same time, I didn't really know how to be in front of an audience without wanting to entertain them in some way, to tell the stories to make a connection before reading my poems. 

To force myself to strip that all back, I created an artifice of the Red Room. It was kind of a reaction to things I personally found frustrating about being a performer.  And I was lucky enough to be able to do that, and this goes back to the Forest and Forest Fringe, having access to all these artists and musicians doing really innovative live performances in small spaces. You'd go into a room, and it would just be my friend Deborah Pearson in a tent with a bunch of mix tapes that people had made her, and she'd be playing the mix tapes and telling you stories about the people who made them and what the songs called up for her. And it was really beautiful, poetic, and interesting. I didn’t even realise these things existed as a format, and I thought, yeah. I want to try that.

You have released two award winning collections of poetry, The Good Dark, and Tomorrow We Will Live Here. How would you characterize the differences between these collections.

The first book was very much everything you’ve got. It was like the culmination of a lot of years of writing, poems I had done for my master’s degree. A lot of the process of that was workshops, a lot of people had read them and they had been really worked. It had a lot of characters, a lot more narrative. It was a tightly controlled group of poems about people who couldn’t quite say what they wanted to say but were saying something anyway. Unreliable narrators who weren’t sure how they got to where they were and what they were doing, I think you could sense that there was a lot unsaid. I was trying to evoke that kind of feeling. It was an eclectic group of characters – Death Row prisoners, a guy who left his family on September 11th, Hunter boy – and lots of writing through news stories. 

Anyway, there were a bunch of poems I couldn’t fit in there. A poem called A Raincoat, a Spell of Rain Ago which was kind of my starting place for The Good Dark. I knew I wanted to have a little bit more range, I wanted to let myself off a leash a little bit and be a little bit more unrestrained in the poems. And I guess due to the material that I was dealing with, which was a breakup, or a series of breakups, it went into a different register, a different kind of voice. Poems got a little more messy, a bit more chaotic. For the first collection I was thinking of the tight poems of someone like Raymond Carver or Sharon Olds, and in The Good Dark things just loosened. 

Your poetry often touches on personal griefs and intimacies. How do you approach these things in your work?

For me, working through a collection tells me something about myself. I don’t know what I’m trying to get at until I have finished a book, it’s a process of working through things, and I’m often talking to myself. Not all my poems are about me, but I’m using pieces of my life, or tying a thread of empathy from my experience to a narrator’s experience. I’m not actually that concerned about who is reading them, I don’t have an imagined reader or anything like that. Poetry is a process of getting intimate with myself I think. 

What I’m trying to say reminds of me of this John Baldessari painting, that’s just text, Solving Each Problem as it Arises, which reads 

IT CAN BE SUBJECT MATTER OF A RELIGIOUS NATURE. A SCENE IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. WHATEVER THE SUBJECT. THE PROFESSIONAL ARTIST MAKES EXHAUSTIVE STUDIES OF IT. WHEN HE FEELS THAT HE HAS INTERPRETED THE SUBJECT TO THE EXTENT OF HIS CAPABILITIES HE MAY HAVE A ONE MAN EXHIBITION WHOSE THEME IS THE SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM. IT IS SURPRISING HOW FEW PEOPLE WHO VIEW THE PAINTINGS REALISE THIS.

That’s kind of what each book is. The solution to a problem of my own making. Working my way through grief, intimacy, leaving home, making a new life in a foreign country. Not necessarily in a linear way, but it’s there.

You work with children in a creative writing capacity, can you tell us a little bit about what that’s like for you?

My work with children is a different kind of thing, a world apart from working in a university setting with students who want to be here, who choose to go to your workshop, to come and see you in your office hours. I've been lucky to work in lots of schools and with the Edinburgh International Book Festival for the last two years doing cool projects in schools, but you become very aware of the fact that they have to be there, so you bring a different energy into it, different expectations. 

Working with younger, high school or primary school kids, offers a different kind of joy. When I’m in schools, I’m just thinking about the pure, creative side of writing. In workshops at the uni I didn't do a lot of creative writing prompts or anything like that, whereas when I'm working with younger students there’s a lot more ‘rewrite Goldilocks from one of the one of the Bears' perspectives’, or ‘The Three Little Pigs from the wolf’s perspective’. I would bring along weird book covers and say, hey, write the opening chapter to this novel that you've never seen.

It was about encouraging them to use their creativity in some way – which has its own rewards and excitements and frustrations. At the best of times, you're just marvelling at these young people's imagination, and when they hit something, and they're really engrossed in their efforts it's super fulfilling. Recently, the students imagined their own planets which they’ve populated with strange aliens and mercury waterfalls and infinite hair holes and garlic bread trees with chicken wing leaves and these kinds of things. That's just a delight and encouraging that and making sure that everybody in that class, whether they consider themselves good at writing or bad at writing or not interested in writing at all, feels like they can contribute, that they are allowed to be creative. You miss the polish, the ability to clean it up, to sit with someone and say, send me another draft of that. But getting to work with people as they’re just switching on their imaginations, activating those impulses, giving them permission to do weird stuff, to talk about themselves and be creative – giving them the tools and the freedom to explore, it’s wonderful. 

A couple of questions before we go, do you have any advice for any aspiring poets or writers reading this?

I can give you the advice that I got when I was at university. I think I was feeling pretty angsty about a career in writing, I studied journalism, and I asked my professor, you know, do you have any advice about doing all this? What they told me was, you're not necessarily better than anybody else – but if you don’t stop, you’ll be fine. That's the main piece of advice I have. I recently found my old poetry chapbook from when I was an undergraduate and I realised, geez, I was the worst person in that seven-person group. I always knew I wasn't the best, but I didn't realise I was the worst. And that was very illuminating. And all those people there, they’re not writing any more. The only difference between me and them was that I didn't stop. If you want to be a writer and take it seriously and hopefully have a career in it, don’t quit. Do not quit. I’m sure there is other great advice out there, but that’s mine.

So to finish off, what does the future hold for Ryan Van Winkle?

Hahaha, the future is murky. My contract with the university is up - I’ve had an active freelance career for a long time, so I’ll probably go back to doing that and work on some new projects. Hopefully I’ll have a third book out in the not-too-distant future. Fingers crossed, knock on wood. I’ll try to make a performance around it, which is what I like to do once I have a collection, to find a way to present those poems beyond the straight reading. 

I've also been doing a lot of work in Pakistan over the last 7-8 years with a group called Justice Project Pakistan, who are working to eradicate the death penalty in Pakistan. Hopefully I'll be doing a project with them for World Day Against the Death Penalty in October and then kind of after that I'm not really sure. I'll still be working a little bit with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. But otherwise I’ll be kicking about.