Ryan Call, The Weather Stations, Caketrain, 2011.
“When travel writer Alexander Frater wrote lovingly of his father’s fascination with weather, ‘he measured and recorded it, noting down items like precipitation, hours of sunshine and wind speed and direction,’ he might just as easily have been writing about Ryan Call. Call’s narrative consciousness chases clouds and storms the way paparazzi chase stars: not to quarry them but to worship them, ancient gods and goddesses that they are. In the story ‘My Scattering,’ a character asked to describe a storm cloud says, ‘I remember thinking I could nearly reach out and touch it, so low did it hang in the sky. It seemed to have come for me, selected me for the taking.’ In capacious tales of mythic scale, Call tends to the delicate yet sometimes brutal relationship between us and nature. The Weather Stations is a record of humans ravished by Olympian thunderheads and carried off to live among the clouds. As in the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, this art has a timeless shape, a pure adoration of archetype, and yet it also has compassion, wry humor and awe. There’s so much depth and precision in this debut collection that it reads like the culmination of a life’s work. What wonderful providence for us that it’s a beginning.” - D.A. Powell
“For all its breathtaking, vividly imagined terrain and astonishing meteorological phenomena, what you’ll remember most about The Weather Stations is Ryan Call’s keen rendering of human grief and longing and the struggle to survive in a fragile world where the sky is quite literally falling.” - Matthew Derby
“You’d have to look to such masters as Norman Lock to find language so purposefully and satisfyingly well treated. Call does not pose. Scenarios that we think are fantastical are depicted in such sympathetic, bone-simple human language that they seem completely reasonable—and resonant—aspects of worlds we know.” - Kathryn Rantala
“There is a lot of weather in these stories—a lot of broken skies, miraculous clouds, killer storms, fantastical happenings. In thick, muscular, meticulous prose, Ryan Call provides a beautiful and troubling forecast. The people in the crumbling worlds of The Weather Stations do what they can to survive and bear witness, and we, as readers, are the better for it. Stock up on canned goods and read this book.” - Robert Lopez
"These stories are at once startling and beautiful. The world(s) of these stories is/are weathered… the characters face trying emotional and physical battering, and the weather itself behaves as a character, a deliverer of conflict, or as the element in the stories that interrupts, brings forward, gives resistance. These stories remind me of Don DeLillo at his best — though I think Ryan Call exceeds DeLillo’s talent… the language here is just so excessively beautiful. My heart breaks over and over again in the reading, and yet my lips hurt a bit from also smiling. A beautiful collection!" - Moriah L. Purdy
"The Weather Stations is best described in images: balloons of hot air or helium, steam hurling out a burst pipe, bubble baths and foam, how similar the rustling sound of large trees to that of sea waves, the blowing about of debris and sand and small seashells and stray feathers, the billowing of lace curtains and of bright superhero capes, the magic of houses made of cards or of long rows of dominoes tumbling, the tragedy of stepping on a sandcastle, the way parts of it collapse into meaninglessness while parts of it stay impersonating the façade of a castle.
Colors I think of when I think of The Weather Stations: mint green, strawberry ice cream pink and rusty vanilla. The dusty golds and creams of the architecture in Barcelona. The brown of horses’ eyes. Crayola's burnt sienna and pine green crayons. That scary cutting silver of lightning and the millions of grays of the skies over London.
My copy of The Weather Stations was dedicated to me by the author. In it, he says he likes that this book came to England to see me and I believe that is entirely apt. There is something about British weather that you can't fully grasp until you've lived here. Talking about weather in London is not making small talk, it is more like necessary venting about this important, all-encompassing aspect of daily life. The clouds seem to always hang so low and so full you can feel them warm and moist about your ears. It's this kind of feeling in all its variations of wind, clouds, sky, rain, etc. that Call's book pays sweet attention to, that it honors.
Birds I think of when I think of The Weather Stations: Crows, owls, wrens, bluebirds, magpies, robins, pigeons, so many other birds whose names I don't know. There are things you see in literature that you never forget. They can be said to traumatize you. In one of my favorite stories in the book, ‘Consider the Buzzard’, a young boy and his sisters and their mother end up having to let wild birds from outside into the shelter of their house:
As children, we learned to gauge the temper of the local weather by observing the various ornithological activities in the trees and the air above our heads. A wedge of sky devoid of crows demanded caution of us as we traipsed around the neighborhood, a rosary of starlings perched along the power lines or the soft twitter of tumbling swifts in our chimney freed us from the confines of our home, sent us rushing to the abandoned factories to play among the tangles of razor-wire, and in the din of shrieking, crying birds southbound for caves outside the city, we knew to lock the shutters and huddle quietly in our rooms.
And the beginning to each story in the book is foreboding like this – because these stories are told by those who remember, so they presage the happenings much like the calm that announces the coming storm, though when it finally hits, we are still awed by its force and magnificence. What happens inside that house later continually flutters in my memory like a dream.
This is but a small illustration of the kind care and attention that must have gone into these stories' many rich layers of imagination and complex emotion. It is almost hard to accept that stories so naturally beautiful are essentially about death. In that, The Weather Stations is exactly like nature." - Ani Smith
"So far 2011 has been host to an unnerving sequence of “black swan events.” We have witnessed revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the Gaddafi regime’s assault on its own people, and a horrific earthquake that rocked Japan and set into motion a gruesome nuclear crisis. During strange times like these, the premise of Ryan Call’s debut collection of short stories, The Weather Stations, is surprisingly easy to imagine. The fantastical world Call creates is a world in which the weather is humankind’s ultimate enemy. These ten stories are set in a place rife with “dust devils,” where toads “entombed in dirty blocks of ice” fall from the sky and civilians lather their homes with protective coatings of “anti-cloud foam.”
The opening story, “How We Came to Live in the Sky,” depicts a city that retreats underground until the treacherous weather subsides. With this clearing of the skies, the mayor declares that their city will be rebuilt, but not on the ground. This new city, reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “will raise up into the sky… a cloud city, a city of air currents… a city that will harness the power of the weather.”
Another standout, “Consider the Buzzard,” is a tale about a family whose observations of birds serve them as a weather gauge: “a rosary of starlings perched along the power lines…freed us from the confines of our homes,” and “in the din of shrieking, crying birds southbound for caves outside the city, we knew to lock the shutters and huddle quietly.” The weather worsens and the birds, too frightened to fly, are seen en masse idling in fields and front yards. The family saves as many birds as possible, bringing them into their home, an act of kindness the birds later repay.
In “Windswept,” a wicked family collects violent squalls of wind to sell for profit to “men and women [who] made use of wind… as weapons upon the battlefield, as a force to enslave and manipulate others.” The final story of the collection, “Our Latitude, Our Longitude,” an allegory of the global warming debate, is about a once well-respected meteorologist who is ostracized for his predictions of the ghastly weather to come.
B.R. Myers’s October 2010 review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, published in the Atlantic, criticized not only Franzen, but also a certain faction of contemporary fiction writers, for creating worlds in which “nothing important can happen.” These lackluster worlds, Myers theorized, are created by use of “strenuously contemporary” subject matter and overly “matter-of-fact,” “juvenile” prose.The Weather Stations serves as a testament that there are indeed contemporary fiction writers who fashion worlds where remarkable things can and do happen. Call’s decorated, fanciful prose has a nostalgia to it that recalls a time before the onslaught of blogs and 140-character tweets. Occasionally, the ornate sentences seem a touch overwritten and would have benefited from a scrupulous edit, however this is just a small fault. Perhaps the prime shortcoming of the collection is its portrayal of women. As the prose feels from another time, unfortunately so do the lives of the women who inhabit Call’s stories. Many of the women are, disappointingly, resigned to the duties of wives and mothers.
Despite its minor blunders, The Weather Stations shows incredible promise for such a young writer. In our turbulent times, these stories can be read as cautionary tales, imploring us to take heed, as our little planet continues to experience alarming bouts of ominous weather." - Kianoosh Hashemzadeh
"Most of the characters in the ten stories in Ryan Call's The Weather Stations are unnamed. I believe only three actually have names and two of these are soldiers named Termite and Anvil. Which leaves us with many characters names simply as "he" or "she" or "my husband" or similar words. At least when we're dealing with human characters. But that would leave the collection's most prevalent character out of the discussion. The weather, which is routinely referred to as such, is the biggest character in the collection.
The weather not only appears in each and every story, its presence looms over every other character. And it's not weather like we think of - it might rain today, it's sunny out, we should have wind or snow or hail - but instead the weather is an active participant. It's deciding what it will do, not simply resulting in some cause of cold fronts or high barometric pressures.
From "Our Latitude, Our Longitude":
Our joy dissolved to grief at the commencement of the weather's violent era, which issued forth across the skies and shocked us with its wildness, its cunning, and its unending hunger, assaulting indiscriminately both our land and its people.
From "How We Came to Live in the Sky":
Finally the weather withdrew its hostile presence, and we emerged from the damp caves and tunnels of our age of refuge to celebrate the miracle above our heads.
From "Consider the Buzzard"
They still fled to the caves in the south when they could, but more often than not, cloudbanks swiftly cut off their escape route, trapping the birds on the ground, in tree limbs, and against the sides of buildings, where they suffered, flattened one on top of another beneath the impressive force of thunderstorms, windstorms, tornadoes and hail.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Call's stories is that he makes them seem so believable. Sure it's sunny outside as I type this, but when is the weather going to decide that it has had enough of being passive, that it would like to choose its own path? Beyond making the scenarios reasonable, Call also truly puts that weather, prevalent as it may be, in the background. Yes, it's wreaking havoc on the world, and yes, it's something that we as readers are fascinated with, but it's the people in the stories, those poor, mostly unnamed, bastards trying to cope that we end up caring about.
The people coming out from the caves when there is a break in the weather. The family worried about the birds that are ending up in their yard, suffering underneath various types of storm. The couple floating above the storms. Each and every story has a human component that Call has written with such care, with such straightforward language, that we cannot help but get pulled in and root for them while they battle elements so much greater than they have the capacity to truly battle. They are doomed to lose and we know it, and they know it, and we know that they know it, but still we care and we root and that says a lot for the abilities of Ryan Call." - Emerging Writers Network
Some stories from the work:
Our Latitude, Our Longitude
The Architect’s Apprentice
A Conversation with Ryan Call By Brad Green
Ryan and Christy Call, Pocket Finger, Publishing Genius, 2008.
Read it
"Wow. POCKET FINGER represents a new level of ‘wow, fuck’ from Adam Robinson, the Publishing Genius. Insane and beautiful enfolded images from the clearly new and intricately spare imagery of Christy Call, meshed with bro-for-life Ryan’s knack to meld the everyday of fathers, fishing, and tradition with some tonally-wicked phrasing.
Read the shit out of this." - Blake Butler
"Publishing Genius does these pretty great PDF chapbooks and the newest is "Pocket Finger" by Hobart 8 contributor Ryan Call, with art by his sis, Christy. I'm not even sure what exactly to say about it other than the presentation, between art and text is beautiful and the writing kicked my ass and reminded me of everything that I love about the little of Ryan's work that I've read. It includes my newest favorite sentence:
Years later, after all of this had happened, I began to understand her words, why a worm will wrap itself around the same hook that stabs its body, why a fish will inhale fully a barbed lure." - aaron at Hobart
"I finally got a chance to sit down and read Ryan and Christy Call's fantastic Pocket Finger, which was released last week by Publishing Genius as part of their This PDF Chapbook series. It's a stunningly good short story by Ryan, with illustrations by Christy. Here's the text from the first page:
Our diet then consisted of whatever misshapen fish Father managed to bring home from the polluted estuary by our neighborhood. He had grown worried at the inconsistency with which the government delivered our rations, and so one night I found him out in the yard, his head under a decayed log, night crawlers knotting themselves together in the beam of his flashlight. These he pocketed when he saw me peering at him from beyond the vinyled side of the house. I asked him if he planned to eat them all by himself, but he only shook his old fishing pole at me and disappeared down the dirt path.
Later, as my sister I bathed sick, sleeping Mother, I whispered that I hated to imagine what went on beneath the surface of the water, the quick choreography of a strike and all it entailed. My sister thoughtfully dipped her sponge into the bucket and then asked me why.
Because neither of them have a chance, I said.
That's the beauty of it, she said. That's something worth imagining.
Year later, after all of this had happened, I began to understand her words, why a worm will wrap itself around the same hook that stabs its body, why a fish will inhale fully a barbed lure. When you have hung long enough at the end of a wire, you tend to forget that the force traveling along its length belongs to a life not your own.
So, so good - I needed to read something great today, and this was exactly the right sort of thing. Christy's illustrations are great as well, really complementing the disconnected mood of the story." - Matt Bell
"A lot of the new fiction I read online these days does good work with language and image, but not good work with character or story. Sometimes it's simply bad work, these things haven been lately short-shrifted in a, oh, post-whatever world. Call me old-fashioned, but when I want language and image I can go to poetry. I want my fiction to take me somewhere and show me some people I don't know and let me spend enough time with them that I can watch how something happens in their lives that makes me reconsider me own.
I also want brilliant sentences, and all of the images to be inscrutable. Too much to ask?
No! says Ryan Call, a buddy of mine who just released this great chapbook illustrated by his sister, which is appropriate as the story is about two siblings living quietly in the margins around a sick mother and a very sullen and terrifying father. I think what makes Ryan's book work so well is that he's (or his narrator's) directing all his best sentences, all his close watching and description, at this father and not at himself, and so what results is this close relationship between the observer and the otherwise distant observed, which the goings-on of the narrative then work to develop:
What Father had suffered during his brief absence, what he had inflicted upon others in his derangement, my sister and I could only imagine. We each held for his abilities a newfound, horrified respect, and with this respect we carefully guided him away from the estuary when he grew distraught by his failure to draw a single bite. [. . .]
My sister distracted him by locking her thumbs together and flapping her delicate hands softly about his face to coax him onto the pathway home. And I pressed lightly my tiny head into the small of his back and motored him along, occasionally losing my footing in the fetid mud, sobbing, filthy." - Dusty Myers
RYAN CALL: Funnel as Paranormal Conduit
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