TIMOTHY RYAN DAY - Author of OUTSIDE ATHENS

1. Your first novel BIG SKY was a kind of homage to your place of birth, or maybe just a way to look into your relationship with your childhood. What really prompted you to write this novel.

I started writing Outside Athens in the empty space in the year after COVID. Teaching had gone online, so I was working at home. My wife, son and I had moved out to the mountains about an hour from Madrid. My academic work had begun to focus a lot on trees and I had become fixated on the history of some of the trees in the mountains around my home, specifically one pine called el Pino Solitario that is supposedly the oldest in Spain. I was hiking a lot. Slowing down in a way that I really hadn’t in my adult life. My wife still worked in the city. She was doing a play in Madrid that revolved around themes of polyamory and infidelity. We were in very different places and processing this massive thing that everyone has been processing these past years. I think her play sort of seeped into our relationship as we were coming out of the traumatic COVID lockdown that we went through in Spain. My son was three years old, and I didn’t yet have a driver’s license in Spain, so every morning I walked him down the mountain and thought about all that was happening—emotionally, politically, biologically—as I walked back up and started my day of writing.

Very important for me to note that this is not a work of autobiography. I think a lot of the emotional content of that time worked its way into this book, and all the characters—especially Mia—reflect some of what I was feeling. Also, I can see in retrospect that I was intuiting things about my marriage that I didn’t—couldn’t—know yet. But, other than being a Shakespeare professor I have very little in common with Ethan. I think his character represents a lot of things that I was frustrated with in models of masculinity that were emerging. His intransigence, unwillingness to connect, and even impotence were all things that seemed like failures of whatever masculinity was supposedly becoming, but he’s also smart, basically decent, and trying his best… The book doesn’t aim to apologize for anything that he represents, but I also don’t want to demonize him. Like everyone else, he’s dealing with his past and processing his present.

2. Now we have a completely different “animal” on our hands. Of course, we can still recognize the same storyteller, but the setting is completely different. Can you tell us a bit about the evolution of the idea for OUTSIDE ATHENS.

Well, one of the things that you notice when you teach Shakespeare is that when you start looking, you find him everywhere. I don’t think that this demonstrates anything about Shakespeare in specific—though his writing is unique in the way that it is has infiltrated our culture. I think the diffusion of Shakespeare helps to illustrate something about the way stories move through time and culture more generally. Shakespeare’s prevalence makes him an incredibly traceable example of how information moves through communities and shapes our cultures. You could think about tracing Shakespeare through the culture as looking for memes in the Richard Dawkins sense of the word. There’s a moment in the book when Ethan is thinking about his own ideological drift as he listens to podcasts. To my mind this is one of the important insights of our moment. None of us is ideologically isolated. We’re all flowing through this powerful tide of ideas and information. We’re bombarded with podcasts, films, songs, books, theatre, social media posts… The section of the book titled “monologues” is meant to speak to the way in which we’re all subject to the forces of media and how they shape us minute by minute even as we perceive ourselves as having some control over who we are and what we think. I wanted to think through how we arrived at a moment like January 6th after this intense COVID era, the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter, and how all of that emotional flow of energy arrived to us through art, narratives and products… And how all of it is intensely personal even as it is part of these big social flows.

For me this led straight to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the idea of doubleness. When Hermia wakes from the hallucinatory night in the forest brought on by the potion Oberon commissions Puck to produce from a special plant, she sees both the story, the law, the culture, and the wildness of the nature that it aims to control. It’s a doubleness of emotional and rational truths, a doubleness of the tension between sexual desire and the desire for stability, a doubleness of scientific and political truths, a doubleness of economic and environmental realities. We are living in a moment that forces us into these incredibly complex positions of having to see multiply and live in contradiction and, to be honest, it feels like we’re struggling. So, Hermia’s ability to see nature and culture layered one atop the other felt like a great place to root a novel. How can we appreciate both the discipline of culture that defines so much of what we think we are as humans and acknowledge that we are these completely clueless beings that are subject to the whims of a physics we barely comprehend?

3. How much did the fact that you are a scholar of Shakespeare play into the development of this novel?

The whole story is infiltrated by Shakespeare. The clearest example is Mia’s night in the forest which is a sort of retelling of the youth outside of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But she’s in the forest because she is part of the team that is excavating the body of Richard III who is, of course, one of Shakespeare’s great subjects. For me this was the intersection that brought the book together, the place where history and fiction formed another sort of doubling. The image of that body that had been so important to history and literature being disinterred really set me to thinking about the importance of narrative and consciousness as it’s laid on top of our material history. So, Mia’s archaeology, her mother’s theater, her father’s academic work, and even Ana’s music are all part of these geological layers that she digs through in her work. And then, of course, the two fungal obelisks that set the world on the track of mass hallucinations are named Titania and Oberon. Make of that what you will…

4. How would you explain your ecological approach to literature?

My approach starts with recognizing that narrative forms a part of the human environment. Story is really a huge part of who and what we are. This gets said a lot in a way that can feel sort of postmodern and ethereal, but I mean it in a much more physical and material way. A dog senses its world through its nose, a bat through sonar (as Thomas Nagle explores in his famous essay “What It’s Like to be a Bat”), and humans very often through an immense series of consciously and unconsciously constructed stories. So, literature—or story at least—is a huge part of our unique human environment and it’s the primary way we connect to the rest of the material world out there. I have stories about the coffee I like, about why I choose to eat or not eat certain foods, about what I deserve in terms of resources, etc… Those stories are all malleable. They’re changing all the time. Add to that some of what we’re learning about trees, fungi, the microbiome and you start to see that the line between consciousness and the environment is thin and permeable, and I think that’s where so many of the stories being told right now are pointing because it’s a fascinating—and not entirely new—perspective. Shakespeare, Ovid, Lucretius and a whole host of poets and writers in the intervening years have intuited this, but now we have the science and technology to really drive the point home.

5. You said that this is a “story about how family dynamics shift over time, especially as people mature and contextualize themselves through their own professional and artistic pursuits” – how much of this story if your own life path?

Emotionally it is very familiar territory, but in terms of autobiographical detail it is not close to my personal experience. I am a parent, for example, but my son is very young. I can only imagine what it’s like to be the father of a thirty-year-old professional who is a mother herself and living abroad during a pandemic. I know more of what it is to be that child. Mia is the character that I most identify with. I love her job for one. As an archaeologist she literally digs through the human past. That’s familiar territory for someone who works in literature. I feel like an archaeologist sometimes.

I did go through a separation and divorce in the aftermath of writing this book and I’m sure that a lot of that disconnection and anxiety was already present before I was fully conscious of it, but the details are different. For better or for worse, there are no affairs or throuples in my past. It’s fiction.

I think what I meant to say about the shifting of dynamics over time was really about how we are all sort of existing on two planes at once (at least!), one of them is based in the senses and lends itself to rationality and fact—the things we all navigate on a daily basis—as they shift and change in our environments, and the other this deep emotional space that is internal and subjective and can only be shared and shaped by proxy… through art, expression, approximation… I was thinking a lot about the struggle to not only engage with that growth as an individual, but about how to communicate that to the people we love which is what helps them continue to evolve their concepts of who we are, which is what allows us to stay close and connected. I think we can sort of blow that up onto the social level and start to see where a lot of the disconnects in our society are rooted. It might be a bit of a trope these days to say that we need to undergo a sort of national therapy, but I really think we do. We need to reconnect with ourselves and give others the space to be themselves—and to be different—without that becoming an existential threat. We can absorb a lot more than we are allowing ourselves to without sinking into fear and recrimination.

6. Do you feel that OUSIDE ATHENS is a finished story, or we may see a sequel?

Oh wow, I hadn’t thought of that. I do think there was more to be done with Titania and Oberon. I could have imagined a more fleshed out version of the sci-fi elements of this book. But, I didn’t want to lose the texture of realism. I could have worked on this book for another decade and I am sure that the themes will keep popping up for me, but these particular characters are probably done. I’m ready to move on in more ways than one.

7. You teach Shakespeare. What do you think Shakespeare would say about your writing?

I have no idea… My sense of Shakespeare is that he was a generous sort of genius, so I can only hope he’d be gentle with my fragile ego! If the universe ends up looking anything like the one my novel projects maybe I will get a chance to find out one day in some lost theater in the woods! But, I’m not counting on it… Shakespeare for me has been a lifelong relationship, a sounding board for all sorts of ideas and emotions… So, whatever he may or may not think of my writing, I am infinitely grateful for his.

8. What service do acting and theatre play in our society?

Theater is such an immense piece of the human story. I firmly believe that it is deeply tied to what it means to be human. Most of us spend hours of our day invested in make believe and performance to some degree. That is a really alarming fact when you stop and think about it. My more academic take on this is that we embody narratives through acting and physical forms of storytelling because we are literally bodies made of encoded material. DNA wrote us into existence and then we found a way to externalize something that is at least an analogy to that process. So, when people say that writing or theatre are forms of telepathy, I think that’s a literal material truth. I can have some access to what was happening in Shakespeare’s head four hundred years ago and that is truly amazing. I also think that theater is just a great method of creating empathy. Good art, good writing, good acting… all of that brings us closer to each other. When we slow down and try to understand someone else’s perspective there just isn’t a lot of time or space left over for hate and difference. It helps us focus on the commonalities of existing as a conscious being in this unique human context. I love theater.

9. Do you have any writing habits – like a certain number of words per day, or writing only at night, or anything that is specific to your style?

I try to write one thousand words a day when I am active on a project. I aim to do that first thing in the morning with way too much coffee and music with no lyrics.

10. What would you like or expect readers to get out from your writing – particularly from OUTSIDE ATHENS?

I hope it leads them to a meditation on consciousness, narrative, and the connection of mind to environment. The idea that these two fungi pop up and create a sort of portal into a theatrical space that is raw and emotional connects to something which I think a lot of us toy with throughout our lives: there is the drama of our physical lives but then there is, maybe, this other plane on which things are happening simultaneously. I think of twenty-year running conversations that I have had with friends just in my head, or deep emotional disconnects with loved ones that go unacknowledged, or this sense of a sort of core self that accompanies a person throughout their life… I think of things like the capacity for forgiveness or the ability we have to love people eternally who biographically we’ve grown to hate. To some extent all of this is narrative that we carry into the world where it doesn’t just disappear. It has effects. It seeps out of us and becomes political reality. So, the theatrical space in the novel tries to strip all of that away and get to the emotional core where the characters can start to confront themselves, to heal themselves, and in turn their relationships, and then—hopefully—their political and social realities.

11. What is your opinion about the use of AI applications in writing – it seems like a very controversial subject lately?

The jury is still out for me! I like technology and assume that over time new technologies are integrated in productive ways, but we are clearly in a moment of disruption. There are analogies to the printing press and all the social upheaval that came in the decades that followed. Of course, it’s also true that the democratic revolutions that led to the world we know were made possible by mass literacy. In the short term it is worrying to see the degree to which students rely on this technology. I am not concerned at the moment about anything like good aesthetic literary production by AI challenging what humans create. And I’m not sure that it would even be theoretically possible for AI to perform the literary function in a satisfactory way because that empathetic purpose that I mentioned above almost demands another consciousness on the other side of the equation. So, for now anyway, I think that the preponderance of AI generated writing might just make access to other human minds more valuable. In the novel Ana is experimenting with AI in her own poetry, but importantly she is never ceding her creative process to the machine, she is collaborating and shaping almost like someone might if they were writing ekphrastic poetry. Those sorts of uses I think could be interesting. I was very tempted to actually generate Ana’s poetry with AI and include that in the novel, but ultimately, I kept the poetry “off stage”.

12. What do you think about censorship of published books in the USA either from the extreme right or extreme left and efforts to edit classics of the things “not politically correct”?

I think it’s profane for people to ban books. Period. Left, right or in the middle, we need discourse. We need conversation. On the left political correctness should not be used to police the range of possible thought. People should try to engage with empathy and humility because in the long run that is—to my mind—the only thing that will actually work to defeat bad ideas, cruel ideologies, and ignorance. On the right people should actually embrace the libertarianism of ideas that they claim to and really allow for the vulnerability of this sort of free market of thought. We don’t grow through policing thought. We grow through listening. We all benefit from expanding conversation. It gets back to empathy. We should be spending a lot more time trying to get into—as opposed to under—other people’s skin. Books are one of the best places to do that.

13. Do you feel that Europe is different when it comes to censorship?

There are all sorts of big and complicated differences. In absolute terms the US is probably better. I mean there are no strange laws about what we can or can’t say about the royal family, etc… However, I do get the sense that conversation is much more free flowing in Spain and that there are fewer ideological constraints on casual conversations. In the US there’s more homogeneity in the beliefs of the communities I tend to interact with especially in academic circles. I have friends in Spain that span the ideological spectrum and still find a way to get along, though admittedly that seems to be changing for the worse. Spain, with its relatively recent civil war has its own complexes, and I don’t want to pretend like they have it figured out. But, I don’t feel like political differences seep into daily life and conversation to quite the same degree as they do in the US. That could very well be my own veil of ignorance as a twenty-year expat living blissfully in my international bubble. In both contexts—Spain and the US—I think people are keenly aware that the meaning of “left” and “right” are in a state of transition right now and that populism is blurring those borders. There is a lot of frustration and we should guard against institutional censorship, but also self-censorship, as we navigate this really complicated moment.

I’m a true believer in the value of difference to generate the best sorts of friction and change. We should embrace difference in our personal and political lives. It should be sacred. Difference is the only space that can generate change. This is an evolutionary truth as much as a discursive one. When someone says something that challenges your beliefs, your ears should perk up and you should engage because it means there is growth afoot. I hope that we see some of these trends that have emerged in the past couple of decades start to retract, but there’s a lot at stake, and we’re in the midst of huge technological shifts, so there may be some rocky road ahead before we might settle into something more hopeful. But, I have to believe we will arrive.

14. Finally, what is your next project?

I have a few things in the works: a memoir, a cookbook, a new collection of Shakespeare essays, and a novel that is in very early stages. Emotionally this past year has been a tough one, but I am coming out of it with a lot of renewed energy and feeling grateful for all this internal space that I didn’t know I had… So, I’m really excited to see how that filters into creative work.