“The best writing, for me, sustains a controlled bewilderment, and my effort to de-bewilder gets the story lodged somewhere inside me. It doesn’t have to be a total, all-the-time bewilderment, but just enough here and there to keep my interest up. If the controls are compelling, then the difficulty of the text just encourages me to participate in the creative process. Reading to me is a creative act. If I’m allowed to fill in the opaque spots with my own light, my own inferences, I will—and the reading experience will stick because the story becomes a part of me. Some of the best books I’ve ever read will be completely different the second time I read them. It’s then that I realize I’d written into them all kinds of things that weren’t necessarily there in the surface text. The debris we encounter has the capacity to spin off all kinds of personal associations, heteroglossia. Whole other stories get made in the dark spaces.”
– David Ryan