PARENT TRAP

Fort Collins author J.A. Tyler spins domestic themes into magic

BY BART SCHANEMAN

Many parents want to stop time. They’d like to keep their children small and innocent and exactly a certain age — if not forever, then at least longer than the ticking clock allows. It’s a natural impulse to want to protect them from our cruel, unforgiving world.

But there’s another natural impulse: the desire to run away. That’s because being a parent is one of the hardest things someone can do in this life. These themes run deep in Only and Ever This, the new novel from Fort Collins author J.A. Tyler, out now via Dzanc Books.

Told in poetic prose, the book veers between plotlines following the unnamed mother — who takes some, let’s just say dramatic, steps to keep her children young — and the father, also unnamed, a pirate who chooses the sea over his dad duties.

Tyler is himself a parent and teacher, and he says a major part of the novel is about navigating those conflicting parental impulses while watching your kids grow up. Part of you wants to flee, because you fear you might not be doing it right, while another part says maybe you just need to step aside and let your kids grow up.

‘A WEIRD WORLD AROUND US’

The true craft of Tyler’s writing lies in his beautiful sentences. He worked on the book for nearly a decade before landing an agent and publishing deal with Dzanc, partly due to this granular attention to style and detail.

“On the sentence level, I have just been chipping away and revising and revisiting for so many years that I do feel like I finally in the end got the version I wanted,” he says.

way,” he says. “So it’s kind of trying to skirt the line between the poetics and the cinematography of a book, and also having that narrative throughline and making sure the action was clear and had forward momentum.”

That narrative momentum takes various forms in Only and Ever This. Some chapters follow the father out to sea, while others explore the twin brothers’ perspective, which Tyler likens to the adventures of characters in the ’80s film The Goonies.

“I just wanted to let those twins have this adventure of falling in love and looking for treasure and those sorts of things while their parents are fighting to hold them back, just because they think that’s what’s best,” he says.

Not only is there adventure, but Tyler also manages to work in several elements of magical realism, and even some unexpected creatures like vampires and mummies. He’s the type of writer who can take what might seem like an ordinary moment in daily life and find a way to work it into his story of pirates and buccaneers. As Tyler was drafting the book in a Fort Collins coffee shop, he drew information from the “sketchy” characters he saw there.