Fabulously Fantastical

FABULOUSLY FANTASTICAL WITH RYAN LA SALA

Interview by Gillian St. Clair Written by Juliet White

“It’s a book about a young, queer kid battling a drag queen sorceress in suburban Connecticut,” Ryan La Sala says of his debut novel Reverie. When it comes to suspending disbelief, the biggest stumbling block in that summary is the idea of something interesting happening in suburban Connecticut. Then again, if any place could benefit from a dose of bedazzling, it’s the pastel-hued land of country clubs. And who better to bring the sparkle than La Sala? Twitter followers know the author as a Sailor Moon-loving, wit-wielding, unofficial arm model. But don’t expect that light tone to carry over into Reverie. Author and novel are two decidedly different—although equally fabulous—creations. Kane Montgomery was half-dead when he was fished out of a river. What he knows of the circumstances surrounding this incident could fit into a Tweet—no abbreviations necessary. Kane can’t trust the people who claim to be his friends or even “reality.” After all, when your school gym turns into an underground temple, you may get out of wearing a heinous uniform, but it leaves you with some well-earned trust issues. Reverie is a story about the outsider experience and being othered. That begins with La Sala’s choice of main character. “There’s the subtext that the hero is not always the hero,” the author explained. “Within Kane’s group of friends, there is that classic, strapping young boy who is given the sword, who is told, ‘You’re going to win, so long as you fight.’ While I love that character, I’ve also been drawn to the character archetype that’s quiet, reserved, but incredibly powerful—the Mathildas of the world. I actually love using that character as the vector for heroism.” “I wanted Kane to be this gloomy, imaginative, empathetic person. Ultimately his power comes from his ability to perceive stories, to get in touch with other people’s imaginations, and help them unwrap

CURIOSITALES K 23 themselves. I don’t see a ton of that in YA in general. We’ve got a lot of people that are fighting, that are bold, that are super smart, but I really wanted to take empathy and interiority and turn that into a strength.” La Sala embraces undervalued traits in both his protagonist and antagonist—a drag queen sorceress named Poesy. “I see flamboyance and eccentricity as empowering. [With] a lot of drag queens, what you don’t realize is that they’re able to change an entire room just by entering it. Poesy is that, taken to the nth degree. Drag queens are exceptionally powerful artists because they’re so commanding. I wanted her to have that, but turned into an ability similar to Kane’s, to influence and reflect the reality around her. So Kane and Poesy are two sides of the same power. I hoped to highlight their commonalities when I’m pitting them against one another. [They] start out diametrically opposed. The closer they get to understanding each other, the harder they’re fighting. You do see the ways in which they’re very similar and it’s hard to tell by the time someone wins, what’s really won.” That kind of mirroring makes for compelling hero/villain dynamics, as we’ve

24 K CURIOSITALES witnessed with Harry Potter who literally contains a bit of Voldemort, and Luke and Darth Vader, when the latter’s identity is exposed. “My favorite stories are the ones that have villains I could see the hero turning into if they had different influences,” La Sala commented. “Villains make a story most of the time, especially if they’re interesting and fascinating and sympathetic to the reader.” Young kids don’t typically critique the images and stereotypes presented in media of good guys and bad guys. So, recalling the antagonists of our childhood from an adult perspective can be jarring. “If you look at villains across the board, the ones that are the favorites are usually smart, pretty righteous, and they’re almost always queer-coded,” La Sala observed. Take The Powerpuff Girls, who face a nemesis dubbed HIM. “He is quite literally a drag queen, super-effeminate gay man. He is also the Devil and he wears a tutu. As a kid I was like, ‘That’s scary.’ Not because that’s a gay man; you were scared because he doesn’t have weapons, he doesn’t have a giant laser gun, he doesn’t have cronies. He’s just a super self-possessed queer person who doesn’t give a fuck about these three little girls and is going to take over Townsville, no matter what.” “Look at Ursula, the sea witch, [in The Little Mermaid]. She’s based off of Divine, a very famous drag queen, [right] down to the eyeshadow. Ursula’s vilified as being this manipulative bitch, but she’s a woman in STEM who’s been ostracized, and she tricks the only noble dumb enough to swim out to her. I love that about her.” “When I was thinking about what makes me feel powerful as a queer person, I was taking all of my cues from the villains,” La Sala said. “I was learning how to navigate a world that was going to villainize me, that was going to see me as somebody that was automatically an outcast. So, knowing how to get people onto my side, how to recruit, how to indulge and fascinate, those were all tricks that I learned from drag queens, from villains, from people that have to be necessarily manipulative in order to survive.” If La Sala were a contouring brush, he’d be highlighting a heck of a lot more than stellar cheekbones. Reverie emphasizes both the isolation of being othered but also the strength that can emerge as a result. “I wanted to do a classic take on giving the outcast power but couch it in terms of literal power that comes from the act of being othered,” La Sala revealed.

“My hope in including a range of diversities is that people don’t think, ‘Oh this is a book just for sad, gay kids.’ While it is a book for sad gay kids, I ultimately want it to encompass a range of experiences that create dissociations from what we refer to as reality. I loved including characters who would be good emotional siblings to Kane—people that were dealing with their own othering.”

“The gloom of escapism comes from my own tendencies to withdraw inwards.

“Many of us who can relate to feeling like outsiders value reading precisely because it offers a mental vacation to limitless destinations—bibliotherapy’s a thing. But La Sala’s novel explores the darker side of overusing fiction as a coping mechanism. “The gloom of escapism comes from my own tendencies to withdraw inwards,” he said. “I have a rich interior world, but it warps my idea of what the real world should be like. There’s a certain amount of neglect that’s always paired with escapism. If you’re escaping inwards, you’re actively taking yourself out of a situation, maybe because you need to, maybe because you want to, but as a result that situation’s not changing. It’s stagnating and it might be getting worse.” “As a kid I proactively withdrew and created worlds within myself. From the outside, that’s a person sitting alone on a swing or under a book, just zoned out. There’s a gloom to that because someone might be very lonely and not have the wherewithal to form bonds with people because they’re so busy looking inwards.” Just as Dr. Poesy and Kane mirror each other, La Sala’s protagonist serves as a cautionary tale for his past self. “Kane was outed at a really early age and not by

his own volition—just by being himself. That’s the same for me. Growing up, that created a big chasm between me and my peers I didn’t understand what about me was different, but I could tell that there was this dynamic that was created when people saw me walk into a room. I wanted to capture that within Kane because, for me, it created a lot of isolation and loneliness that I really fought through. I eventually came out on the other side a much stronger person because I learned how to make friends, how to use humor to join people together.” “Kane is what would have happened to me if I never figured that out, or if I didn’t have that kind of bravado naturally. Kane Montgomery, he’s not me; he’s the polar opposite. He has a rich imagination and uses that to keep himself afloat in a world that tolerates him, but does not love him—and there’s a big difference between those two things. Whereas I am a caricature of a real person. I’ve always been that way and I’m totally fine remaining that way, but I don’t necessarily want that to inform how people take my work.” “When the options for the audio rights sold, Sourcebooks asked if I potentially wanted to do the narration, which is a great honor. Someone must have told them, ‘We have to appease Ryan’s ego, so we’ll let him audition!’ But I shied away from that because I don’t want people thinking about me when they’re reading Kane’s story. I don’t want to detract from that rendering.” Reverie has been in the works since La Sala’s own teen years. “I started it in response to the fact that I wasn’t reading about a lot of queer characters. That didn’t make sense to me because I’ve always been very flamboyant, very out, very alone, and it always made me wonder, ‘Where are those characters?’ So, if you can’t find something to read, sometimes you just have to write it. That’s literally the impetus that sparked Reverie.” By the time he was in college, La Sala knew the type of big questions that appealed to him. Although his area of interest stayed constant, it underwent some dramatic outfit changes along the way. “I’ve always been interested in thought, in the brain, and how this small thing creates our entire world for us.” At first that led him to neuroscience. “It’s the combination of looking at why we think the way that we do and how that impacts our world. Ultimately, a

CURIOSITALES K 25 lot of careers in neuroscience involve killing mice, and I got to a point where I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I then panned out and, with the same goal, switched to anthropology, which is the study of the ways groups of people behave and why they do what they do. For me, it wasn’t that dissimilar.” La Sala found anthropology useful in his writing, too. “Anybody who wants to go into worldbuilding and fantasy should definitely read through some Anthropology 101 books because it gives you a model for looking at the way in which cultures are studied. There are seven fully realized worlds in Reverie—and even more that I didn’t get to include—but I loved taking my characters and bringing them through different worlds. That was the fun of writing the book for me.” La Sala’s path to publication was no quick runway strut. It all started with DVPit, a Twitter event aimed at showcasing work by traditionally marginalized writers. “I found out about it a few days before, and I didn’t know anything about Twitter pitching contests. I did notice though that were people offering to mentor. I thought, ‘Bare minimum, these are people I can reach out to and they’ll know my name, and maybe I can become friends with them.’” The feedback on his first chapter proved invaluable. “I ended up participating in DVPit three times in total. I wasn’t this instant success. I got maybe a request or two per round and, by the time I was participating for the third time with the same book,