Celebrity, Skinned: Donovan Reyes Babbles To Himself

Two identical young men—two incongruously tall Filipino-Americans, both in their early twenties, both wearing black-framed glasses with the jet-black hair to match—enter a warmly-decorated soundstage, furnished with seventies-style chairs in soft red and orange hues. The interviewer (D) is clean-shaven and conservatively dressed, in a black turtleneck underneath a brown blazer, flared pants resting over a pair of Chelsea boots. The interviewee (R), on the contrary, looks rough: hungover red-rimed eyes and a scuzzy beard. He lights a cigarette, drawing a fine plume of smoke. His wardrobe for today consists of a crumpled, unbuttoned Oxford shirt revealing a stained wife-beater underneath, blue jeans and white-socked loafers. Both take their seats.

D: So, Donovan—

R: Yeah. What’s happening, baby.

D: —I’d like to introduce you to our audience.

R: Alright.

D (clears throat): Donovan Reyes is a prose-writer and poet, known for his forays into the suburban gothic. He is the author of two, but technically three, books: apocrypha (which collects his volume of short stories and his volume of poetry into one singular volume), and his novella, denouement. And I understand that you have another novella coming out as well?

R (chuckles): Well, I really should’ve just stopped after the last book. But you don’t want to disappoint your audience, you know? They’ll kill you if they get the chance—they’ll sing your praises so much it deafens you to the sound of your own dull prose. The next book’s an example of that: ennui, forthcoming from Anxiety Press (the joint that published denouement); it acts as the latter book’s spiritual successor.

D: Maybe you could give us an introduction to your work, then? So the audience can be more familiar with your literature?

R (takes a drag, coughs): Sure. My first book was a short-story collection called harvest. I had no idea what the hell I was doing at the time, since this was my foray into writing fiction, after a two year-stint working as a freelance film critic. It was really like a kind of strange, atonal melange of all of my influences, because when you write that first book, you don’t know what to exclude or include. You end up putting pretty much everything in there.

A lot of it was primarily influenced by my hometown in Northern Virginia in a psychogeographical sense—all the stories in harvest (unless otherwise mentioned) and denouement are all set in Virginia, and there are a lot of places I mention in both books that you could find on a map—and my love for weird fiction and genre film. I was also in a liberal arts college at the time, and so I sort of just poured in what I was studying during my tenure, which led to strange philosophical and theological musings in the book as well, like a sort of grindhouse evangelism. The book itself is not very tightly plotted nor written, but I like it for the fact that it’s interesting and on the verge of collapsing in on itself.

denouement didn’t come in a schizophrenic, free-jazz flurry like harvest did. I was a lot more careful with it; this was more like directing a feature film. I felt like David Lynch being given a budget by Dino de Laurentiis to make Blue Velvet, and I, too, wanted to make the kind of art that would become the blueprint for everything else that came after it. And I found the process a lot more interesting than it was with the stories in harvest. Rather than work off a singular idea or premise or cliche, I mentally followed my characters around as if I was just another friend in their group. They talked to me. Joked around with me. Confided in me. Sometimes I’d be woken up just as I was about to drift off to sleep with some flash of what they were doing or how the story progressed, and I’d have to get up and start writing again.

I positioned them like actresses on a set. I rigged the lighting. I constructed the sets. I was cinematographer and director and producer. I wanted to make denouement the equivalent of a hangout film, like Slacker or Nowhere, both of which were huge influences on my book; the very title denouement suggests a certain plotlessness—“unraveling” in French. But this is also because plot was never my strong suit—I’ve always been influenced by Poe and Lovecraft the most in their complete mastery of mood, sometimes to the detriment of the other mechanics of a story. But a good atmosphere’s the first thing I try to establish in anything I write.

bacchant was my poetry collection, which was complied and whittled down from a number of chapbooks I’d published prior. Not much to say about this one; it was more of an automatic process, like I had a certain number of poems in the ether that I had to pluck out of the air and incarnate, so to speak—like Plato’s teaching on souls pre-existing their bodies.

D: Who or what serves as your inspiration, and who are your influences?

R: Mentally-ill women, for one (laughs). They have been and will always be my Muse, against my better judgement. The broken attract the broken; you don’t get to writing the stuff I write unless there’s something wrong. You know, a lot of my writing has been less inspiration and more an instinctual need to write. A lot of it would’ve killed me if I didn’t crucify it on the page. It’s catharsis, it’s an exorcism without the sage and the incense. That’s why I write, so I don’t kill myself or do something stupid or crazy or both. And for influences—

Ancient Greek tragedy, particularly Euripides’ The Bacchae; Flannery O’Connor; J.K. Huysmans; Doug Liman’s early films (Go and Swingers); Gregg Araki and Richard Linklater; creaky Gothic fiction from the 18th and 19th centuries; low-budget horror flicks that enter into the avant-garde; Charles Baudelaire; Jim Morrison; Charles Bukowski; Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, especially Bitches’ Brew; dive bars and d.i.y. punk venues; William S. Burroughs—Naked Lunch burnt a hole into the ashtray of my skull.

D: What’s next for Donovan Reyes?

R: Nothing. I think I’ve done what I’ve needed to do. Everything else is just extra.

D: What advice would you give to young writers?

R (rubbing his chin): Don’t let the publishers nor the public seduce you; praise is the deadliest kind of poison. Read Our Band Could Be Your Life; it’s the greatest handbook on d.i.y. marketing. And be a savage critic, so you can tear your own work to shreds. Apart from that, have dangerous loves and drink and smoke like hell—you can learn a lot of life through the worst parts of it.