CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Timothy Ryan

Rappahannock Review Nonfiction Editors: Joe serves an important part in this piece. In the end, you admit that for the past few years, you have seen him everywhere. Who is Joe to you, and what does he represent? 

Timothy Ryan: I see Joe representing this sensibility in us to take on and justify ways to indulge in baser (for lack of a better term), insular, tribal behavior, somebody or something that is both attractive for that, and yet by acknowledging that attraction, forcing us to confront our own submerged/inculcated prejudices that can surface in different ways. By the early 70s, we’d quit the Vietnam War, schools were being desegregated, voting and civil rights laws were passed, and Jim Crow (upon which the Nazis based their early 1930s Nuremberg racial laws) had been overturned. What I’m seeing today is a resurgence of that sensibility and not just in America.

RR: When you reunite with Rick, you establish hesitance to mention Joe? Why? 

TR: It was one thing to be immersed in Nazi history when you lived in Germany surrounded by it. It’s quite another when you recognize your own distance from that immersion and how some people have become mired. Coming back to the US in 1966 and watching history unfold over the next few years radically altered my perspective. As I remember it, in that moment in LA, I didn’t want the conversation to go any further.

RR: This piece frequently falls back on the image of games, particularly the ones you played in childhood. Why are games such a prominent part of this piece?

TR: Kids love games. The games are all real and feel intertwined with how we gin up rituals out of conflicts (earlier generations “cops and robbers”, “cowboys and Indians”). Their rules are a reflection of ideas not just about conflict but also hierarchy and an early echo in society of how we define insiders and outsiders and how we treat them.

RR: What obstacles do you face when writing any politically charged piece? 

TR: I like this quote by George Orwell, spurred by his involvement in the Spanish Civil War: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books… As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” The challenge is for writers to address their times to inform a narrative without letting the polemics overcome the story. It’s a fine line. I do love Bertolt Brecht… I have a flash fiction being published shortly about the dilemma American educational institutions now have regarding publishing certain work. Dear Miss Jessup is a nod to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel about fascism in America, It Can’t Happen Here. That novel, incidentally, was inspired by Lewis’ journalist wife, Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed the new Chancellor of Germany the year before. The reluctance to publish this story by some university presses may be rational, but it forces people and institutions to face the question of politics vs. expression. It’s coming out in a literary magazine not connected to formal academia. 

RR: What most makes the experiences you had in Europe back in the 1960s relevant to today’s climate?

TR: Joe has never gone away. He fades and comes back. Especially in moments of fear or anger. My immersion in Nazi history and the Holocaust drew my attention in the 1990s to Jonah Goldhagen’s excellent (though controversial) book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” in which he makes the argument that it wasn’t just party members, or the Wehrmacht, or the bureaucrats, or conscriptees that fueled the genocidal antisemitism of the Nazi regime, it was the majority of common citizens across the country who had internalized a cultural antisemitism over years of political, cultural and religious propaganda. You don’t have to be beating up, arresting, and deporting innocent people to be an enabler.