An Interview with Author Shann Ray
Born in Montana and residing in Spokane, Shann Ray is a prolific author, poet, and editor. His latest novel, Where Blackbirds Fly, is the latest addition to his lengthy list of publications across a wide variety of prose, poetry, and academic settings. Spring Arbor University professor Rachel B. Griffis has written a review of the new novel and recently spoke with Shann about its inspiration and themes.
Acts of Betrayal and Salvation
On Where Blackbirds Fly a novel by Shann Ray, review and interview by Rachel Griffis
Set in the Pacific Northwest following the COVID pandemic, Shann Ray’s new novel, Where Blackbirds Fly, alternates between five stories that explore romantic love and the human experiences that complicate it, such as trauma, suffering, lust, and greed. John Sender, whose story anchors the book, is a 33-year-old former rodeo champion from Montana who becomes a loan officer in Seattle. His job is the impetus for his interactions with the other characters—couples who purchase homes in Seattle—and each of the men who borrow money hail from Great Falls, Montana. There are significant differences in the socio-economic backgrounds of these characters. One couple is a pair of addicts who purchase a trailer whereas another selects a waterfront property. From the vantage point of a blackbird, “they slept in modern castles and under tarp. Cloaked by trees. Encumbered by blocks of industry.”
These disparate characters nevertheless meet in bars and on the street, bringing out the best and worst of each other. They meet in acts of betrayal as well as salvation. For example, Phil McBane pulls John’s wife and baby from the street just as they might have been obliterated by a van running a red light. In a single night, enacting one of his many infidelities against his wife, Gabriel Kennedy Reed propositions both Aurora American Horse and Juan Carlos de la Cruz—characters whose stories are told more fully in other parts of the book.
Though each character is deeply flawed, they create a stark contrast when considered alongside the villain, a psychopath named Roark Freeman, whose ideology is a contemporary version of Ayn Rand’s. Like the other men of the novel, Roark is from Montana, a compelling detail reminding readers that the villain once stood in the same place as the hero or everyman. Roark is John’s boss, president of the National American Bank, and he dreams of ruling over Seattle by way of skyscrapers and violence. His actions and beliefs haunt the other characters and move the plot forward, particularly as he becomes obsessed with enacting revenge upon a woman who humiliates him.
Underlying each of the five stories are complicated questions about human existence and survival, ranging from tension between the wilderness and city to leaving home to the connection between freedom and private property. The way that the financial industry touches each life is especially provocative, given that all the characters have a loan officer (as well as a place) in common. Though this novel frankly takes stock of the challenges of the world in which we live—relational, social, economic—it conveys hope through human connection. As Ray writes, human movement is “almost birdlike…like birds in sevenfold synchronization the human world is interconnected by flight…not into sky but loneliness, and self-sabotage, and the darker mysteries of life and love.”
RG: How did you make the decision to have each of the male characters grow up in Montana and end up in Seattle? Is Montana good place to be from? Is it a mistake to leave?
SR: Having been raised in Montana, in Cohagen, an outpost of eight people 60 miles north of Miles City, in Billings, Bozeman, Livingston, and on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in southeast corner of the state, Montana is a sanctuary to me. My family spent many days in the Beartooth Range, the Crazies, the Bridgers, and the Spanish Peaks. For my brother and me and our father rivers were places of friendship and fly fishing: especially the Gallatin, the Madison, the Jefferson, and the Yellowstone. I love Montana and the people of Montana, and I feel deep love from Montana in return. When my mother passed, we scattered her ashes at a high point overlooking three mountain ranges. Thanks for the question, and yes, I agree, it’s a very good place to be from, and for me, leaving Montana’s wilderness is only done with sorrow and regret. Of course, in leaving, the soul of Montana goes with you. I’m so glad my father still lives in Bozeman. I return home to him quite often. This novel seeks to give a little of the spirit of Montana to everyone: a microcosm of the nation, and the nations, filled with people of varied cultures, unified by a notion of wilderness, and perhaps love.
RG: The novel includes some details about Roark’s background, but he does not get his own book like the other characters. Why did you decide to tell his story this way?
SR: Roark Freeman is a man who lives a torturous existence. He carved a dark life from early despair. I’m not sure he was ever able to leave his childhood despair behind. Rather, it coalesced into violence and vengeance. The shadow of our toxic leanings, individually, in family, in groups and nation states, sometimes rises with violent intent. I see Roark as an expression of the human shadow, one that has become embodied by antagonism, loneliness, emptiness, greed, ego, agonizing spiritual discomfort, and the kind of dissociation and fracture that haunts people and nations. In a sense, each person’s shadow walks with us, and noticing the national shadow in its many forms, attending to it by eating our own humiliation toward a generative wholeness, is courageous and very humbling work. My research internationally in forgiveness and genocide, and the art I seek in collaboration with others looks to unearth the shadow, disarm the corrosive effects of our collective enragement, and reaffirm and restore the ancient mystery of love.
RG: In addition to having John Sender and Montana in common, most of the characters are 33-years old, an allusion to the age of Christ at his crucifixion. How did the Christian story influence your writing of the novel?
SR: A few years after I became a professor of leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University nearly 30 years ago, a close friend and colleague named Iris St. John and my wife Jenn and I were having dinner. Jenn mentioned it was soon to be my birthday. ‘How old are you?’ Iris asked. ‘I’ll be 33,’ I said. ‘Ah,’ she said, and then paused before saying, ‘The year of crucifixion.’ Iris was a woman of tremendous gravity. Her words held the heaviness you might experience in a landslide. I respected her for saying them. I was also unnerved and unsure how to respond. She then said, ‘And the year of resurrection.’ I thank Iris for increasing my awareness of the inherent crucible of life. Who can claim knowledge of the mystery of the Divine? Perhaps no one, but Iris came close. In Latin there is a naming of the soul of Christ that takes the feminine form, the Anima Christi. That mystery, a series of infinities, may never be unraveled.
RG: Your characters are very complex psychologically. What psychological theories or principles have helped you create fictional characters, and how do you integrate your expertise in this academic discipline with creative writing?
SR: Thank you, Rachel. The novel took seven years, and in the end, it was my editor Clark Whitehorn at Bison Books with University of Nebraska Press who opened the door to publication. A novel lets us descend into the complexity of our lives, the beauty and goodness as well as the propensity for harm or great evil. A novel is capable of generating an unforeseen root structure that grows a forest of hope, perhaps indomitable, immune to deforestation and blight, immune even to fire. Among many others, authors I love who create this hope, especially in light of the despair that is our human inheritance are Montana writers Melanie Rae Thon, Debra Magpie Earling, Mildred Walker, Jim Harrison, Melissa Kwasny, James Welch, A.B. Guthrie, and Sandra Alcosser. In writing the characters of this novel I was influenced by things as wide ranging as the gear, tackle and trim of saddle bronc riding, the mysteries of atomic theory, how to field dress an elk, and the psychological philosophies and poetics of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Vincent van Gogh, Layli Long Soldier, Wallace Stevens, Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, John Murillo, bell hooks, and the Beatles. In light of these luminous people, the characters were thrilling to write!
RG: What challenges of our current moment influenced your depiction of money? What questions or issues do you hope it will get readers thinking and talking about?
Money madness, which is another term for spiritual poverty, might be the organizing principle that not only destroys families but democracies. A fiercely gorgeous book called The Things We Carried by Tim O’Brien serves as a backdrop for Where Blackbirds Fly, in which the weapons carried by soldiers in Viet Nam in O’Brien’s work are exchanged in this novel for voracious money worship and the refractions of all we borrow from life and others. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the current age of hyper capitalism coincides with the current age of enragement. Another title for this novel might be ‘the things we borrow.’ It’s a book that asks questions about what we borrow but may not be able to repay. Or even understand. It’s about soul hunger and intimate union and the history, tradition, experience, and geography of love.
RG: Structurally, this novel is very interesting: seven books and five interlocking stories. It is also visually interesting, as most chapters are vignettes. Some are just one sentence long, leaving lots of blank space on the page. Why did you opt for this structure, and how do you hope it will affect the reader’s experience?
SR: I’ve always loved the novella form. Jim Harrison’s collection of three novellas in Legends of the Fall is cherished, as is the intricacy and intimacy of Edna O’Brien’s Little Red Chairs, and both Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Putting together a novel in five novellas seemed like a lovely way to interweave people of distinct histories. I believe we all come from the wound, as evidenced by the fact that people of every culture and every religion and anti-religion have both committed and received genocide. I also believe we all bear the imprint of love. Love for each other, for wilderness, for the more than human world, and the nature of what it means to be restored to life. I hope this structure, as uncommon as it is, helps us bridge from an individualistic and cultural-centric way of being to one that supports cultural identities while also creating a healthy and whole familial sense capable of healing every division. Currently I’ve been working on a collaboration with Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho ledger artist James Black, pairing his images with poetry sequences that speak to nuclear warhead proliferation and the how as brothers worldwide we love each other, often destroy each other, and are sometimes given the grace to return to each other. My own heritage is Czech American. Through this form of collective art, James and I hope to generate pathways of friendship, sisterhood, brotherhood, and restoration among all people. This kind of peace-making and friendship-forming dates back to Cheyenne unification and new life ceremonies that help restore the life of the tribe as well as leading the way toward restoration of those who were formerly enemies. It also dates back to the Velvet Revolution led by Czech artists, and the Garden of Peace and Friendship outside Prague at the site of the Lidice massacre.
I hope the quietness of this novel, including the one-sentence chapters, develops a reading impulse that leaves room for contemplation, and from contemplation, individual and collective action toward greater empathy. I’ve written from 10 to 2 at night for many years now. I find there is so much music that comes from listening to the beloved, in our families, in art, in quietness, in cultures not our own, and in the unique graces afforded by love and friendship.
Dr. Rachel B. Griffis is originally from West Michigan and she spent 20 years in California, Texas, and Kansas before returning to her home state and joining the English department at Spring Arbor University in 2023. She teaches literature and writing courses, and her scholarly interests include the works of Cormac McCarthy, religion and literature, and Christian teaching and learning. When she is not teaching or studying, she enjoys running, traveling, and spending time with her husband and daughter.
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