Ryan Turner tests What We’re Made Of

If you ever meet Ryan Turner, watch out for his little tan notebook.
The Moleskin pad has a spine barely half the width of your pinky, but
it holds the secrets to many of Turner’s characters—and one of them
might be a piece of you. “Once in a while, someone will say something
that I feel is like a little gem that needs to be held onto,” says
Turner. He will later work them into a story.

Turner’s new collection of short stories, What We’re Made Of,
published by Oberon Press, is the first book publication for the local
author. The stories are built on what Turner calls the vulnerabilities
and insecurities of his characters—some purely fictional, while
others have traits that are bits and pieces of the people he knows.
What We’re Made Of is composed of 11 snapshots of protagonist
Benjamin Wallace’s life, pieces Turner insists can be read either in
succession or randomly—they’re not presented chronologically.

“It’s almost like getting away from that novel convention of an
arc,” he says, of choosing not to follow a timeline.

Each short story is a window into Benjamin’s life, with most panes
centred on his relationships with female characters. Turner’s molding
of Benjamin into his full-fleshed self reveals writing filled with
humour and sex that can only be found through an open sketch of who we
are, as people, when stripped down. While there are no marked plot
points to move you through the collection, Turner’s skill at walking
the reader into Benjamin’s world and attaching to his humanness is an
exercise in meeting Benjamin multiple times—forming his character
along the way.

“I wanted people to approach the stories almost like you’re meeting
someone,” says Turner. “When you meet someone, you don’t start at the
beginning and work your way through to the end. You kind of start in
the middle, and then find a little bit more that makes you go back and
re-evaluate what you already knew.”

Talking with the author is like discovering those little bits and
re-evaluating what your definition of a writer might be. Turner,
originally from Moncton, hasn’t been writing for what he considers a
long time. “I wasn’t interested in books really as a kid at all,” he
says. “I did a math degree, I was much more interested in
statistics.”

His obsessive nature had his 15-year-old self jotting down daily
activities in a journal, which bloomed into a writing career. He went
on to get a master’s in English, and when he’s not writing he’s heading
a business called Mad Science that runs after-school and lunch programs
in the city.

Turner has had short stories published in magazines and journals,
and What We’re Made Of was also shortlisted for the national
2008-09 Metcalf-Rooke Award for unpublished manuscripts (the award was
won by another Halifax writer, Amy Jones). But Turner’s still uncertain
of his writing future.

“I have about 40,000 words written on my new project, but every once
in a while—and I’m in one of those periods—I feel like it’s not any
good,” says Turner. Something nags at him, asking, “If I can’t make it
go any further, where am I going to go from here?”

When the box of books arrived a week before the launch, Turner’s
excitement got the better of him. He grabbed a screwdriver to tear the
box open because he didn’t have a pair of scissors handy.

“I’m excited and anxious,” he says, re-evaluating. “I’m doing my
best to stop and enjoy it.”

This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2009.