Ryan O’Neill talks to A.S. Patrić about his new collection,

Las Vegas for Vegans

A book often has a particular dynamic. If I was to characterise both books in the simplest way I’d say The Rattler is a train and Las Vegas for Vegans is an airplane. The stories in each cover the same five years but there’s a local focus in the Spineless Wonders collection and an international perspective in the Transit Lounge book. There’s continuation and departure. One way or another, I hope the stories are always moving.

The title story

I put together the collection hoping to reflect the breadth of my literary interests, while at the same time binding each of these stories to a narrative core. Ideally, a reader will feel they have read a book and not just a bunch of stories. A book with a beginning, middle and end – even if not in that order. Lives are rarely as simple as novels make them out to be, because unless we reduce ourselves to birth, life and death, there are many beginnings, middles and ends. Las Vegas for Vegans focuses on the same connections a novel might have done, but it gave me scope to explore more interesting narrative options.

You mentioned you wanted the collection to feel like a book, and not just a number of stories. How important was the selection and sequencing of the stories to achieving this?

There are different kinds of books. A novel uses one or two characters to bind all the elements of a story together so that it feels like a book, but the narrative can ramble, take wrong turns, crash and wheeze the rest of the way home. A book of stories doesn’t have that license. Every piece must merit its place. How well the stories connect with each other is the test of a book for the reader. Sequencing is vital to the circuitry since a book carries a current from page to page. There’s a culminating charge that should end with an explosion.

While this might be akin to asking someone to name their favourite child, are there any stories in the collection that you are particularly fond of?

A gambler who has lost everything feels horses rumbling through him towards the finishing line with the last of his savings, and as they near the finishing line, he might not remember which horse he actually put his money on. There’s an exhilarated love he feels for all of those horses. There’s a more pious affection in that image of a father caring for each of his children equally. Stories are not babies or horses, of course, but each piece of Las Vegas for Vegans offered me stretches of life and love, freedom and exhilaration.

You are obviously passionate about the short story form. Were there any short story writers in particular, Australian or international, that sparked this passion?

When I was young Science Fiction got me reading. I didn’t know it was a literary ghetto. It just seemed a lot more interesting than Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare, or any of the other authors teachers kept pushing at children. The SF literary journals were fundamental to the ongoing development of their writers, so most continued writing short and long prose with equal passion for their whole careers. Writers like James Tiptree Jr., Phillip K Dick, Isaac Asimov, wrote entertaining stories that also seemed vital, daring and colossal. Dangerous Visions, an anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, made me realise that literature wasn’t an antique to be revered – that literature was, in fact, a field of endeavor, fervently struggling to break away from the past, trying to discover what was yet still possible.

In the last few years many of your stories have appeared in journals and anthologies, but currently you are at work on a novel. Do you think writing short stories can give insights into the process of writing a successful novel, or are the forms too dissimilar?

I spent seven years on my first novel and wrote my first story five years ago, just after I finished that novel. Short prose teaches rigor and dynamic storytelling, and I hope my new novel has benefitted from my stories, but long prose doesn’t require different skills. A novel is a set of stories and characters with one central narrative that organises the moving parts as it all hurtles along to its destination. The trick is to find a narrative with enough power to drive that immense literary machine.

Las Vegas for Vegans

Ryan O’Neill is the author of