Will the Real Sebastian Castillo Please Stand Up?
I AM HERE YOU ARE NOT I LOVE YOU / An Interview with Aidan Ryan
Last year, hours before the launch party for The Moan Wilds (Shabby Doll House, 2023), Sebastian Castillo, who was due to read that night from his new novel, SALMON (also Shabby Doll House, 2023), fell ill. At first I assumed he was just being a little dramatic, but then it soon became clear that he was genuinely suffering. In a fit of inspiration, perhaps because they’re both white guys with brown hair and glasses, I invited Aidan Ryan of Foundlings Press fame to perform in his place.
After he finished reading, there was an intermission in the evening’s entertainment, and several people literally ran to the book table to grab the last remaining copies of SALMON available for sale that evening. It was there and then that I knew a star had been born.
This year, I invited Aidan to read as Sebastian at the Buffalo event on the Escape the Internet Tour. I didn’t even invite Sebastian. I knew he wouldn’t come. But it doesn’t matter. We don’t need him anymore. We now have our own private Castillo. We have his liaison.
On the afternoon before the Buffalo event this summer, while I was preparing the bookmarks for the ‘official tour program’, I asked Aidan if I could interview him. What follows is a straight-forward transcription of our exchange.
Lucy K Shaw: How do you feel about performing as Sebastian for the second time ever tonight?
Aidan Ryan: To be honest, I missed it. The last year felt somewhat empty without having access to this, uh, mode of expression.
Before we even planned any details of the tour, one of the first things I knew was that at some point, you would be Sebastian again.
Wow. Can I ask why? Why was that?
Because when we did it last year and it happened quite spontaneously, or it was, you know, planned on the day of, kind of thing, when Sebastian fell sick. It was just such a highlight for us all that I knew that I wanted it to happen again. And also, I think at some point you had told me something like, Oh, yeah, I had a good time - I wouldn't mind if we did that again in the future. And then I especially thought that, seeing as we’re in Buffalo, your hometown, it would be funny for you to be a different person because everybody would know that you were, in fact, you.
Yeah. Well, I'm glad it worked out that way. I'll be honest, I like it for myself, but I'm also a little surprised that in the last year, we haven't seen Sebastian readings popping up all over the world, sometimes even in multiple cities on the same day, at the same time. Now that he's, you know, unlocked this ability to multiply himself.
Right. Yeah. Well, as I told you earlier, you were the first person to be Sebastian apart from Sebastian himself, but you're not the last. Because we did have an impromptu reading by Kit Schluter, of SALMON illustration fame, reading with us in Brooklyn. So you're actually the second Sebastian Castillo on the tour, despite the fact that Sebastian Castillo himself was present at three of the events.
Wait, doesn’t that make me the third? Did he read at the earlier ones or…
No, he just attended. But at one of them, he was the DJ. (He played music off his phone.)
I see. Well, maybe in a future event I could DJ as Sebastian.
Yeah, maybe. His DJing is not quite as good as his writing. I mean, no offense to his DJing skills, but he's just put more work into the writing, so far.
I'm sure. Well, I was very briefly employed as a professional DJ, playing, uh, Latin Tuesdays at an Australian bar in Edinburgh, which is really mind-bending.
Wow. Yeah. Latin Tuesdays…
Last time you read as Sebastian, you actually had not read the book you were reading from, SALMON by Sebastian Castillo, (it had just been released that month), and I had to send you a voice note briefly describing the plot and the style of the writing. And we introduced it as non-fiction, which it clearly was not once you began speaking. Now you've read it. I’m wondering what are your thoughts on the book? And also, do you think we should introduce it that way again?
Well, yeah. So I have since read it and found it delightful. I love the whimsy of it. I love the shift into the mode of, I guess a play or screenplay or something. However, for this upcoming reading, I want to go back to that state of innocence, as if… I want to just forget the whole thing again, because I feel like I really was able to channel it in a pure way. So we'll see if I can do that.
That's a great idea. Do you have any other acting experience?
No, not really. In eighth grade I was in a play of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and I played a character that is not in the movie, which is a Christmas tree salesman, which I think I did quite well, but that was the last role I'd held until I was Sebastian in 2023.
And yet you just headed into it with such confidence. It’s a surprise to me that you haven't done this sort of thing before. Is it perhaps from your business experience that you were able to perform so naturally on command?
That might be it. You know, you do have to be on your toes, but to be honest, I think it's just that no one asks, you know? So I think Sebastian is maybe the first writer to use a legal representative in this way. It's really quite innovative. So maybe more people would be good at this if this was a more common practice.
Yeah, true. I guess now you're kind of pioneering the genre. Do you think that you should be compensated financially for the work that you do, or should it be more just like something that happens for fun?
Well, I do it out of a commitment to high art. But I suppose others can make a career of it. Yeah. I don't know how… Would it be a royalty thing? Would it be a, you know, percentage of the door-take? I don't know, but then again, at these readings we’re not really used to passing around the hat. Or ticketing for things anyway, so that could be tough.
Well, you are well known as a Sebastian lookalike, but you are also a writer in your own right. You have a book coming out next year from the University of Iowa Press. What's the name of the book? And can you give a little description of it?
Sure. So the book is called I Am Here You Are Not I Love You. And it's kind of a hybrid nonfiction work, in that it's part biography of my aunt and my uncle, who were both visual artists and passed away when I was a teenager, and part memoir, just about my own experiences in getting interested in the arts and moving into that world and kind of —not exactly following in their footsteps, because I'm in a different medium, but always thinking about them and how they might have experienced things. And I actually, over the last couple of years, in putting this together, I've been thinking about a kind of unnamed but very definite genre of works that also sit between biography and memoir. And I think of, most recently, Blake Butler's Molly, but also Molly Brodak’s Bandit, Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception, Maggie Nelson's Jane, Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Clair Wills’ Missing Persons, where the relationship between the author and the subject is so powerful that biography and memoir bend toward each other. So I think it stylistically tries to, you know, enter into that conversation.
Nice. And so was it always your plan or intention to publish with an academic press?
No. I'm very happy with where I ended up, though, because they have, I think, a good record of publishing books that are in conversation with this. And the publisher Jim McCoy is really a wonderful guy. And I like their design. But originally I think I would have been happy just about anywhere. Although I also think a book like this could easily get lost at one of the bigger presses because it is kind of tricky to, you know, put a label on. So I think this ended up well and they wanted to move quickly. So that was good too.
Why did they want to move quickly?
I have to be honest, I really don't know.
Yeah, but you were hoping to do that, too?
Yeah. Because, you know, I've been working on this since the summer of 2020, and I think any writer of longer form works experiences this. You start to feel your mind turned to other things. I actually was just listening to Tony Tulathimutte on an outtake of the Other Ppl podcast talking about exactly this. Like, you know, you need to do this work to promote the book and all this stuff and read, and you want to do that too, but it requires turning your mind away from whatever new thing you're doing and reoccupying whatever place the previous book came from. And that, I think, becomes harder the further away we get from it. So I've already begun focusing on other things, and I will be eager to, you know, get this out and in some ways get this over with.
Because it's painful?
Yeah, definitely because it's painful. And I don't want to have to continue, I think, to occupy this place forever, but also because I am just interested in other stuff. In some ways if it was dragged out, it would be a distraction.
I felt this way over the last year, while I had an agent that was just kind of jerking me around, to be honest, and not actually submitting the book anywhere and dragging his feet and setting weird deadlines very far out. That was a huge distraction. So I ended up parting ways with him, and the book sold within a week of me getting rid of this guy.
Because you found someone else?
Oh, no, I just sent it out myself. Basically, I worked with him and while, to his credit, he gave good edits very, very early on, and he's a good reader, I don't think he was an effective agent, and I discovered, just ... he was not actually pitching the book. I did this kind of wild thing. I just got fed up with him and suspected he was lying to me. And I reached out to some of the editors that he said he'd sent it to. And all of them said they had no record of having received the book. Which was just crazy. So I fired him on the spot. And then I just pitched it myself and it sold in a week. So that was a lesson in how fast publishing really moves.
What was his motivation for lying to you?
I have no idea. He's a strange man. I wish him peace.
But I mean, ultimately, you didn't have to give him any money, I guess.
No, it didn't really work out for him in the end. No. That is the funniest thing. Like, you have one job. You only get paid one way. That's if you sell the book. But perhaps he's just busy, I don't know.
Oh, I also understand that you’re making a film.
Yeah. Well, that's kind of what I mean by distraction. So I, you know, I've been working on this for a while, and I knew I needed to connect with an editor to take it the last mile, because a different press might want to push it and nudge it, I would say, in a different direction, more memoir, more art history, whatever. And I was able to get some grant money to support my research through New York State. And as I was talking with some of the people who were sources for the book, friends of my aunt and uncle, I was saying, you know, I'd really like to have a gallery get interested in showing my aunt and uncle's work together for the first time. And they said, oh, you know what would help with that is if you had a short film to accompany it, to kind of like, tell the story really quickly. And the book, of course, wasn't a thing at that point. So I connected with a now dear, dear friend, (Mark Anthony Dellas), the son of a magazine publisher I work with, who was experienced in film and had done a bunch of cool documentary projects, and we managed to do a lot of work on a pretty tight budget. We did three days of filming in New York, one or two days of filming in Buffalo, and then he was a wizard in editing, and we made a project that's getting close to completion. We just screened a work in progress cut a few weeks back, and it was pretty well received.
So will this coincide with the publication of the book or…
Yeah, I think so. I've submitted it to some festivals and we'll see if any of that happens. There are so many now that I feel that we could get in one at least. But then definitely I want to have it done by next spring so that it can accompany the book.
Cool. Wow. I’m impressed.
Do you have any other plans for when the book comes out?
I definitely want to tour and read. And one of the cool things is I tracked where my uncle's artwork ended up, and it’s in a lot of galleries, even though he never found stability as an artist or as a working artist. His work was, you know, definitely widely collected. My aunt’s was not at all, but I pieced together a record of where their works are. And so for the film, I went to the Brooklyn Museum and they set up one of his sculptures for me to film, and I went to the National Gallery in D.C. and saw one of his pieces. And so I want to go around to all of those museums and start there and say, Hey, would you like to do a reading? And maybe could you bring out the pieces? And that would be something different than, you know, the usual bar or bookstore.
Oh, that's a great idea. You're very good at working with these institutions.
Well, it took me two years to get the Brooklyn Museum to let me in. But I think the pandemic had something to do with that.
Alright, well thank you very much for talking with me. And good luck for your performance tonight. You're actually performing twice. We haven't mentioned that part yet. You're going to be doing Sebastian Castillo and then Aidan Ryan.
Yes. Which is not something I had to do obviously in Western Mass. So this will be a challenge. But I'm up to it I think.
All right. We'll see.
Yeah. Hats might be involved.
The world premiere of I AM HERE YOU ARE NOT I LOVE YOU, the documentary, will take place this Friday October 11th at the Buffalo International Film Festival!
And you can preview the film now via this secret link. This is a Shabby Doll House subscribers exclusive. Please don’t post the link online.
I watched it a few days ago and it’s very inspiring. I think you will really enjoy!!
P.S. The next session of Zine Writing Club commences on October 20th and you have one more week to sign up! :)