When Ryan Call’s debut book, The Weather Stations, appeared in 2011 from Caketrain, it brought together stories in which the main character is the weather—a dominant, living, all powerful force. These stories had previously appeared in Hobart, The Lifted Brow, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Mr. Call was born in Utah on Hill Air Force Base, and has a BA from Rhodes College in Memphis as well as a MFA from George Mason University. He has taught at University of Houston and George Mason University. He now lives in Houston, where he is a teacher at Episcopal High School.
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The Weather StationsStoriesFrom"How We Came to Live in the Sky"
We will rebuild our city, yes—we will, we will build a new city in the image of our old city, a city that will withstand whatever nature sends against it, a city that will rise up into the sky, our mayor said, pointing, his arm trembling, a city raised up into the clouds, a cloud city, a city of the air currents, of the jet streams, of warm fronts and cold fronts, a city that will harness the power of the weather and put it to good use, only good, constructive use.
The Weather Stations:Stories- Print Books
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The Weather StationsStoriesFrom"The Architect’s Apprentice"
As the architect’s apprentice, I was obligated to sort the various slabs of sky by size, to polish them with a microfibrous cloth until their viewing surfaces were nearly transparent, and then to bevel their edges so that they might snugly fit back together.
The Weather Stations:Stories- Print Books
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The Weather StationsStoriesFrom"Age Hung Us Out to Dry"
My sister and I discovered our mother’s iron lung floating in the hallway, nudging itself along the corridor, bumping into the peeling walls like some trapped sea creature, frustrated and barnacular. The flood had spilled into our rooms overnight, snatching away the canoe and leaving us isolated in the useless, rotten house, which groaned as the waves crashed against its sides.
The Weather Stations:Stories- Print Books
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“The Weather Stations is a record of humans ravished by Olympian thunderheads and carried off to live among the clouds. As in the paintings of Odd Nerdrum, this art has a timeless shape, a pure adoration of archetype, and yet it also has compassion, wry humor and awe. There’s so much depth and precision in this debut collection that it reads like the culmination of a life’s work. What wonderful providence for us that it’s a beginning.” —D.A. Powell, author of Chronic
“For all its breathtaking, vividly imagined terrain and astonishing meteorological phenomena, what you’ll remember most about The Weather Stations is Ryan Call’s keen rendering of human grief and longing and the struggle to survive in a fragile world where the sky is quite literally falling.” —Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times
“There is a lot of weather in these stories—a lot of broken skies, miraculous clouds, killer storms, fantastical happenings. In thick, muscular, meticulous prose, Ryan Call provides a beautiful and troubling forecast. The people in the crumbling worlds of The Weather Stations do what they can to survive and bear witness, and we, as readers, are the better for it. Stock up on canned goods and read this book.” —Robert Lopez, author of Kamby Bolongo Mean River
Selected Works
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The Whiting Selectors saw that in The Weather Stations Mr. Call had “created an entirely new fabric, a parallel universe, slyly allegorical and unlike anything else being published.”