Chatting RUINER with Lara Messersmith-Glavin

Lara Messersmith-Glavin is the author of the award-winning essay collection Spirit Things and the novel RUINER (2026, AK Press), the first in the Tellers series, where storytelling is combat magic and ordinary people must fight against exploitation and environmental destruction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she writes both nonfiction and speculative work, teaches creative writing, coaches movement practices for all bodies, and serves on the editorial collective of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory magazine, the journal of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. While her true loves include forests, crows, and tide pools, she also collects languages, patterns, and magical objects.

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Lara is the author of the novel RUINER from AK Press.

Your vision for the unique system of “battle storytelling,” which replaces violence, came to you in a dream. Do you often dream deeply and vividly, and is this the first book idea you’ve gained from slumber?

I dream wildly and richly, often in geometric shapes or color fields rather than of people and places. I almost never dream about real folks I know. I often emerge into wakefulness and carry the feeling of the dream with me throughout the morning, even if I can’t recall specific details — sometimes flickers of images will return as soon as I go back to bed, like my pillow is a container for the dreams themselves. But no — I have never received a story from my dreams before, and I seldom use them as guides of any sort. If they’re telling me something, it’s only accessible to my subconscious.

That being said, I am a firm believer that our subconscious minds work on ideas without our awareness, often for a very long time, before revealing things to our consciousness. This is why those aha! moments of what may feel like sudden inspiration can have an incredible level of complexity and detail — they are actually the result of years of invisible work that are shown to us all at once. I think Kell and her story had been waiting for me to rest long enough to creep into my dreams; she took the backdoor into my waking mind.

Tell us about your experience working with AK Press — it’s great they’re an anarchist publisher.

I have a long-standing relationship with AK Press through my work with the Institute for Anarchist Studies. We have collaborated on some book series in the past, and they also distribute our journal, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, so I was familiar with most of their crew and knew I would love working with them more closely on a fiction project. I was beyond thrilled when they accepted my pitch.

In one of the early meetings when they were acquiring RUINER, Zach said, “We’re not just trying to sell copies. We want people to readwhat we publish. We want these ideas out there.” For me, that demonstrates the difference between working with an anarchist publishing house versus a more traditional, corporate model — they really are in it because they believe in the work, and they want an audience to spend time with what they produce. After years of slogging through mainstream writing conferences and pitch meetings where the messaging was all about “moving copies” and “developing the brand,” it feels really good to work with a publisher who shares my values. Instead of worrying about TikTok followers and newsletter subscribers, I get to work with an editor who pushes me to think through the political questions my work poses, and a publicity team who understands who I am (and who I’m not). I don’t have to pretend.

I don’t think folks always realize how incredible it is that AK Press accomplishes what they do. They are a very small team that operates collectively and returns all profits to the press, yet the number of titles they put out every year and the quality of their work are so impressive. It’s an honor to be a part of that.

What advice do you have for other anarchist (or anarchist-adjacent) authors who might feel they don’t belong in the typical publishing sphere?

Mainstream commercial publishing is a byzantine and surreal landscape that reinforces all the structures and values that we are trying to remake. The messaging within the industry can feel overwhelming and alienating, suggesting that only particular kinds of work, often formulaic or supportive of the status quo, will sell and therefore have value. You have to follow the trends, but not too closely. You have to be surprising but not shocking. You have to be relatable but also edgy. It’s exhausting, chasing after what agents and editors will say is the “right way” to do things.

My advice would be to put aside all expectations and notions of ways the industry works or doesn’t. Instead, focus on making the work you want to make and then ask who else might connect to it. Remember: No one else in the world can write exactly like you do. Your voice may be just what someone is waiting to hear. The point of making art is to dig down toward the live nerve of your questions and fascinations and cultivate the craft that will expose it, not to chase publication or learn genre conventions. The more I’ve leaned into my own authentic interests and beliefs, shedding notions of what the “right way” might be, the more I’ve discovered that there are other people who are hungry for such alternatives. We can find each other out there.

The same networks that we cultivate for community and organizing can also be our readership. If we are invested in building trust and familiarity in our neighborhoods and with comrades across the country, then we already have opportunities for connection. A book launch doesn’t have to be at a Barnes & Noble — it can be a house reading, a joint event with local organizations, a skill share, or a potluck. And publishing can happen through many different means. We’re all familiar with zines and self-made copies, but there are also a lot of other outlets that are eager to support radical authors—like Radon, or Perspectives on Anarchist Theory — who can help get your work in front of a larger audience.

I would also encourage us all to have the patience to allow our work to pose questions or problems rather than always offering answers. Sometimes I see folks on the left demanding a kind of political purity of their media that feels both unlikely and uninspiring to me. While I believe wholeheartedly in the power and even mandate of our creative work to make space for radical forms and ideas, I think these elements can be suggested in ways that allow space for uncertainty and interpretation, as well. Sometimes the question is more provocative than the model. While I wrote RUINER to puzzle through alternatives to what I see in a lot of contemporary fantasy (e.g. demanding young women become superheroes to save everyone’s ass), I don’t pretend to offer a prescription for how I think change should happen. One role of radical writers is to invest in the what ifs in both playful and earnest ways. We are making room for all of us to dream courageously and with the greatest imagination possible.

How is your work with the Institute for Anarchist Studies going?

The IAS is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year! We like to joke that it’s a hundred in anarchist years. Despite facing the challenges of any small, nonlocal organization, we’ve shown tremendous staying power and have worked hard to evolve with the times. We continue to support radical movements worldwide by providing a mouthpiece for folks doing organizing and theorizing on the ground.

The IAS started out in 1996 as an answer to right-wing think tanks, relying solely on donations to support radical writing endeavors. Now we collaborate with Anarchist Agency to disburse a total of $13,000 annually to writing, translation, workshop, and multimedia projects around the world; we also have published a range of pamphlets, plus multiple book series in conjunction with AK Press. We’ve hosted workshops and speakers, participated in skill shares and festivals, and have gained platforms across a variety of media. And of course, we publish the journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, both in print and online. Now we’re looking ahead to what the next thirty years might be like.

By prioritizing projects that come from underrepresented voices and encouraging the development of ideas outside the academy, we hope to shift political discourse and support the frontlines of global organizing work. It’s a project I am continually inspired by — the kindness, intelligence, and creativity of the other members of the board and of the folks whose work we amplify.

What is your internal approach to proper nouns in your speculative prose? For instance, what considerations do you make when deciding to capitalize People, Home, the Way, the Box?

This is a fun question. A lot of these decisions came down to cultural frameworks. In the world of the Tellers series, there are several different cultures, though we only really see two in the first book, RUINER: that of the imperial city of Soogway, which is industrial, class-divided, and generally corrupt; and the People, a diverse collection of horizontally-organized nomadic groups who range across a vast desert of multiple biomes.

The People are capitalized when in reference to themselves or their culture as a nod to the many real-world indigenous groups who have referred to themselves in such a way — Diné, for example, or Sugpiaq both mean, essentially, “the People,” or “real People.” By extension, Home, when in reference to the desert, is capitalized; the notion of “home,” as it may apply to anyone, not just People, is lower case.

The Ways are navigational songs sung in tandem with a fellow pathfinder. There is the Way at Ease, the Way in Haste, and the Way to Water. These songs are central to survival and daily life among the People, so they have names in the same way that pieces of literature have names or some prayers have names. It’s not quite personhood, but they are proper entities. The Box is capitalized because it’s the name of a business, essentially — a bar with a small, grimy arena where black market storyfights take place in the city.

I do have a tendency, however, to think in archetypes at times, and this led me to want to capitalize far more nouns in early drafts of the book. While Soogway is the official name of the imperial metropolis, for instance, most residents simply call it “the city,” much as New Yorkers might refer to their home in shorthand. My initial impulse was to capitalize it: the City—it gave it a weight that I liked, but my editor rightly thought it caricaturized when we needed realism, so we changed it. The same happened with the combat general; I thought of him as “the General,” but to keep him from appearing as some kind of supervillain, we decided to lowercase those references, as well.

Your novel features shorter chapters (typically 2-8 pages). Was this a conscious decision or a natural overflow of the narrative style you chose? And do you find that shorter chapters better ensnare readers to keep reading, always just “one more chapter”?

I do hope that readers will have that late-night, “OK, just one more” experience with the story. Unlike my nonfiction work, RUINER is best swallowed in big gulps rather than small sips over time. 

Ultimately, I think the chapter lengths are partly to enhance pacing, and also partly the result of how I had to think about the plot. There are so many moving parts to the book, and as I outlined what needed to happen over the course of its span, I realized that I was going to need to distill the challenges the characters face down to specific moments and then let those stand in for larger elements of change. The PoV characters are moving through time at slightly different rates until they meet, so getting things to sync up worked best in short bursts. It’s also how I conceptualize story. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, research or memory, I tend to think in bursts, explosions, fragments, associations, not so much in grand arcs or straight lines.

The two-page chapters aren’t really chapters. I think of them as interstitial stories or interludes. RUINER is, ultimately, about the capacity and limits of storytelling, about battles of narrative, and I felt that I needed to share some of the stories that have shaped Kell and her reality, the stories she carries inside of her. There are other stories, too — a chant from a secondary character turns up later in the book, for instance. These are all just ways of offering layers and texture to the world.

The character Shade's parents are featured at the beginning of many chapters through a quote above the text. What was your intention using the quotes? To provide a unique avenue of texture or worldbuilding? To emotionally set the stage for the chapter's text to come?

This was definitely a world-building strategy for me, and each quote brings something to bear on the coming scene. I gave myself some interesting puzzles to solve with this work, one of which was having a PoV character who was shaped by the loss of their parents inside a timeline that didn’t allow for any of that formative childhood to appear on the page. Shade is characterized by grief but also resilience, and part of what keeps them sharp is that they carry so many of their parents’ lessons with them. This is one of the things about grief that I wanted to explore — how can we show how much of those we’ve lost still live inside of us after they’re gone? Giving the parents epigrams to each of Shade’s chapters allowed me to share with the reader some of what Shade carries inside themself, especially of their father. It helps clue the reader into what might be influencing Shade’s thinking in each scene.

Kell’s chapters each start with a constellation to symbolize the mythology and wayfinding practices that shape her interior world, as well.

As a creative writing teacher, what trends or habits have you found prevalent in student writing over the last few years?

One thing I see a lot of is a devotion to fanfic. When students tell me they’re into fantasy or sci-fi, I try to spend a lot of time with character- and world-building, but often it turns out that they aren’t that interested in coming up with something on their own. Instead, many want to generate continuations of stories and characters they’re already familiar with. There is a comfort and a fascination there that is important to them. Some are engaged in book-length projects but working in worlds that have already been established by others.

I have no problem with fanfic as a pursuit — I think we’re all modeling ourselves after things we’ve loved, in some small ways — but I worry that those who are deeply invested in redrawing familiar paths won’t develop the trust in their own creative capacity to imagine or generate new ones.

The other thing that feels unprecedented is that many of my fiction students don’t actually read fiction at all. I teach at a community college where we’re on a quarter system, so a term is only 10 or 11 weeks long. It’s not a lot of time to work on big projects, so we generally focus on short stories. The thing is, few of my students read short stories, and so they don’t have any experience with or intuition around the brevity and intensity of the form. When they plot things, they are thinking in epic scale: movie plots and video games. Practicing condensing those grander urges into an awareness of the scene level is challenging. We end up reading a lot of examples of short stories, as well as flash and micro fiction, but it’s hard to rework these deeply held assumptions around what constitutes a legitimate narrative.

Again, I love that we live in an age with so many different storytelling modes available — there are incredible things happening in video games as well as cinema and TV — but it’s difficult for students to translate those sensibilities, sometimes. It makes me wonder what the role of teaching fiction writing really is right now. I am constantly reworking my course to better fit the needs and ambitions of the students, but part of me also wants to keep the dialogue with literature and what the short story has to offer, as well.

What magical object captured your imagination the most when younger? Was there one that ignited your wonder?

When I was younger, I was less captivated by magical objects and more fascinated by what I’d call portals — ways into other worlds. I grew up in very rural environments: the farmland and woods of southern Indiana, on a boat off Kodiak Island in Alaska, and in the mountains of eastern Oregon. All of these places were adjacent to or part of the wilderness, and so I spent much of my childhood exploring natural spaces — forests, rocky cliffs, sagebrush desert, beaches, ancient trees. I felt like I lived in a liminal space where the tiniest misstep might send me into a parallel realm. Rather than fearing this, I sought it out, drawn to small caves, twinned tree trunks, darkened coves, rings of stones or fungi where I might finally be able to escape this world and slip into one that was both stranger and less alienating.

As I have grown older, I have shifted to recognizing the magic inherent in everyday objects, imbued within them through history or use. Pencils, for instance. Favorite mugs. Knives. Mixing bowls. My first book, Spirit Things (2022, UA Press), is a collection of essays that explore the secret histories of objects on a fishing boat in Alaska, examining the places where science and mythology overlap. The result is equal parts braided nonfiction and memoir.

As someone who loves to sharpen pencils, what method or technique have you found to be best?

Ha! You’ve done your research. OK, so there are a number of criteria you have to consider: the satisfaction of the fidget motion, the multisensory aspects of the process, and the ultimate sharpness of the result. For my money, there’s nothing quite like my brass pencil plane. It’s a beautiful object on its own, heavy and elegant in its little wooden base, but it requires time and a deeply rewarding pressure to achieve the edge. You drag the end of the pencil across the blade of the plane, which is really just a tiny version of the ancient technology used to smooth planks of wood. It releases the scent of the incense cedar from which most pencils are crafted, and it results in a needle-sharp tip. I have survived many, many Zoom meetings and thought my way through countless difficult plot questions by sharpening a fistful of pencils this way.

Are you still dedicating an hour and a half a day to exclusively writing? Has that discipline been the game changer for you?

Yes, I wake up at 5:30 every morning and sit down at my desk. Lately, that has been to revise the final draft of SABOTEUR, book 2 of the Tellers series, but I also have a number of other projects coming up, including the publication of the first novel I ever wrote, a moon myth told through a pack of tarot cards called How the Chandler Hung the Moon (2027, Forest Avenue Press), and a work in progress called THERMOCLINE, which is a mermaid horror novel interspliced with oceanographic climate science essays.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that making the capital-D Decision to prioritize my writing in this way has completely transformed my life. Rather than trying to stuff my creative work into the rare cracks of time that appear between my other commitments as a mother, a teacher, a trainer, an organizer, a partner, and a friend, I protect that early morning time as something I can come to with my full heart and attention. Something we say at the gym where I coach is, “Consistency over intensity.” For me, continuing to show up at the desk is what results in the work, not leaping into it for inspired bursts and then moving on.

I’ve long considered this a form of discipline, but someone recently introduced me to a reframing of this from Prentis Hemphill. They make a distinction between “discipline” and “devotion.” For me, the experience of discipline is one of fortitude and grit; it suggests an outside force driving me toward something, often with the threat of negative consequences should I fail. Devotion, on the other hand, is for me an offering of time and attention that comes from a place of love and commitment to something that makes my life better. It’s a way of inhabiting a practice that leads toward the things I care most about. My writing routine is an act of devotion.

Excerpt from RUINER, on the nature of storytelling combat:

What does it mean to fight?

Think.

Long gone are the days when People drew blades and spilled blood upon the sands, calling it victory — ancestors be thanked. Now your stories are your weapons, your strength.

Pay attention, girl. I know you don't care now, but one day you will.

Combat is a great intimacy. A dance. In battle, you are partnered, you become the reason for the other to be, and they become yours. When you win, you take a piece of your opponent inside of you. Do you hear me? You will never be the same. Victory changes you. When you lose, they take a piece away, and part of you becomes part of them. Either way, you are altered.

Yet you must win. That is your purpose. You must be able to find both harmony and dissonance in the telling. It is a careful balance, offering truth while also holding your defenses, but one you will learn to maintain. After all, to fight is to dance, but to win is to disrupt.