Nextdoor in Colonialtown by Ryan Rivas
Autofocus Lit, 2022
Ryan Rivas’s Nextdoor in Colonialtown mixes his variety of skills in creating media, combining photography, writing, and storytelling in this short but engaging book, giving insights into what it’s like in one of the most recognizable locations in Florida.
TJ Gottung: What initially drew you to focus on Colonialtown and the Nextdoor discussions?
Ryan Rivas: I’ve lived in the Colonialtown neighborhood of Orlando for almost fourteen years but hadn’t really thought about it as feeding my creative practice until I started taking the photos that ended up in the book. I’m happy to report I only engaged with Nextdoor after the project got started and haven’t engaged since finishing the book. I was never otherwise curious what my neighbors’ avatars were saying, but when I was challenged by Autofocus’s publisher, Mike Wheaton, to add nonfiction text to the photos, my thinking eventually led me to Nextdoor and to use the posts and comments as found text. As it happens, there’s plenty of material on there that feels like you’re tapping into the white suburban imaginary, which is what I was going for with the photos, so the pairing of the two felt right.
TG: Were there any common denominator responses from residents that caught you by surprise amongst the different topics?
RR: Nothing was all that surprising. The worst of Nextdoor mirrors the worst of social media and cable news. I think the biggest surprise was the city-wide obsession with coyotes.
TG: Why did you lean into the focus of coyotes in this book?
RR: There are a decent number of urban coyotes in Colonialtown and the other neighborhoods surrounding downtown Orlando, so, as mentioned, they come up a lot on Nextdoor. It’s always a contentious topic about who has the right to live in a place. The anti-coyote crowd often depict them as monstrous beasts and speak in terms that echo other white moral panics about various nonwhite human groups. So the metaphor is just sitting there for the taking. The coyote is a stand-in for the monstrous “Others” white people invent when they mis-read/mis-see the world. I wanted to mimic the recurring “problem” of the coyotes by having coyote-focused pieces end each section of the book. I think this presents the “problem” as comically elusive while also alluding to a certain kind of Native American coyote trickster figure, an agent of chaos but maybe also change.
TG: What was the process for the order each section came in. Does each one run with a theme, are they chronological, or could it be arbitrary?
RR: I tried to create a kind of structure through recurring themes and images. Each section opens with a piece about someone or something at the door. Most obviously, each section ends with a coyote encounter, which I think helps create the sense of an intentional shape (in my mind, if this book were any longer, it would continue to cycle through in this way, over and over, a kind of White Time purgatory). Grouping photos in certain ways helped structure the book too (which sometimes demanded that I change the text, and vice versa). For instance, the final section of the book is all daylight shots, and the sky always appears white. All that said, readers have pointed out certain recurrences that even I didn’t notice, which is really a delightful experience. So I definitely think the book can be read in any order. A lot of the pieces came together through a kind of free-association, so it makes sense that readers could also approach reading the book this way.
TG: What kind of things didn’t make it into this book? Or what qualified something to be added into it?
RR: Lots of funny, weird, absurd comments and strange, uncanny photos got cut from the book. I ended up having to use a constraint to help decide. I landed on only including 34 pieces in the book because in the old 1960s “urban renewal” reports on the city of Orlando, the city was divided into 34 neighborhoods. This helped cull certain pieces that were either repetitive or not quite sharp enough. I do lament not being able to use this one image of an inflatable unicorn flanked by two large trucks in a circular driveway, but, you know, life goes on.
TG: What other projects have you done or can we look forward to outside of Colonialtown?
RR: I’ve got a novella called Lizard People coming out with Thirty West Publishing this fall, and a suburban gothic novel called The Estuary, which I’m currently shopping around. Similar to Nextdoor in Colonialtown, all these projects are attempts to comment on whiteness’s embeddedness in art and literature, and to bring out its absurdity by trying to critique whiteness using its own epistemological constraints.
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Ryan Rivas is the author of Nextdoor in Colonialtown (Autofocus, 2022) and Lizard People (Thirty West, 2023). He is the publisher of Burrow Press and the coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas creative writing program. A Macondo Writers Workshop fellow, his work has appeared in The Believer, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and elsewhere.
TJ Gottung is a student at SUNY Oswego college working in design and accessibility, as well as minoring in the creative writing field.