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Juan Carlos Reyes reflects on 'decolonizing fiction' in 'Three Alarm Fire'

caption: The KUOW Book Club is reading "Three Alarm Fire" by Juan Carlos Reyes in January 2025.
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The KUOW Book Club is reading "Three Alarm Fire" by Juan Carlos Reyes in January 2025.
Design by Katie Campbell

This is KUOW's book club, and we just finished reading Juan Carlos Reyes' fiction collection "Three Alarm Fire." I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.

A

fter talking to Reyes about his collection, I firmly believe all copies of the book should come with a sort of director's commentary. Because it's one thing to read "Three Alarm Fire" and take away from it what you will, but it's another thing entirely to hear him talk about.

The collection began soon after he arrived in Seattle, not for the first time but for the last, in 2017. It had been a year since President Donald Trump was elected the first time. Reyes had completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Alabama and got a job at Seattle University. The opportunity brought him and his family back to a place that "socially, culturally, things felt a little bit safer."

Still, "urgent" events around the country demanded his attention.

RELATED: Seattle author Juan Carlos Reyes explores the good, the bad, the ugly of the human experience in 'Three Alarm Fire'

"Whether it was a reading after the George Floyd protest, or whether it was a reading during the revelations of the #MeToo movement... I want to always be responding to something that felt urgent to me, to the people around me, and constantly listening to my feelings and where those took me," Reyes said of his creative process. "Even if by the time it gets published, whatever is in the news is passed, to me that kind of lives on, these characters that are, I think, responding to concerns that are universal and timeless. Feeling overlooked or feeling unseen or feeling abused or feeling traumatized or just trying to find love and joy and fun."

The result of that urgency is this collection of stories that is blunt and, at times, uncomfortable.

Consider the final piece, a novella titled "A Summer's Lynching," about a man found hanged in an apparent suicide in the basement of his apartment building. The novella is presented in 13 chapters, each with a different person or persons' perspective on that night and the events that sprung from this death. The reader does not exactly come away with a more complete picture of what happened but rather the fragments of what happened next.

"I knew what the project was for me, which was kind of decolonizing fiction," Reyes said of the decision to approach the story that way. "There's so much about the way we imagine fiction as this continuous timeline, continuity of narrative and perspective, and it's singular. Like a single person has to manage from beginning to end some moral adventure."

But that has never been Reyes' experience, and he didn't want it to be his characters' experience either.

caption: Author Juan Carlos Reyes is portrayed on Friday, Jan. 24, 2025, at KUOW in Seattle.
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Author Juan Carlos Reyes is portrayed on Friday, Jan. 24, 2025, at KUOW in Seattle.
KUOW Photo/Megan Farmer

"It felt important to, in these 13 chapters, have a lot of different people talking about the event, experiencing the event, and starting to question... whether this was at all a suicide," he said of "A Summer's Lynching." "Just the idea of a lynching, taking this old form of American violence... and collectivizing it, making it a metaphor, but then also having people threatening each other and threatening to overcome somebody else's story by imposing their own."

So much of "Three Alarm Fire" is about people imposing their own stories on others, from a story about the fallout of a mass shooting to another about a man who's punched in the head for being on a date with another man's ex. The result is simultaneously isolating and claustrophobic.

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And if you, fellow reader, sensed a bit of rage — maybe more than a bit — you got it.

Reyes referenced a quote from one of the Marvel movies, in which Bruce Banner (aka the Hulk), is asked how he controls that other side of himself. "The secret is, I'm always angry," Banner says. Reyes identified with that.

"It's about understanding it and feeling it and releasing it, knowing that it's like a friend," he said.

That "friend," those sometimes raw emotions, has been part of Reyes' own experience as an American and as a writer.

This line from "A Summer's Lynching" stuck with me:

Not everyone has the privilege to live a life for something that isn't their own survival. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGE 188

It's a line Reyes said repeated throughout the book, even if not in those exact words.

"I came to the country when I was 3 years old," Reyes said. "I do acknowledge the privilege of not having to sort of make my way through the world the way my uncles did, the way my mother did, the way my grandmother had to, and her sisters had to when they got to the United States. They couldn't worry about their their emotional health, right? We needed to be fed. ... I don't feel guilty that I can pursue [mental health and well-being and joy], but it does feel important to me to constantly be acknowledging that family members just didn't have that."

And that's okay, too, he said.

Just like it's okay if readers don't agree with everything Reyes brought to the table, either in this collection or in the interview, which you can listen to above.

In the end, "Three Alarm Fire" is what you make of it, what you choose to take away. There are opportunities within it to sit with your own anger or sadness, and there are opportunities to put it aside and live in a story, even if only for a short time.

For me, it was an emotional experience, one that didn't need me to put an optimistic spin on it. Sometimes life sucks, and literature is a place to make sense of that.

I hate to end on a gut-punch sort of note, but maybe that's just the vibe today and maybe it's not such a bad thing. Because this passage, the note the dead man in "A Summer's Lynching" sent to the sardonically named Department of Resentment and Reasonable Complaints before he died, really hit something in me.

I kept calling but no one spoke and I kept fighting but no one fought back and I kept insisting that being here was just the same as being there because I could never find those right directions to take to get out and to the city to everyone here it doesn't seem important to anyone to know how to get out of places we find ourselves unfortunately in and so I'd rather be nowhere than just stuck in between these places that cram us and don't let us leave. Thank you for your time. THREE ALARM FIRE, PAGE 231

I don't really have anything to say about that, other than to invite you to reflect on how those words made you feel and why. And, as this character did and as his creator did, too, to thank you for your time.

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Spoiler alert: I have found February's pick — and it's a cookbook! We'll be reading and cooking with "Feasts of Good Fortune" by Seattleites Hsiao-Ching Chou and Meilee Chou Riddle. It came highly recommended by KUOW foodie and food reporter Ruby de Luna, and I was sold pretty quickly. The book offers 75 recipes "for a full year of celebrations with family and friends the Chinese American way in this deeply personal intergenerational cookbook, cowritten by mother and daughter." Heckin' yes!

And while you're here, a reminder: This year, I'll be announcing my picks on the first of each month. That just helps me ensure we have enough time to read and really enjoy each book equally.

As always, you can join the conversation by emailing me directly at kcampbell@kuow.org. You can also subscribe to the Book Club newsletter here.

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