Q&A with Rylan Hynes, author of GRAFTING
- Katie Lowe
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
Islandport Press: Thank you for taking the time to chat today, Rylan! Let’s start with your book, Grafting. Tell us a little bit about your book, what’s your elevator pitch?
Rylan Hynes: Okay, so Grafting is a novel that follows two men, Chris and Eben, over the course of their relationship, from when they meet and fall in love on an orchard in high school to 10 years later when they reconnect. It is a lot about being queer in a rural space, and also explores themes like inheritance and faith, and growing up in spaces that might not be very queer friendly.
IP: I feel like there's so many directions our conversation can go! Any one of those themes is just a thread that you could pull. This is a book with a lot of different layers—identity, agriculture, religion—what was the writing and research process like?
RH: I got really intrigued about the setting of an apple orchard when I was working at Alice James Books. I had a long commute where I would drive by a lot of apple orchards and small farms in Franklin County and Androscoggin County, and I just started to get really curious. I picked up this book, Apples of Maine, from the Auburn Public Library, and that opened my eyes to the rich history of apple orchards in our state, and the different varieties that have been grown here over the years. As I started tinkering with this, these characters emerged, and I realized that their identity was a central part of the story. The religious thread that's in the book is actually one of the last things that came into it—it took me a little while to realize that that was part of what was going on. We have the character of Eben, who's very closely connected to this orchard that has been in his family for many years, and then we have Chris, who comes from a religious background. His father's a Methodist pastor, which he's not super comfortable with, and so that's sort of the counterpart to Eben’s history and point of origin. Finding the balance between those two foils took me some time. I'm a real nerd about plants, and I love gardening, but I'm not a very religious person, so it took more effort to work that in and help it be as natural a part of the book as the apple orchard.
IP: It feels very natural, so that's actually surprising to hear! It felt very well researched, and like you were very comfortable in that world. A couple of my questions touch on this duality of botany and religion, but starting with botany, talk a little bit more about how you became so comfortable with the physical labors of orchards and grafting, did you ever work on an orchard?
RH: I've worked on a couple farms, but not in an orchard. I read a lot of dorky apple books, and took some great hands-on workshops through the University of Maine Extension Service. Probably the coldest I've ever been in my life was at a pruning workshop in Wilton, Maine years ago. I also did a few workshops at the Viles Arboretum in Augusta. They have a heritage apple orchard featuring some old varieties, and the pruning workshop I took there was a lot of fun (and much warmer). Eventually I took a grafting workshop at the arboretum that was offered in partnership with Fedco. I was so excited to finally get my own grafting knife and give it a try—it is such a cool process. It's also kind of addictive. They offer this workshop there every year, and I’m like, I want to go back! But, I have more than enough apple trees. It was just so helpful to be able to practice it and really physically do this thing. I wanted it to feel like the characters really understood it, like it was second nature to Eben. I had about a 50% success rate with the trees I grafted., Not all of them took, but a few of them did, and they're still happy and growing in my yard.
IP: When did you think of Grafting as the title? By that, I guess I’m asking more about the emergence of the metaphor behind grafting (which, for those who aren’t botany nerds, is a form of reproduction in horticulture that involves joining two trees into one).
RH: Around the time when I picked up the Apples of Maine book. Inside of it there's a Winslow Homer etching of a man grafting, and that visual definitely inspired some of the content in the book. When I first started writing this book, I really didn't know a lot about apple trees, so I learned that this is an important process along the way. I discovered that actually, apple trees are reproductively more similar to humans than probably a lot of people think. They are heterozygotes, so just like when two human beings have a baby, you never really know what the genetic makeup is going to be. The same is true for apple trees, where if you let them cross-pollinate the traditional way of two trees intermingling and creating fruit, you don't really know what you're going to get. It might not taste like the apple that you want. Whereas, grafting is used for cloning an existing tree. This process spoke to me a little bit about the sexuality of the characters, and how their form of intimacy also isn't the same as a heterosexual couple. The grafting process serves a lot of purposes in the novel, in terms of the characters coming back together, and in the structure of the novel. I'm a big nerd about structure, and love a nonlinear story, and so once I really wrapped my head around the process of grafting, I tried to think of all the different ways that I could make it work in the story.
IP: Wow… It’s more nuanced than I thought!
RH: I hope my long babble about apple tree reproduction made sense.
IP: That was actually genius. Anyways, let's talk a little bit more about the setting, because I love when a setting feels like a full character in a book or movie, like it could not take place anywhere else. We’ve been describing the book as edenic, which is a loaded word. At surface level, it references that it's going to be a beautiful, lush place, maybe a little romantic. But in the first chapter, you introduce this religious storyline as well. A lot of the ways you could summarize this book parallel the biblical story of the fall of man—Chris and Eben partake of the “forbidden fruit,” doing wrong in the eyes of their fathers, and are cast out. When did this idea of exile—maybe not only religious exile—come to you as a central part of Chris and Eben’s story?
RH: I think a lot of queer people experience a disconnect from their place of origin or their sense of home, because it might be a place that you can't go back to. For Chris and Eben, it's such an important part of who they are, where they come from. For queer people, there might be some real reasons why that place is off limits to you—at any age, really, but even as an adult, you might feel like, yeah, I can't go back there because it's not safe. Ultimately, Eden is a place that you don't get to stay in. So I was interested in what happens when you try to go back to Eden, what does that mean, and what does that take? As I started to learn more about the history of the King James version of the Bible, and some of the gayer parts of the text, it was really surprising to me! And it was for Chris too, as we see in the book. Some of that text was very open, and historically interpretations of it have been sanitized. Culturally, we’ve developed this idea pretty recently, about which things are forbidden. The Bible is used as this tool to argue against LGBTQ identity and inclusion, but actually there are sculptures and carvings from the 14th century that show us otherwise, and support other versions of the text.
IP: That’s so interesting to me. I think part of my own religious downfall was understanding who, historically, controls the narrative, who gets to write history. It’s shocking to learn how vulnerable the text of the Bible has been to powerful people’s revisionism.
RH: I mean, even like the apple was not really originally an apple.
IP: Whoa.
RH: It might have been a pomegranate or might have been something else, like some other fruit, and it wasn't until the 16th century that it became commonly depicted as an apple.
IP: They even Westernized the fruit… Wow. So, Eden, both in our current Biblical story and as a metaphor in Grafting, is a forbidden place you can’t go back to. Chris and Eben’s journey shows what it’s like when you try to reclaim that idea of home, and embrace what belongs to you. What advice would you give directly to your LGBTQ+ readers about reclaiming their rural, maybe conservative, hometowns?
RH: I'm not sure that I have any real advice for anybody, but queer people have always lived in rural spaces, and whether that's been highly visible or not, it's true. We are in such a polarizing time in our country, similar to what's happening at the time that Grafting takes place (2004-2005). Civil rights are demarcated by states, people are literally having to relocate, if they even have the means to, and go somewhere else where they feel like they have human rights, or that their children will have human rights. There is a kind of exodus that is happening, where you have to think, daily, about the space that you’re in. At the same time, though, there are people who stay in those challenging places, who are doing the thankless work of holding space there—whether that's because they want to or because they don't really have any other option. My hope is that Grafting kind of gets at that, where it's like, actually you do deserve to belong here, even if it's not politically or culturally a community that feels safe, like it should. You have a right to be there and occupy that place.
IP: That’s beautiful, thank you for that. I wanted to touch on the characters again. Grafting is a non-linear story with a dual narrative, meaning the reader holds two accounts of the same fall-out, that moment of exile. Sometimes they overlap perfectly, sometimes we see how differently each character views the same situation. Did the act of writing in two different voices carry you in any directions you were surprised about? Did the characters become more different or more similar throughout the process as you discovered their voices?
RH: Yeah, it definitely developed over time. In the earlier drafts of the book, a critique that I got, rightfully so, was that they sounded too similar. So I tried to think about how they would use language differently, and through the research that I did on religion and reading about orcharding, I tried to manifest some of the terminology and ways of looking at the world in their narratives, and embed that into how they perceive things and talk. That’s something I had fun thinking about—how they think differently, and how that shows up in the writing. They became stronger as independent people over time, and I enjoyed getting into the language of that. I think at the same time, though, that they do have a lot in common, which is why it's a love story. There are these moments where they are really aligned, and then other times when they are on totally different planets.
IP: Yeah, their disconnects are heartbreaking… You do see how differently their situations and how they were raised has forced them to understand the world. They are quite similar, so when they disagree on something, particularly when they have a limited idea of their future and what their lives could look like, it's profound.
So, my last question gets a bit more personal, and you can choose whether or not you’d like to answer it. I attended the launch of Monster Beauties, which is a stunning queer anthology that you contributed to, published in 2025, and was nominated for a Maine Literary Award this year. The launch party was a beautiful, multi-disciplinary celebration of your community, and you spoke eloquently about all of this. There was one particular line in your introduction that stuck with me, when you spoke of longing for a “boyhood that had never been, a manhood that would never manifest.” I always wondered if writing from Chris and Eben’s two perspectives felt reparative, and like a way to reclaim that lost boyhood, to explore a manhood that would never manifest? Was writing Grafting a reparative process of its own?
RH: I'm happy to get into it. Writing was a part of my coming out journey as trans. I noticed, in different stories over the years that I've written, that I always seemed to pick a male voice, and, like, what's up with that? Whether it was first person or third person, those were the characters that I felt like I had the most natural perspective through… shocking, I know! There’s this great quote by José Esteban Muñoz, from his book, Cruising Utopia, he describes queerness as “a longing,” and I think that is really true. Chris and Eben’s experience is one where you're growing up in a repressive environment that doesn't make space for you to be out. Whether that's your sexuality or your gender identity, there's a way that you don't get to know yourself as a young person. You might know things, or you might understand things, maybe you just don't have the words or the vocabulary for it. But there is a part of you that is inaccessible, as a youth, and then, you know, hopefully, over time, you get to know yourself better and be in different spaces where maybe that is not the case, and you can be more fully yourself. So it's this funny process (kind of like grafting) where you are sort of looking back and it's an odd dissonance—you see yourself, and you also don't. You see your absence and you also see the moments where you were present as who you really are. I think that in writing that introduction it's like, yeah, we are trying to reconcile those things as a community. I think that shows up for Chris and Eben, too. You’re just trying to understand yourself in a world or a place that doesn't want you to, and is maybe intentionally trying to make the truth inaccessible to you. But writing it allows for anybody to get to know themselves better.
