I wrote a few vignettes to have something on my site that isn't resume content. I have published reviews of writers and bands in magazines, but these snippets are a good fit right here.
Christians and Atheists
I have several contradictory layers in my psychology. One of them is a Catholic layer--the default, semi-conscious training from childhood--while yet another layer rebels against religion. This contradiction is probably related to having a great model of faith in my mother, on the one hand, and seeing my family get cut off the vine for no good reason, on the other. My dad had confessed at Bible study that he quit drinking, so these Christians cut us off. They said he'd been a secret drinker and a liar, so we had to go, though he'd gone to a recovery center and was sober. Even their children were forbidden to speak to me and my brother at school.
Christianity can feel quite shitty to those who have felt the lash and blister of a church picnic gone wrong. Many people feel this way, for good reasons.
I've known good Christians, too. Once, in Portland in 2000, I was drinking buddies with a priest, a gay man who was hazed and tormented by some in his church. Someone had taken pictures of him entering gay bars with cross-dressers and put together an album. But the diocese stood up for him, and so did many parishioners.
I tend to disfavor hearing someone's absolute disdain for faith. I've also known and liked some Christians who hated atheism. And I've known and liked a few atheists who hated Christianity.
My experience with baleful Christians and salutary ones amounts to a draw, but I rest easy in my contradiction. There's no need to make furious boundaries between myself and other individuals. Evil exists in every demographic. I love the orthodox Catholic Flannery O'Connor and the atheist Christopher Hitchens. So be it.
Both Hitchens and Flannery have been castigated lately. Americans have a hard time forgiving authors their sins these days. The reason might be that our roots go back to Cotton Mather and the Puritan communities that shamed, banished, or destroyed sinners. All exceptions granted. There were thoughtful and educated Puritans. But even now, many Americans, right and left, love to gather around a sinner and jeer and scream like devils. It's in our blood.
As I say, I usually dislike blanket prejudices about Christianity or atheism. But I make exceptions when I like the person who's talking. Christopher Hitchens absolutely hated Christianity. But he was a charming genius, a force, one of the most articulate and educated people of our time, and he wrote about many other subjects.
Much of his criticism about Christianity exposes a cultural ignorance of those who wave their Bibles and flags in the air--behaviors that are likely offensive to intelligent Christians.
“The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.”
When some Christians find out you like Hitchens, it's a deal-breaker. They turn against you. Likewise, some atheists will disown a friend if he confesses a fondness for C.S. Lewis or lives according to a nonjudgmental, personal marriage ideal. And some Christians will back away when they learn of a friend's dissipated summer fifteen year's ago. At such moments, these exclusive atheists and Christians seem like they are part of the same unhappy club. The criteria for entrance is to profess that human beings are not ambiguous, flawed, and contradictory, but absolute, rule-governed, battle-ready, and capable of sustaining one dreary song across the years, and no slip-ups.
I prefer individuals who see by their own lights, who aren't absolutely owned by ideology or religion, who pick and choose according to their personality and taste. Therefore I'm sometimes lonely.
I have known atheists who are disgusted by Dostoevsky, simply because he was a Christian. Since none of them were charming geniuses, I didn't think highly of them. But Hitchens loved Dostoevsky, and he didn't care that he was a Christian. Hitch put aside his own prejudice when he encountered great art.
Giovanni's Room
David has lived on the edges of a homosexual milieu in Paris, while conducting an upright heterosexual life. From a car he glimpses many butcher shops, and regards the daily lifestyle of unrestrained sexuality as a brutal reality that he ought to avoid.
But of course he follows Giovanni to his room, and he is
never the same. He's repelled--repelled by himself--and he falls in love, and
he despises his new lover.
“But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening;
it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one
realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was
not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of
punishment and grief.”
When Giovanni is convicted of a terrible crime--the reader
learns of this in the beginning of the book--David enters a darkness in which
he feels that he is forever trapped. There is no longer any escape from his own
nature or the young man he loves.
"People who remember court madness through pain, the
pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget
court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred
of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and
madmen who forget."
I feel intimidated when I read such a line of psychological
learnedness. Then I remember to slow down to a speed of deep learning, allowing
the words to become part of my own education.
A Farewell to Arms
Though in the beginning Catherine says things like, "There isn't any me anymore. Don't make up a separate me," Frederick speaks in this love language later. Their language might sound treacly or absurd at times, but Hemingway always wanted to locate "the way it was," and this is what being in love sounds like, even if it's sometimes off-putting to those within earshot of the lovers.
But Catherine has real depth. She has experienced loss in the war before meeting Fredrick. She's strong, but also a bit broken and spooked. She imagines herself dead in the rain now and then. She's not crazy, but she feels the pull and dread of her psychology during war, especially.
Catherine also displays an uncommon ability to stand alone in her beliefs. When she gets pregnant and her nurse friends are melting in paroxysms regarding this "shame," Catherine is light-hearted about the child growing in her, knowing that such things happen in wartime.
When Frederick meets Catherine, he's just a kid. He later understands that he loves one of the strongest people he has met, and he is deeply influenced by her.
“I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
And since Catherine is brave--and psychologically wounded by the world--she becomes an authentic Hemingway hero, a designation of high respect.
On Virginia Woolf
When people discuss Virginia Woolf online, there are always a few strident Americans who object to her suicide, as if that action erases her accomplishments. But suicide is tragic, not immoral, in most cases. Since Woolf endured bipolar disorder without the aid of lithium--and suffered a gathering of voices that terrified her in the end--her last years played out with sympathy.
The most recent silly remark I read online about Virginia Woolf occurred only yesterday. This comment was uttered by a house flipper: "Why should I listen to her about life? She committed suicide."
Many Americans have a lot of moral judgements, but not much questioning of their own choices, in my experience. To spend one's life flipping houses, playing video games, and turning occasional pages of political thrillers, for instance, is considered exemplary or neutral. To rest in an armchair waiting to expire naturally, while holding an alien romance novel or a joystick, is thought a noble way to finish life.
"Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?" Mary Oliver wrote. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Virginia Woolf did something extraordinary with her life, exhibiting grace and toughness the whole way.
I doubt many house flippers could endure Woolf's difficult life or make their own lives so meaningful. She was a modernist alongside Joyce and Eliot; a brilliant woman who endured post-Victorian foolishness; a sufferer of a ravaging mental illness; a founder of the Bloomsbury Group; a patient who was owned and controlled by doctors; a formidable seer, a true genius; and a conjurer of new and fantastic worlds that will always be read. She also experienced manic episodes that left their shocks in her mind and body each time. And she changed literature and she changed the world.
The literary life isn't fashionable now. Even small pockets of literary readers and writers in America are shrinking up. I fear we are becoming a nation of house flippers. I often hear the advice, Read what you want. It doesn't have to be Dostoevsky, etc., as if we need more encouragement down the mediocre road.
In this shabby moment of wealth building, of wheatgrass milkshakes and thin, longevity soups, we certainly ought to read Virginia Woolf. We ought to study her books, take notes, discover her craft, and read our favorites again. We ought to demand to understand this brilliant writer, getting a little farther on each read, allowing the books to point inward. Soon we'll feel a satisfying change happening inside us. We'll understand some things about ourselves and other people that we had never dared to admit or explore before.
In America, making some money and expiring quietly like a dandelion in the breeze is considered a satisfactory life. But Woolf was really alive in her efforts and battles. That's what matters most, really being alive while we're alive, doing vital and urgent work.
Despite her illness, she brings out the essence of a myriad psychological characters, exploring the lies we tell ourselves to buffer the shocks. She records the weather, parks, and buildings in London with the richness of the moment and the singular perception of each protagonist, and the friends and children and family who are liked or disliked, sometimes for all the wrong reasons. She explores prejudice, class arrogance, envy, greed, and wrong-headedness in sympathetic characters, because she wrote about human beings, who are flawed, and she allows kindness or a selfless gesture in the same people, all of them contradictory and real. She presents the vital passions of some, like Septimus, a soldier of the first world war, who is shell-shocked, intelligent, and doomed, and the flaccid, conventional hopes of others we care for. And we see how the world looks and feels, with metaphorical exactness, and it's all true and often so moving.
That's why we read Virginia Woolf, in part--there are a thousand other reasons as well--and the details about her departure from the world only make her more sympathetic and interesting.
Amy Hempel in the 90s
Reasons to Live is Hempel's best book, oblique, difficult in a way, and each of her stories is absolutely about something that matters. And "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" remains her most popular and anthologized story.
That surprises me because it's such a 90s story--the protagonist looking inward after doing something awful. In our current stories, protagonists tend to look inward only when someone else does something awful.
The central character in "Al Jolson" has abandoned her friend who is dying of cancer--it's hard to descend any lower in the category of friend. But she was too terrified of death to go to the hospital until now. Now she feels ready to face it, everything--death, and her friend she abandoned. She might be ready.
“It is just possible I will say I stayed the night. And who is there that can say that I did not?”
What follows is escape and exhilaration, failure, loss, and regret--and an exploration of her many calamitous fears, as she seeks to understand the depth of her suffering and betrayal.
Amy Hempel was my terrific teacher at the New School in New York City when I went there briefly in the late 90s. We took the train together a few times after class. She had modeled for Italian Vogue, and I resolved not to look at her. She talked about Gordon all the time. Gordon feels this way, Gordon doesn't care for that.
The great editor and teacher, Gordon Lish, had to make any genius he encountered his "creature," like he did with Carver, rewriting stories till they were his own. He rewrote Amy's stories as well. She, too, was Gordon's creature. He had creatures all over the place.
I was telling Amy about the slight, social novels we were forced to read in our seminar. "Oh my God, Gordon hates those books. Why are you reading those?"
But this woman who seemed to consult Gordon on every issue was one of the most original writers around. She was friends with Mark Richard, Tom Waits, Francine Prose, and other famous people in NYC, not just Gordon. In class she told us to get new friends, if necessary, and I thought, I'd pick you, but we were both shy and never got any conversations off the ground.
What a lovely presence she was in class, her voice shaking now and then, her cheeks blushing. Once, she told us something Tom Waits had said: "When I compose at the piano, these hands are like a pair of old dogs, going to all the places they've been before." She often dressed up in slacks and a blouse, conservative outfits. In the office was a photo of her on the board, with the caption "Got Milk?" tacked there.
I liked seeing her shyness. It was one of the things that made me think that I could keep on writing. Amy seemed innocent but her stories were not. They were weighted with experience and personal knowledge that she preferred not to discuss too often, and they were her own stories. Few writers had such an unmistakable style.
Interview, "His Own Private Idaho," in Rain Taxi Review of Books. 
The author of the short story collection Horse All Over Hell (Wipf and Stock, 2019) and the novel Down in the River (Wipf and Stock, 2019) talks about his work, inspirations, and characters.
. . .
ASO’K: I’d like to ask about Horses All Over Hell, your short story collection released by Wipf and Stock in 2019.
It’s a book of related stories focused upon a family: mother, father, and two sons. You depict problems caused or affected by alcoholism, mental health issues, and religious fundamentalism. These are adult problems, viewed by Cory, a child, who is the elder son. He also does what he can to look after Matt, his younger brother. Why did you choose Cory as the central character?
RB: A child inhabits a compelling psychological world. To a kid, a dog might have the power to read minds. A horse on the side of the road might cast a judgmental glance. Cory’s young enough to live in that magic, but old enough to grasp the troubles of his family. He’s an ideal observer.
ASO’K: The setting of Horses is rural Idaho in the early 1990s. Please forgive the cliché question, but may I ask how much of the setting and characters reflect your real-life experiences?
RB: The town of Laroy is, more or less, Lewiston, Idaho. My family lived there in the 70s and 80s. My dad was an alcoholic, but not the wild drunk that Marty is, and my mom was a very traditional, heterosexual Catholic woman who sat with the dying. My dad was an anxiety-ridden parole officer who didn’t talk much except to yell, though he was good-hearted. I was a sports kid and wore my team uniforms at home, watching TV always. My family was hyper-normal, patriotic and God-fearing without question. Once, I tried on my mom’s bra as a joke, and my older brother screamed in fear and tackled me. My mom shouted, “Ryan, this is a Christian household!” My dad was at work. Naturally, I wouldn’t have tried that stunt if he'd been at home.
ASO’K: Cory’s father, Marty, arrives drunk (or at least uselessly hung over) on the morning when he’s supposed to be coaching Cory’s baseball team practice, then again when he’s supposed to be coaching them for a game. Cory’s mother Joanna has quit drinking and found religion, but sees imposing her religious views on her family as a solution to their problems, and is sycophantically desperate for the approval of the more affluent and socially prestigious members of her church group. What’s the biggest thing preventing Marty and Joanna from fixing what’s wrong with their lives? If they appeared to you and asked for advice, what would you tell them?RB: I understand your temptation to wonder about this. But I say literature isn’t about solving problems. It’s about presenting problems. After all, we follow character trajectories that make sense, based on psychological realities. I’d feel content leading a character to prison if I understood he had to go there because of the story’s urgencies. I’d feel sad but I wouldn’t try to fix his life or anything like that.
Regarding Joanna, I feel sympathetic toward her. She is troubled by anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. She has quit drinking and needs help. Since she’s speaking from pain and not judgement, I don’t get irritated by her reading the Bible to her kids, the way I might in a more self-righteous context. She’s deeply unhappy in Laroy, but church is the only game in town. She seeks to act like the other mothers because she has suffered a loss of confidence during her depression. She’s my favorite kind of Christian—deeply flawed, on the edge, trying to stay alive. The woman she meets, Lucy, the Native-American, is a similar kind of woman, though farther down the road in her sobriety. Later in the book, Joanna locates strength and toughness, partly due to Lucy’s influence. Where Joanna ends up is far more important than where she is at the start.
ASO’K: Birds seem to be a major motif in Horses All Over Hell. Marty, the father, expresses his dislike of large gatherings of birds. What do the birds represent? Other motifs, it seems to me, are the river and the horses of the title.
RB: My favorite metaphor is one that feels meaningful and right but is somewhat out of grasp. The birds resist explanation because characters speak of them differently. The metaphor changes depending on who’s exerting psychological pressure on it. Therefore, it wouldn’t do to nail it down too much. But I will say that I love the mystery of the image and I think it’s right on the money.
Regarding the horses, I suppose they represent disaster and chaos in the book. Of course, there’s got to be a dash of Revelation in the title too, but I wouldn’t make too much of it.
ASO’K: I’d also like to ask about Down in the River, your novel published by Wipf and Stock in 2014. The protagonist, teenager Lyle Rettew, commits an incredibly drastic act in attempting to come to terms with the recent suicide of his twin sister. If you would consider mentioning it to be a spoiler, we can keep mum about it, or mention it openly if you prefer. Anyway, it’s rather macabre, and truly unconventional. Can you describe how this idea came to you?
RB: When Lyle robs a mausoleum, he is flying on his mania, and therefore believes he’s doing something good. Of course, it is terrible and macabre. Lyle’s action is mitigated, though, when the reader understands he’s acting out of love for his sister, in his own cracked manner. Though his sister’s remains are in Idaho, and he’s in Eugene, Oregon, he associates this body he steals with his lost best friend and twin, Lila.
He meets Rosa, a Latina who says about him, “Oh, you’re not quite right,” but knows he’s a good person at the same time. They happen into some speed. She becomes disturbed when she discovers what he’s carrying around in his backpack, but he explains it again and again—when she’s alternately high and tired—and she stays with him.
Although there’s not much sympathy for bi-polar people in the world right now, especially ones who rob mausoleums, I felt very tender about Lyle. Once, Lyle stands up for a goose who hits the top of a bridge while flying. It sits on the pedestrian walkways below, very dazed. Lyle guards the bridge and forces two kids to turn around, so they won’t frighten the goose.
Rosa says to him, “You’re like some kind of protector.”
But some readers won’t tolerate a sympathetic story about a grave robber. That’s okay. I wasn’t trying to please everyone.
Pittsburgh's City Paper "Arts Feature" Interview:
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/cp-catches-up-with-newly-arrived-novelist-ryan-blacketter/Content?oid=1851057
Paste Magazine's interview with Ryan Blacketter: "The human story is a fairly dark one with painful and dangerous impulses that we all have. And that's coupled with a fortress-like psychology that most people have, protecting them from the awareness of the fact that they are part of this human experience." https://www.pastemagazine.com/books/drinks-with/drinks-with-author-ryan-blacketter/
Fiction Writers Review: "What makes this novel so warm and heartbreaking despite its gruesome material is that all the characters are driven by their love and concern for each other." Click here to read the entire review: Canada's Miramichi Reader: " 'Starlings' opens the collection and presents Joanna as a religious fanatic oppressing her husband and children, who feel a strong need to escape from her lectures. But by the end of this story characters unfold in a way that inverts our earlier expectations."
Largehearted Boy. Presented here is the narrated playlist for Down in the River.
Kirkus Review of Horses All Over Hell, 2023
"Told through stirring vignettes, the stories gathered here follow a family in rural Idaho as they approach emotional implosion. Cory and his brother, Matt, are at a loss when it comes to their mother, Joanna, especially since she became a born-again Christian. Cory does not understand why Joanna seems sad all the time, and the boys often try to avoid her attempts to read the Bible to them. Alternatively, the boys adore their father, Marty, who likes to crack jokes as often as he cracks open cans of beer, and they often turn to him for fun and approval. Marty leaves town (going first to Las Vegas and later to the town of Red Star, and Joanna’s friendship with an Indigenous woman named Lucy sparks rumors about 'perversion' among their town’s religious crowd. Later, Joanna and the boys drive to Red Star to move there with Marty, who, much to everyone’s surprise, has been living with an older woman named Carla. The author’s prose is as outstanding as the story it conveys, with spare, raw dialogue and deft scene-setting that is descriptive without feeling overwrought. As Marty, Cory, and Matt look at their home with Joanna inside, Blacketter writes, 'The clouds moved fast with her lying under them, and the oak scraped its branches on the roof, and bits of flying ice tapped their bedroom window. As if the day itself disapproved that she was in bed, and gathered new anger in the thickening sleet.' The titular story reads almost like a play reaching its gripping climax: Tension rolls off of each character as Joanna attempts to leave while Cory tries to stop her, Marty pleads with Joanna, and Carla and Lucy bear witness with their own romantic intentions simmering beneath the surface of the familial drama. Each character feels real and lived-in; the stories are poignant, evocative, and definitely worth the reader’s attention. An excellent and moving collection."
"Blacketter's prose is paired with the torque of a plot that lives and moves like an indomitable engine. This difficult and necessary story is inbreathed with a ferocity that leaves the reader shaken."
--Shann Ray, author of American Masculine
"I was completely enthralled by this haunting, page-turning novel. The disturbing events, the evocative landscape, and the chaos of mental disorder self-medicated by drugs and rebellion are all rendered in humanizing, beautifully-rendered realism."
--Wayne Harrison, The Spark and the Drive
"Down in the River is a startling, disturbing, and ultimately entrancing novel, a fever dream that astounds and never sits still for a moment, breathlessly played out in the sad twilight between the innocence of childhood and the despair of age, life lived on the last edges of love and loyalty strained to their limits."
--Ernest Hilbert, author of Caligulan
"Blacketter has created an outsider story of adolescence that left me wanting to travel more with his characters; I felt connected to them as they opened my eyes to new forms of chaos."
--Max Wolf Valerio, author of The Criminal: the invisibility of parallel forces.
“The eleven intricately woven short stories of Horses All Over Hell portray a family caught in an ever-deepening spiral of damage and despair while bound together by ties of love in a Western landscape that comes to life on the page. The deep flaws, the beauty, and the bravery of these richly imagined characters will linger with the reader long after the last page.”
—Mary Clearman Blew, author of Jackalope Dreams and Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin
"Moving yet realistic and unsentimental, this is a finely crafted collection of short fiction."
--Arthur O'Keefe, author of The Spirit Phone
“Ryan Blacketter's Down in the River is an impressive debut novel that effectively tackles themes of mental illness and grief.”
--Largehearted Boy
“A heartbreaking, macabre pilgrimage.”
–Paste Magazine
“Even as Lyle runs toward trouble and danger, his youthful optimism, however delusory it might be, flickers in these pages, compelling the reader to journey deeper into night, in search of hope and redemption.”
--The Rumpus
“Lyle is clearly disturbed, but Blacketter never lets him become a caricature, never lets his mental illness cloud his personality or override his humanity. Like Dubus’s characters, even his most terrible deeds are driven by noble impulses and understandable grief.”
--Fiction Writers Review
"A remarkable, darkly startling and endearing debut novel . . . As Lyle’s quest unfolds with messy inevitability, I am rooting for this young man, I am living as this young man, I am learning to feel as skewed and caring as Lyle does. And what a pleasure this is, and what great inspiration to a fellow writer the experience of Down in the River is. I cannot recommend this novel enough."
--The Quivering Pen
"A strange, haunting journey across the shadowy landscape of grief and longing. To our good fortune, Ryan Blacketter is a heroic guide into this exploration of the mysterious workings of the human heart . . . This is a brave first novel from a writer to be watched."
--Mitch Wieland, author of God's Dogs
"I can't remember when I've liked a character as much as I like young Lyle Rettew, or when I've cheered one on so hard, despite the fact that he's clearly crazy and his quest is doomed."
--Pinckney Benedict on Down in the River
Hitchens
I used to embrace a libertarian ideal of free-speech, until I discovered the right and left censor in equal fashion. Right or left isn’t the problem. Politics is the problem.
Ideology divides people and it divides the mind. It’s rare to encounter anyone who declares a love of Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, for instance. Most people would pick one or the other, as an expression of their politics.
I wanted to locate Melville’s “howling infinite,” a territory of ambiguity and possibility, in which we are open to all things human and good. In Moby Dick, Melville invites us to love the cannibal Queequeg, who shares a bed very lovingly with Ishmael. In mid-nineteenth century America, such openness was indeed risky, and may have partly explained why the book was a flop upon publication.
Such openness to ambiguity isn’t allowed in the culture right now either. I appreciated Elon Musk when he was an apolitical geek who might have been on the spectrum. Then, as if he understood he needed a political party to back his brand, he met Jered Kushner at the World Cup and transformed into a MAGA dude, and was no longer intriguing.
We seek political fortifications on a smaller level too, in organizations and among our circle of friends. God forbid we should be seen standing alone.
It's clear now that Christopher Hitchens carried the entire responsibility of creating fine independent cultural writing on his back for twenty years until his death. When he was gone, there were few writers out there who had the smarts to stand alone in their beliefs and shine a light on hypocrisy, no matter its ideology, and none so effective. He challenged major faiths for their treatment of women, but he was no academic pet who often changed his opinions to fit the news. He saw by his own lights, and he liked controversy.
But perhaps he was a bit strident in his condemnation of religion. Maybe he never met Marilynne Robinson, a Christian and a true genius, his equal in smarts, and also someone who embraces many pleasing contradictions--at least I always thought so, to her credit, when she was my thesis advisor and fellow Idaho writer at Iowa. She is a fierce liberal who protested nuclear pollution in Mother Country and loves Abraham Lincoln and John Calvin.
But Hitchens doesn't need schooling about his views. He left a wide circle that was his own terrain of individualistic discernment, and it has quickly been closed by ideologues right and left, who recognize no fine distinctions. His bright light of openness and reason inspired many who wished to think for themselves, in a world that tends to usher people into camps.
Two camps--that's all we're allowed. Pick one side or the other and sit quietly until it's your turn to say what you've heard so many times before.
“My own opinion is enough for me," Hitchens wrote in a humorous mood, "and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.”
Those Who Do It Anyway
I had trouble hearing my early teachers--their voices produced mysterious sounds that were beyond my understanding. In my early teens, I stood before a judge twice for petty crimes. I knew many other peaceful kids who liked adventuring. At sixteen, I quit high school and told my mom I wanted to buy a VW bus and drive to Europe. She wished me luck.
Soon I left Oregon and lived in Boston for a year, rooming with an accomplished twenty-year-old painter who had been homeless. That year was a great education for a young wanderer. I read Naked Lunch, On the Road, The Great Gatsby, Queer, Junkie, A Room of One's Own, The Ghostly Lover, A Clergyman's Daughter, and A Farewell to Arms.
Back home, I attended community college, and the university I went to the next year didn't require English majors to take math. It was good luck.
Later, I failed the GREs--"correct answer" tests are inscrutable to me--but the Iowa Writers Workshop was kind enough to overlook that fact. The most selective graduate program in the U.S., Iowa was a dropout's playground. Students weren't required to attend classes except for workshop once a week, and teachers didn't give grades.
I wrote all the time, at least six hours a day, sometimes ten, and read three or four hours. I annotated books on my own reading list, and casually read the books for the nonrequired lectures. As part of my financial aid, I taught creative writing classes to freshmen, and preached about craft and the lazy, hard-working lifestyle of writers.
My teachers were all terrific--Frank Conroy, Chris Offutt, Marilynne Robinson, Jim McPherson. Offutt's workshops presented such clear distillations of craft, and I was instantly changed as a writer. "A story's issues have to be set up and buttressed," he said once. "We need to learn the mother is depressed right away. You need to front-load that information."
It was wonderful to learn so feverishly in a loosely structured environment. Most people aren't stirred to ferocious work habits when they're told they can make their own schedules and they won't be graded. Maybe it's only writers and artists who do it anyway.
The Year of the Empath
2025 must be the year of the "empath." On LinkedIn, for instance, many of my connections seem to get in line to announce that they warmed their hummingbird feeder, or looked past a homeless person's rags to give him a bag of groceries. Those are positive things, but I'm curious about the frequency of such utterances in the culture lately--especially regarding what it could mean for writing.
The empath is definitely the new hero in writing circles. Two or three times a week I see a new article on "empathic writing" on social media. My email inbox often looks like an empathic logjam. We can read thousands of articles about this writing craze that's making the internet blink red.
Of course it's essential for writers to experience the suffering of their characters on the deepest level. But I believe writers have been working on the empathy project for hundreds of years or longer.
Hemingway, Melville, Woolf, Chekhov, and thousands of others demonstrate deep concern for their characters. Most of us--excepting sociopaths and those with narcissistic personality disorder--have the ability to imagine ourselves inside another person's pain. We do need to develop empathy, but writers have always had their own way of doing it.
What troubles me is the public mania regarding empathic writing, and its possible influence on literature. Take the character Fuckhead in Jesus' Son, for instance. As a drug addict, he shows a capacity for violence that might fail the empathy test. But literary empathy demands that we basically accept our protagonist, in this case a drug addict. We should know that drug addiction reduces empathy, and therefore our protagonist might not have too much of it. That's showing empathy to our protagonist.
Fuckhead also exhibits a lot of vulnerability, pain, and lostness in his chaotic travels, and he's far more sympathetic than not. I despair of having to read the book where a guy like Fuckhead goes around showing empathy on every page.
That's not necessarily what teachers of empathic writing would want. But since we're all getting clobbered by so many empathic foam bats, we might feel that our central characters must show a lot of empathy in order for us to sell our work.
Consider this insight about writing empathically from writerslife.org: "Let's explore how writing with empathy can become a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal without compromising your sales goals."
Not all discussions about this trend are so cynical. But I get the feeling that writing empathically often has to do with improving sales.
Not all writers tended to the elbows of sufferers with deep feeling at every chance. Rimbaud, Celine, Baudelaire, and Henry Miller didn't spend a lot of time imagining themselves into others' pain, although they all did it sometimes. What's more, some famous empaths produced mediocre work. Ponder this second-rate line by Charles Dickens: "Oh poor Oliver Twist, despised by all, pitied by none!" That's a forehead slapper.
Whether you're an empath or a chilly type, what matters is making your book a good one. I embrace both qualities at once, according to the demands of each story or book.
All of that said, I celebrate true empaths. My mother was one. She volunteered as a hospice worker, and one time she stopped the car at night and asked kids, out walking, if they were okay. Like all authentic empaths, she kept this quality a secret. She didn't announce her recent kindnesses to everyone. She never began a sentence, "As an empath, . . ." I don't believe she ever even thought about it.
A loose count of American empaths must amount to 60%, based on magazine articles and social media interest. But I suspect the count of true empaths is closer to three percent. After all, the ability to feel and absorb others' pain to an extraordinary degree is special, a rare gift. Empaths were born that way. No workshop, book, or webinar is going to give us what they have.
A national march toward public empathy isn't the worst thing in the world. It's better than fake Christianity or fake patriotism, brought to us by MAGA.
But I fear that mimicking something rare and good, on a national scale, results in a trampling of the original flower. Public empathy isn't going to kill true empathy, but it might ruin it for a while, when everyone is sick of it and goes on to the next craze.
Even something as beautiful and cool as the saxophone was finally buried due to overplay.
Writers need to learn how to express empathy on the page. But we have great books to guide us and our own human hearts. Those things are all we need.
Gregory Wolfe Hacks Another Publisher
July 14, 2025. Greg hacked Lawrence Knorr at Sunbury, who had accepted "The Lord's Hacker," and they released me from my contract after he was hacked. It's true I had complained that my editor was rewriting my characters, but I doubt it was the first time an author had complained.
Publisher Lawrence Knorr accepted "The Lord's Hacker" in September 2024. A couple of months later, he told me on the phone that the Christian leader's character was interesting. I asked him if the hacking moments seemed too fantastic, and he told me he believed they could be done.
Five months after that, he released me from my contract. He said that I had complained too much about my editor's rewriting my characters and the staff had lost their generosity toward me. They insisted they were only trying to "help" my book.
Lawrence included these lines in the email that he said was a precursor to the termination of contract: "The antagonist, StJohn, is not believable . . . Additionally, many of the hacks he performs would require an incredibly high level of technical knowledge and skill that seem very out of character."
He obviously arrived at an about face, and I believe he had Greg's help in that. Also, a publisher writing a negative review about a character in an email that promised a termination letter, seven months after the book's acceptance, seems unaccountably strange--especially since the publisher had read the book before and claimed to like that character.
I believe Greg hacked Lawrence, just as he has hacked so many other publishers, and so the latter was forced to adjust his feelings and attitudes about that character. He must've figured Greg was reviewing our emails, and he wanted Greg to leave him alone.
The one commonality hacked people share is that they say very strange things in their rubber-legged, shaky-fingered panic.
He has some kind words, but since he told me he'd read the book before, the suggestion that this was his first shot at it was disingenuous--seven months after he accepted my book.
