"If you want someone to tell you how good your writing is, have your mom read your work. If you want to learn how to make your writing better, I can't recommend Ryan Blacketter enough. Ryan has a keen ear for language and an excellent feel for a work's narrative flow. He will challenge you to become a better, more conscious writer." --Brian Peters (Princeton, New Jersey, & author of To Wander the Labyrinth)
"I go to Ryan when I want a tough critique that will get to the heart of what a story is, what it does, and what it can--and must--do." --Adam Farley ("tree lover" at Countryside Nursery and former editor of MARY)
"Ryan is one of the best, most effective, and enjoyable teachers I've ever had - THE best in my writing/literary experience. He has a way of teaching that is at once challenging, supportive, patient, humorous, refreshingly honest and straightforward, and extraordinarily concentrated and condensed. His teaching hits you with a one-two; it's packed with information that expands and stretches you in new directions and is absolutely fun as hell." --Kimberly Warren (Eugene, Oregon)
"I have taken many writing courses and Ryan's is the best, hands down. His intensity, passion and dedication to his craft are tremendously inspiring. Work with him and you will never view the art of literary fiction the same way. Survive his workshop and you will have gained many of the tools you need to thrive as a writer. The rest is up to you." --Lawrence Birch (Eugene, Oregon)
"Ryan has a magical ability to teach--and he repeats it until you get it, and knows when to move on. He believes everything in a piece of writing must link together. That's where the meaning is--in unity. Find the meaning beneath the surface, and get all the connections right. Let the reader see it." --Rebecca Evans (Boise, Idaho)
PEN America Recommendations. Ryan serves as fiction mentor to prisoners via PEN's online system
In 2013, I received the flattering offer to teach Advanced Fiction at an Idaho university after my first book, Down in the River, appeared. My boss was a great writer I'd read before, and I made two friends in the department. I'd taught creative writing elsewhere, but now I was teaching seniors. It seemed like a positive jump.
Half of my students were enthusiastic about my class. But it was a religious-influenced public college and parents, especially the mothers, were heavily involved on campus.
The other half of my class disliked the (non-explicit) sexual content of two of the stories I presented on Blackboard--by Alice Munro and Chris Offutt. Two of them took up the curious activity of yelling in class, not at me, but just yelling their discontent.
Some also suffered in my intense workshops for this advanced class. My model was the Iowa Writers Workshop--extremely frank in terms of craft. I had received difficult workshops as a grad student, and felt they were some of the best experiences I'd had as a writer. Nothing was handed to you in a care package. You were able to see what worked--especially what didn't work, and why. That said, after this advanced workshop, I moved on to other teaching roles and discovered the value of kind workshops, though occasionally I still find the stray serious student who prefers the Iowa method.
When half the class didn't like my teaching style, I assumed a defensive posture of snobbery, holding to literary standards and ripping stories that were overtly religious or gratuitously conventional.
Nervous before the unhappy students, I gave grumpy workshops, not personal, but frankly negative regarding craft. I had a habit of shutting my eyes too long when I talked: weird.
In addition, in the red state of Idaho, it was hard to find a med-check doctor for the lithium I needed. I soured in my intermittent treatment. One doctor believed I was a "drug seeker" when I landed in the emergency room for medication.
During class I made light of my emergency room visit and revealed my diagnosis--a confession that was welcome in a Portland creative writing classroom at that time, but not here. Boise was a gorgeous city with many writers, but its pockets of social conservatism were deep, even among Democrats. I was unaffiliated, an inscrutable type in the margins of the culture wars. In addition, this was also the start of what became a ten-year hacking campaign that a Christian leader and former associate had commenced after I refused to do what he wanted me to--the subject, in part, of "The Lord's Hacker"--and I hadn't yet made a psychological adjustment to living with a hacker.
Soon a mother or two waited outside my classroom to meet their children--college seniors--after each class. I met with a dean about a student whose constant yelling disrupted the class. He believed it was better for the student to leave the class and finish the coursework one-on-one with a different adjunct. Then a professor called me. He said he wasn't going to have some adjunct kick out a student he had worked with, but the student remained outside of the class.
A second dean at the Idaho university emailed me and wanted to bring several members of the Care Team to observe my class, and I, foolishly, swore at him on email and referred to some of the students as "drama brats," and he fired me.
In the end, the student newspaper published an article explaining that I was fired “with a life-time ban." The author, a student of mine who was the managing editor at the student newspaper, noted good things about my teaching and interviewed students who liked me, but that lifetime ban, in the first line, was a hit job--a fabrication that seemed two-thirds mental health freakout and one-third sexual prurience in this conservative environment. He also used the same photo that Boise Weekly used for my interview "Enter the Mausoleum," concerning my novel about a grave robbery--the photo is a bit stern.
The chair was quoted in the newspaper stating they couldn't discuss my firing for legal reasons, but the dean had already placed my termination letter on his university site, as if they wanted to suggest to the public that it was bad, to justify my firing, while communicating to students and parents to rest easy, that nothing serious had happened.
A year later, the new student manager at the newspaper, Patty Bowen, retracted the "lifetime ban" language and stated in an email, and on the site, that there was no such ban. There remains an aggregated copy of the original article. It seemed to disappear from the internet six years ago, but recently it has returned as if plucked from oblivion and placed in my high Google pages.
At any rate, I was pleased to find Patty, a journalist who was willing to locate the facts. Before getting back to me, she wanted to look into it and make sure that nothing shocking had happened when I taught there. She works at Meridian Press now.
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