Literary Fiction Classes

Workshops

2011-12-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

"Without the Blacketter treatment I never would have gotten into the Iowa Writers' Workshop." --former student Jordan Glubka

Fiction Workshop, Winter 2012

Portland Community College, Climb Center, downtown

Tuesdays, 6:00-9:00

High-Risk Fiction: A Writing Workshop

This class encourages fiction that, like all good writing, takes emotional risks. This riskiness sets literature apart from the dishonesty of bad books, TV, and movies. Workshop is not confession, but in the privacy of their writing rooms students might begin to tell personal stories that perhaps they have only told about other people. "Tell everything on yourself," Raymond Carver urged. Virginia Woolf would have agreed: "If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people." Yet we will never assume anything in a story actually happened to the writer. Rigorous storytelling, of course, evolves into fiction, blurring and even obliterating its source material. We will read published stories as models. Amy Hempel writes of a woman who abandons a close friend dying of cancer, and confronts the aftermath of her choice. Thom Jones explores one soldier’s psychological territory of war, aggression, and epileptic torment, in which “illness” provokes dark illuminations of self and humanity. The good news is, the truth redeems, no matter the damage… * * *

Ryan also edits and critiques novel and story manuscripts.

You may contact him at

ryanblacketter at hotmail.com

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“Because how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” --Annie Dillard

Recommendations

2009-04-09T12:00:00.003-07:00

“Ryan is committed to the writing life… The evidence of his hard work is found in his precise, musical sentences.” --Frank Conroy
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"[Ryan Blacketter] has a marvelous eye for the emotional textures of the most commonplace experience, the kind that familiarity makes almost subliminal." --Marilynne Robinson

“Ryan’s writing is excellent. He writes about real people in real circumstances, often facing tough moral decisions. There is a depth of feeling and understanding in his work that one seldom sees in the work of young writers. Ryan is willing to reach beyond himself and his own experience, treating his characters with compassion and respect.” --Chris Offutt

Student Quotes

(altered for grammar and spelling only)

"Without the Blacketter treatment I never would have gotten into the Iowa Writers' Workshop." --Jordan Glubka (Eugene, Oregon)

"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)

"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 (Portland, Oregon, & 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 working knowledge of the craft of writing that is far superior to that of anyone I have had as an instructor. His ability to find examples of good writing in student stories and to pinpoint what needs work is most helpful.” --Susan Whipple (Boise)

Biography

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Ryan Blacketter’s short stories are published or forthcoming in The Antioch Review, Image, Crab Orchard Review, Quick Fiction, Alaska Quarterly Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Other Voices. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is a recipient of a Haystack Writing Award and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. He has received a literary grant from Oregon Regional Arts and a prison teaching grant from Idaho Humanities Council. His novel-in-stories, Horses All Over Hell, was a finalist for the 2006 Bakeless Prize in Fiction and a runner-up for the 2008 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction. Ryan has taught creative writing at University of Iowa, Boise State University, Lane Community College, Portland Community College, and University of Oregon. He was a 2009-2010 Writer-in-Residence for Portland's Writers in the Schools Program. He teaches composition and introductory literature at OSU and is finishing his second book, a novel.

Ryan has taught ESL in Greece and Spain, sorted salmon in Alaska canneries, waited tables in Boston, stocked shelves at neighborhood groceries in Brooklyn and San Francisco, taught fiction workshops to prison inmates, picked beets off conveyor belts, and worked many other part-time jobs.

Encouragement and Advice

2008-12-07T11:06:00.015-07:00

"Talent is nothing other than patience. Work." --Flaubert

"Be patient!" --Kafka

"A desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."--Tacitus

"It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs." --Gerald Brenan

"Be obscure clearly." --E.B. White

"Every writer I know has trouble writing." --Joseph Heller

"For we have been there in the books and out of the books--and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practiced the arts."--Ernest Hemingway

"Although there are an astonishing number of aspiring writers who seem to be uninterested in other people's books, you simply cannot be a good writer unless you are also a good reader."
--Judith Barrington

"Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." --Mark Twain

"It's no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face." --Sherwood Anderson

Classes Taught

2007-02-02T11:49:00.010-07:00

High-Risk Fiction: A Writers' Workshop, Portland Community College, Continuing Education, 2009-2010

New Fiction: A Writers' Workshop, PDX University of Oregon, Continuing Education, White Stag Block, Portland, Oregon, 2009

Intro. to MFA in Creative Writing: A Fiction Workshop, Lane Community College, Extended Studies, Eugene, Oregon, 2008

Annie Proulx: Seminar and Workshop, Lane Community College, Extended Studies, 2008

The Writing Life, University of Oregon, Continuing Education, Eugene, Oregon, 2008

Fiction Workshop, Lane Community College, Extended Studies, 2008

Fiction Workshop, Boise State University, Hemingway Center, 2007

Flannery O’Connor: A Writers’ Workshop, Hemingway Center, Boise State University, 2007

Raymond Carver: A Writers' Workshop, The Cabin, Boise, Idaho, 2007

Chekhov's Characters: A Writers' Workshop, The Cabin, Boise, Idaho, 2007

The Writing Life: Flannery O'Connor, John Gardner, Annie Dillard, Boise, Idaho, 2006

Young Men in Deep Woods: Pancake, Ford, Stegner, North Idaho Correctional Institute, Cottonwood, Idaho, 2006. Funded by Idaho Humanities Council

Hemingway: A Writers’ Workshop, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, 2006

High-Risk Fiction: A Writers’ Workshop, The Cabin, 2006

Literary Spiritual Fiction: A Writers’ Workshop, The Cabin, 2005

Creative Writing Studio, fiction workshop, University of Iowa, 2003-2004

Freshman Composition/Rhetoric 1, English Department, University of Iowa, 2002-2003

Fiction Workshop, Multnomah Art Center, Portland, Oregon, 2001

Past Course Descriptions

2007-02-01T11:24:00.011-07:00

The Writing Life: A Fiction Workshop

In this class we’ll examine the writing life from the perspectives of five writers—Ernest Hemingway, Annie Dillard, Francine Prose, John Gardner, and Anne Lammott. They all seem to agree: Although the writing life is risky and impossibly difficult, it is nevertheless exciting and always worth the effort. Apart from discussing these authors’ books—A Moveable Feast, The Writing Life, Reading Like A Writer, On Becoming a Novelist, and Bird by Bird—we’ll commit to a daily habit of reading and writing.

Chekhov’s Characters: A Writing Workshop

In this class we will study ten of Chekhov’s short stories. Each story offers multiple lessons toward mastery of craft. We’ll devote most of our time to studying his character portraits. Chekhov presents an astonishing variety of people in his fiction, surprising us again and again with complex, often contradictory human truths.

"The Teacher of Literature" treats a man who constantly tells his friends and family of his own happiness, and discovers that beneath his surface he is quite a different person. In "The Petchenyeg," however, we meet a truly miserable man with a distorted vision who believes any happy person must be pretending. No question is settled for Chekhov. He is more interested in the myriad ways we deceive ourselves than in any fixed truth. Perhaps for Chekhov truth is simply the careful observation of human beings.

High-Risk Fiction: A Writing Workshop
This class encourages fiction that, like all good writing, takes emotional risks. This riskiness sets literature apart from the dishonesty of bad books, TV, and movies. Workshop is not confession, but in the privacy of their writing rooms students might begin to tell personal stories that perhaps they have only told about other people. "Tell everything on yourself," Raymond Carver urged. Virginia Woolf would have agreed: "If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people." Yet we will never assume anything in a story actually happened to the writer. Rigorous storytelling, of course, evolves into fiction, blurring and even obliterating its source material.

We will read published stories as models. Amy Hempel writes of a woman who abandons a close friend dying of cancer, and confronts the aftermath of her choice. Thom Jones explores one soldier’s psychological territory of war, aggression, and epileptic torment, in which “illness” provokes dark illuminations of self and humanity. The good news is, the truth redeems, no matter the damage…

Spiritual Literary Fiction Seminar

Rather than “inspirational” writing, we will focus on the oblique, the ambiguous, the troubled and troubling, staying close to the dark story of the human heart. We’ll read the stories as writers, keeping an eye out for what the authors are doing in terms of craft. Contemporary authors who might appear under the “literary spiritual” heading include John Updike, Andre Dubus, John Irving, Annie Dillard, Mark Helprin, Erin McGraw, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Marilynne Robinson, and Flannery O’Connor. Discussion might dwell on the mystery of creating divine mysteries on the page...
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Hemingway: A Writing Workshop
In this class, we will read the short stories of Ernest Hemingway as writers, applying his mastery of craft to our own fiction. Hemingway is still the most influential writer of our time. His literary principles are universal. He was no minimalist, nor a mere innovator of style. Writers around the world claim him as their greatest teacher, including such disparate talents as Albert Camus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Frederick Barthelme, and John Updike. To read Hemingway well is an experience of profound enrichment. He rendered human experience with such intensity and truth, creative writers will always search his prose for secrets.

While discouraging Hemingway imitations, this class will examine concepts that writers of all tastes can use to improve their work. We’ll discuss sensory detail, compression, density of meaning, musical language, coiled dialogue, and the iceberg principle. We’ll devote the second half of class to workshopping our own stories.

As time permits, we will correct an assortment of distortions about Hemingway. Where it matters most—in his work—Hemingway demonstrates enormous compassion and deeply humanistic values. At heart a traditionalist, he nevertheless embraced values that today we might call multiculturalism and feminism…

Raymond Carver: A Writing Workshop

In this class we will study the short stories of Raymond Carver. Called "the American Chekhov" by the New York Times, Carver wrote about the common people of the West—waitresses, salesmen, loggers, and, especially, the out of work. His characters are often haunted by their own failings. But they would sooner drink or change the subject than own up. They blame others, tell lies, inflict subtle cruelties, and fail to love. Although tempted to judge them and find less honest reading, we keep turning pages for, of course, we are reading about ourselves.

Carver achieved the highest level of emotional power, spiritual force, and artistic excellence in his short fiction, each line rewarding the careful reader with its precision and depth. Thus he became the most influential author of the late twentieth century, inspiring a generation of writers, including Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel, and Tobias Wolff.

A River Runs through it: A Writing Workshop

It’s never too late to start writing. Nobody demonstrates this fact better than the author of celebrated novella A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean, who didn’t begin to write fiction until he was seventy years old. Maclean enjoyed telling his family stories about his days growing up in Montana. Urged by his children, he decided to weave his stories into a narrative, and in three years produced one of America’s great books.

The narrator of this novella tells us, “I am haunted by waters.” Most of us are haunted by the landscapes and people of our early years. Maclean shows us what we can do when we commit to the daily effort the craft requires.

For the first half of each class we will discuss A River Runs Through It. We will devote the second half of each class to workshopping a rough first chapter of our own. Each student will submit one ten-page chapter. As we mine our own histories for material, we will explore strategies for summoning distant experiences and bringing them to vivid and sensory life on the page. Writers at all stages of artistic development are welcome.

FREESTYLE FICTION GROUP
In Freestyle Fiction Group, writers are encouraged to develop their own styles. Although many instructors teach narrow schools of writing, your style is your own business. Literature is not a group project but a deeply personal expression of the individual author. As Nabokov observed, "There is only one school of literature—that of talent." And all that talent requires is daily commitment. Whether you write like Raymond Carver or Virginia Woolf--like J.L. Borges, ZZ Packer, or Louis-Ferdinand Celine--we will guide you toward excellence by focusing on universal literary principles.

We will discuss stories line by line, exploring the essentials of literary craft, including voice, tension, character, description, dialogue, and narrative arc. Since advice is craft-based and more or less objective, writers can immediately put these concepts to work in their fiction.

This class supports writers at all stages of artistic development. We are honest and rigorous in our advice, yet respectful and constructive.

Decide now to work toward publishing a story in a respected journal, or to resume work on your novel.

Freestyle Fiction Group is…
Diverse. We have no aesthetic agenda, no favored style. Our one concern is with the enduring principles of storytelling.

Bookish. Serious writers are in thrall to literature. We’ll discuss ways to foster a daily commitment to reading as well as to writing.

Innovative. Although writers learn from great authors, we nevertheless struggle to find new forms of literary expression. As Ezra Pound urged, "Make it new."

Intense, honest, churlish, and a lot of fun. A good writing group might be the last public forum where people can tell the truth without consequence.

Affordable. Most writers are struggling and cannot afford to pay for overpriced classes at highly profitable writing groups and centers.

Inspiring. Discover why the writing life is always worth the effort.

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"I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." --Saul Bellow, from The Adventures of Augie March