"Ryan has a marvelous eye for the emotional textures of the most commonplace experience, the kind that familiarity makes almost subliminal."
--Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping
In J.T. Bushnell's Poets & Writers article "The Thousand Pages," he reflects on something Ryan said years ago: that he threw away a thousand pages of his first book, Down in the River, before he was done.
This review appears in Canada's Miramichi Reader. Drew Lavigne is Poet Laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick, and serves on the editorial board at The Fiddlehead.
"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. An excellent and moving collection.
". . . Joanna’s friendship with an Indigenous woman named Lucy sparks rumors about 'perversion' among their town’s religious crowd."
--Kirkus Reviews on Horses All Over Hell, 2023
“Horses All Over Hell is a heartbreaking new book from a master of modern American fiction.” —Ernest Hilbert, author of Last One Out, book critic for Wall Street Journal. Dust jacket blurb.
“Drinks With” is an interview series started in 2009 by Skip and Timshel Matheny, currently songwriters in the band Roman Candle.
"Paste: I know a lot of details went into the inspiration and writing of this novel—your own history in Eugene at age 16, your friend who actually broke into a mausoleum, your research and reading about manic behavior and it’s connection to art. Can you talk about how some of these things influenced your writing?"
"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."
--Fiction Writers Review on Down in the River
“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 on Down in the River
“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
Author of Down in the River (2013) and Horses All Over Hell (2019), Ryan has a GED and an Iowa MFA. He mentored writers in PEN America's Justice Writing Program for ten years until 2025. He has taught creative writing at University of Iowa as a graduate student, introduction to literature at Oregon State, and advanced fiction writing for seniors at Boise State. He stood before a judge twice as a young teenager, and worked in Alaska canneries for three seasons as an undergraduate.
Ryan was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee, and led discussions of A Farewell to Arms for NEA's Big Read in Boise. He has received grants from Oregon Regional Arts and the Idaho Humanities Council. His stories appear in Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly, Crab Orchard, Image,
and Quick Fiction. His novel KARMINA was a finalist for the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.
Since he was nervous in front of large classes, he was surprised to find that he was a popular teacher at OSU.The students, most from Eastern Oregon, were more alert and independent than he'd seen at other colleges.
Inquiries should be sent to colorwheel22 (at) icloud.com, or 458-234-3541.
When I wrote for the Observer, they allowed my contradictory, anti-MAGA, anti-PC essays that were mostly about writers.
Milo Essay in the Observer
“I support anyone's right to speak and publish. But my own feeling is that Milo was often thin stuff—he was one-dimensional, neglecting to locate any other personality trait that might mitigate his constant judgments about people on the left . . . His rhetoric was absent goodwill that might truly persuade, and therefore he lacked complexity and depth on the stage. In short, too much stupidity issued from his pretty mouth.”
Hemingway Essay
"Though I have my own reservations about the macho, photo-op persona he embraced in middle-age—machine gunning sharks, swilling from a bottle, grinning next to a conquered marlin or lion—the younger Hemingway, in his early twenties, had a kid-like vitality and art-loving exuberance that were enormously appealing."
Holden Caulfield Essay
"Holden is the best sort of rebel, to my mind—a quiet individualist. Though angst-ridden and critical of the culture, he’s intelligent, good-natured, and kind. He seeks out kindreds who see the world according to a singular vision, despite the influences of parents and teachers forever driving home the accepted program."
Polemical Literature Essay
"In the 1990s the exciting ethnic boom in literature began, introducing Americans to talents such as Juno Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Ha Jin. Soon, however, the increasing diversity of voices often seemed less authentic than the crowd that created the buzz. Young writers across America were transforming themselves into sellable models of culture.
"In 2006 Poets and Writers published 'The Pressure to be Exotic,' by Azita Oslanoo, who grew up in Montana and liked it there.
“'As a first-generation American, the daughter of Iranian parents, I’ve been advised by peers, professors, two agents, and one editor to cash in on the latest book in Middle Eastern literature, particularly in memoir-driven literature…The problem is that I can’t in the least imagine the book I’d have to pen…Would it have lots of italicized foreign words interspersed throughout the prose? Would I open with a passage on veiled women and Persian rugs?'”
Quillette Essay
I taught at two colleges back to back, one conservative and one progressive, and found both administrations hit hard against alternative thinkers, as if punitive PC was alive and well on both sides.
"It was as though church moms were everywhere, tidying up, dumping unclean books and magazines, and wiping all the windows that looked onto God’s blue sky."
Rumpus Essay
Albums of Our Lives: Alien Lanes
"I discovered Guided by Voices fifteen years ago, while miserably married and fully employed, teaching ESL in Atlanta. In those days, I was earning money for curtains, towels, and bedspreads. Instead of working full-time as a writer slash part-time anything, I woke at 3:30 a.m. to write before work. After my job I went to my counseling appointment—for my attitude and my drinking."
Two of Ryan's Classes
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."
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 insight and understanding of life.
Hemingway: A Writing Workshop 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 talents as Albert Camus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Frederick Barthelme, and John Updike.
We’ll discuss sensory detail, compression, density of meaning, musical language, coiled dialogue, and the iceberg principle.
Creative Writing Tutoring,
Online and Telephone, through Blacketter Services
$40 per hour. Two-hour class, meeting once a week or twice a month.
"Without the Blacketter treatment I never would have gotten into the Iowa Writers' Workshop."
This post received about 1200 visits in its first ten days. That's no indication of how many readers there are, but it seemed like a good sign.
I have sent this book to only one publisher, who accepted it and mysteriously returned it, in case you're wondering why I present it here. I believe I'd get more readers by offering it for free, and maybe pick up some more interest in my books that way. Right now I'm shopping other books to publishers.
For now, anyone can read "The Lord's Hacker." Please read it here, paste the full manuscript onto your computer or Kindle, or give it to others. Print it out if you like. When you're done with it, drop it from your window page by page, or keep it in a drawer for your mom. It's your book.
"Ryan has a marvelous eye for the
emotional textures of the most commonplace experience, the kind that
familiarity makes almost subliminal." --Marilynne Robinson, author
of Housekeeping
“Ryan Blacketter’s writing is often humorous
and melancholy in the same breath.” –Mary Owen, daughter of Donna Reed
“[Ryan’s] characters
are interesting and real.”--Robert
Pollard of Guided by Voices
"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."
--Kirkus Review on Horses
All Over Hell
Author of Down in the River and Horses All Over Hell, Ryan is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His books have been explored in Poets & Writers, Kirkus Review, Fiction Writers Review, Paste Magazine, the Rumpus, Largehearted Boy, Pittsburgh City Paper, Canada’s Miramichi Reader, and Rain Taxi Review of Books. He served as fiction mentor through PEN America’s Writing and Justice Program for ten years.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever
pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
I have published reviews about writers and bands in magazines. Most of the following pieces are tiny, less formal items that are a good fit right here.
Recently I pitched a magazine with three articles. They green-lighted a story about my experience at a natural foods grocery over many years. It's a quiet piece so far. We'll see if they take it.
The Unusual Structure of Housekeeping
A smart colleague of mine, who has published many book reviews in national magazines, told me that Housekeeping is a bad book. "There's no structure," he said. Though I knew he was wrong, I figured I understood what he was getting at. The book's arc shoots up in the beginning, then creeps along near the bottom for many chapters, violating the steady assent, climax, and denouement that we have learned about in creative writing classes.
But regarding the rules of craft, we say Generally, but not always.
Near the beginning, after the mother drops off the girls at their grandmother's house in Fingerbone, Idaho, she sails her car off a plateau and into the lake to her death. By this time, we have already witnessed the girls' grandfather die when a train he works on slides into the lake.
Robinson sets up her cataclysms in the beginning for a reason. Much of the book explores Ruth's inward concussions after losing her mother. There are concerns about who is going to care for the girls. And there's not a lot of talking about it, nor a lot of drama, for the most part.
We gather Ruth's emotional state through description. The floods suggest a gathering upward of the inner self during great stress, as if everything below was rising for the first time. The lake hints at all that is concealed or buried. Ruth processes the loss privately, so the metaphors reflect her quiet state with psychological precision.
“I think it must have been my mother’s plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.”
Soon Ruth's aunt Sylvie arrives to take care of her and her sister, and the book remains quiet but enthralling. She's a hobo accustomed to riding the rails, but displays an easy-going grace and affection. At one point, when the house is flooded and Ruth is concerned, Sylvie grabs Ruth and they waltz in the kitchen, water to their waists.
But Sylvie is mildly off. She likes the kids, but she has lived as a bum for years, perhaps due to a minor mental illness or some other oddness. Once, not knowing the girls are watching her, she creeps onto train bridge too far, potentially risking her life and the position of the girls.
Another day, they find her in a public park with a newspaper draped over her face--an embarrassing image for the adolescents to confront.
People are starting to talk in Fingerbone. It's the 1950s, and there is public concern that maybe Sylvie isn't the best choice to take care of Ruth and her sister. A new, subtle arc begins to rise, about midway through the book.
I know how a traditional structure in this book would look. Have the mother kill herself in chapter three. Then Sylvie rolls in at chapter five for eccentric triage. Get the town worked up about her unconventional nature. The train wreck needs to happen near the end. And Ruth makes a choice between Sylvie and the town.
I'd prefer to follow the characters and their transformative march through this gorgeous and meaningful landscape, exactly as is. The book works, it more than works--it's one of the best. The language alone intoxicates any reader who's paying attention.
“We walked north, with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.”
This popular classic doesn't need my defense. I heard about one reader who kicked off a chunk of the real train bridge in Sandpoint, Idaho, and carried it around, as if he possessed a piece of the True Cross.
The miracles of Housekeeping
are no accident. It's as if Robinson chose to write a novel exactly her way, as if eschewing all models, like someone walking into the Idaho wilderness, and drawing her own map as she went along.
The Rebel
Camus inspires me to no end in his books and private life. His willingness to hold contradictory opinions has always fascinated me. When Camus criticized American capitalism and dictatorial Soviet tactics, the French literary world swerved away from him. It was fine to criticize America, but unthinkable to rebuke communism--an ideology that many believed would save the world.
Jean-Paul Sarte called Camus "the little crook from Algiers," and rained down hell onto Camus' good name at every chance.
But Camus understood that Soviet detentions of dissident writers, and the relentless beatings and executions, were not trustworthy behaviors of a nation that was supposed to offer an example of justice. And he said so, at a considerable cost, losing friendships, readers, and position in French society.
He felt crushed and ruined, but he never backpedaled his position. I believe the ghost of Isaac Babel, the Russian Jewish writer who was executed as a "terrorist," would thank Camus, and so would thousands of others who were imprisoned or murdered for no good reason.
Marilynne Robinson My advisor at Iowa was Marilynne Robinson. A Calvinist, an anti-nuclear crusader, Marilynne often gave guest sermons at her church near downtown in Iowa City.
She's intimidating, but kind in conversation. She helped me a lot on my book Horses All Over Hell. She wasn't one for line-by-line craft discussion, but a single sentence from her could open up your view in a startling, book-changing manner.
She was solitary and always walked the river alone. This mood gave some people the feeling that they weren't invited to speak to her, but her sudden warmth and wit, when you did speak to her, made you understand her inwardness wasn't personal. She allowed brief windows of contact, and I knew I wouldn't forget those discussions.
It's clear the world won't forget about her, though I don't believe she's trying for immortality as a writer. She has too much reading and inquiry in other subjects to think much about herself.
Giovanni's Room David has lived on the edges of ahomosexual 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 stressed when I read such a line of psychological
learnedness, as if I have to learn this news immediately. 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.
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 also 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. 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. She had modeled for Italian Vogue. 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.
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 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.
Rain Taxi Interview
Interview with Ryan, "His Own Private Idaho," inRain 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.
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 wasgood-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 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.
Later in the 90s, after we moved to Eugene, my brother was a compelling influence. Once he took acid and climbed a tree on campus at night. He called to passersby below and had wild conversations with strangers. One of his favorite books was The Baron in the Trees. He might have seemed like any other hipster, but he had a singular, experimental imagination and jovial intensity, and was a great reader.
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 LyleRettew, 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.
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:
The Rumpus: "[Down in the River] casts us deep into a haunting, crystalline forest of ice-lit trees, broken streetlamps . . . a place where a kind of inner wilderness has crept back through the city, where the lights of passing trains, the reflections of windows and the 'cry of night birds' appear intermittently like forms of meaningless chaos or secret signs." https://therumpus.net/2014/11/down-in-the-river-by-ryan-blacketter/
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."
"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
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.
"THEY WORK AT NIGHT," published in Antioch Review in 2011, and in Horses All Over Hell in 2019.
The ceiling vent rattled and cold air sprayed his shoulders.
“Why did Uncle Jerud sleep under the kitchen table last night?” Matt said.
Their mom held her cup for warmth, breathing steam. She told Lucy that her brother in law got a job selling insurance, and that he and Marty dressed up like cowboys and spied on their clients at the bars. “He’s not even trying to come up with good lies anymore,” she said.
“But they’re not lying,” Cory said. “They really are working undercover.”
Lucy stood and tossed a dollar on the table. “I have to pick up my boy at the movies. Stop by my place sometime.”
“They’re not lying,” Cory said.
His mom watched her cross the floor and slouch to her truck at the curb right outside. They smiled at each other, waving, as she drove away.
“Mom, she’s a janitor,” Cory said.
“Yes. Some places need cleaning up.”
“I want to go to sleep.” He glanced at where the sky would be. Long tubes of light reflected in the glass. “We have practice in the morning.”
They clicked shut the seat belts, and she tapped the breaks before their driveway. The porch bulb fanned a bright light on the front door. The two big windows presented black rooms. Cory disliked the outside light flaring while the inside lights were off.
Inside, she helped Matt get ready in the bathroom before tucking him in. Later the house began to creak. Cory knew that Matt didn’t like the creaking.
He trotted into Cory’s bedroom. “There’s a devil in my window,” he whispered. Cory flapped the sheet back and his brother dove in facing away and pulled his knees to his chest, folding up small against the bad things. Cory fit his arm around him, careful not to bother his sleep breaths. He was nice to hold onto when the house was quiet, dark.
A breeze rustled his curtains of gun-shooting cowboys. A chain clinked on the pole out back.
At breakfast his mom accidentally set a plate at his father’s empty chair. She clattered the plate back into the cupboard, put a kettle on, and sat with the boys. She read a magazine, eating bacon. She’d have tea, then rest till late afternoon, reading, napping.
Cory squinted into the back window sunrise.
“Here they come,” he said. “Mom.”
She rolled up the magazine and squeezed it in a fist. Across the back fields, their shapes walked toward home—his father and his uncle, melting against the sun.
They stumbled through the kitchen door laughing so hard they were quiet. His father fell against the stove, knocking the kettle, and rested his elbow on the hot red coil. His shirt sent up a trail of smoke. He dipped his arm into a tub of dishwater. “You guys booby trap the place? Ouch. Damn.” He dropped to a squat. “Ha ha!”
Jerud lay on the floor, laughing. “Booby trap! You kill me!”
When their laughter died, they sighed and hooted, giggled in fits. Jerud had moved here two weeks before. At dinner one night he said he was a tank, made of the same stuff, and what he drank in the bars was fuel for the next day.
“How many days in a row can you keep this up?” she said, when their giggling had settled. His father touched his elbow where he’d burned it.
“Ask my boss here,” he said. “Not easy doing two jobs.”
“Did you catch anybody?” Matt said.
“Caught one,” Jerud said. “Fella claimed a neck injury. We got video of him riding the bull down at the bar.”
“Where’s your video camera?” she said.
Jerud sniffed. “In the car, downtown.”
“Dad, we have practice,” Cory said.
“I know it, buddy. I’ll be there.”
His father lit a cigarette and tipped over and slept. Smoke drifted out of his mouth. The church men had asked him to coach the team. They told him they all took turns.
When the cigarette rolled off his finger, Jerud picked it up.
“Mind if I sleep over?” Jerud said.
“I don’t crash into your house half wild.”
He tapped an ash into his own crew cut. “Well, if you did, I wouldn’t kick you out.”
“Your brother is passed out in front of his children,” she said.
“Aw, you don’t get my sense of humor. Marty’s the only one who gets me.”
“Why don’t you stay at your apartment?”
“It’s empty, it’s lonesome. I’m not too sure about this town anyway. I’m thinking about a move to Vegas.”
“You’re going to quit another job?”
“I hear you been running with that Indian gal,” he said.
“She’s my friend.”
“Yeah, I been hearing.”
She turned off the stove and swung her purse from the chair, went out the back door and threw the magazine flapping over the yard. “Boys, come here!” she said. Matt and Cory followed her out the side gate.
They circled neighborhoods in her car, once around the church, twice around the graveyard. Cory sat in back. In the front seat Matt pounded the plastic farmer against the dash and the head snapped off. He stuck the body in the glove box. Her fingers shook when she floated a hand to change gears.
“Can we say a prayer?” Matt said. He was trying to sound holy for her.
“We’ll go to mass tonight.”
“Mom,” Cory said, “where are we going?”
“Your dad promised me in college, he said no more whiskey—ever. Jerud knows Marty can’t handle liquor. I shouldn’t speak, but you boys know what’s going on. Kids know. I remember. Kids know what’s wrong.”
“I have practice,” Cory said.
“Mr. Larkin might have to coach again.”
“Dad said he’s going to.”
“Honey, did you see your dad just now?” She found him in the rearview. “Did you see him? Did you?”
“Nothing’s a matter. He said he would. He can sleep for two hours and then we’ll go. Practice isn’t till nine.”
“We’ll visit Lucy. She won’t mind.”
She turned onto the river road. Far down in the canyon, house shadows striped the water, and the shimmering parts were like scales. They glided past their house, where his father was sick inside—his mom didn’t even look at it—and she turned onto a dirt road before the high cliffs, the road looping up and into the Orchards. The ground flattened. Rows of trees flashed by in angles. Then came desert country, and they entered a canyon dark in shade, with green fields at its bottom.
“Lucy said the first gravel drive on the left,” his mom said. She found the drive, followed its curves, and parked in front of a double-wide trailer, painted in colorful diagonal stripes and black figures here and there, bear, tree, hammer, hand.
Next to the trailer were fenced horses, two staring at the ground while another stared at the visitors. When they got out, Matt offered grass to the horses, but they didn’t want any. A creek slipped behind the trailer. On the shore, next to a tree painted six feet in red, a refrigerator lay on its back.
Canyon walls crowded the sky. Cory tipped his head to see the line of sun.
Lucy came outside in her long brown coat. She wore slippers that weren’t pink anymore. Her hair was messy. Cory scowled around at broken things in the dirt, a tipped over barbecue, a rusted bike. His mom was looking at the figures painted on the trailer. “I love your house,” she said. Then, “My God, are you okay?”
Lucy smiled. “It’s pretty mild as far as black eyes go.”
“Do you ever get any sun around here?” Cory said.
“Not much. But you appreciate it when it comes.”
“I think I’d like having shade,” his mom said.
“Why’s the fridge outside?” he said.
Lucy laughed. “I had to sleep in it last night.”
“Why?”
“What are you, a little cop?” his mom said. “She doesn’t have to tell you anything.”
“I’ll tell him if he wants to know,” Lucy said. “You mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Well, my husband came to visit my son. He was sober and I let him stay on the couch. But he’s got a mouth on him.” She pointed at her eye. “He gave me this, but I hit him first. Not good, not good. First sober punch I ever threw. Anyway, I wasn’t going to sleep in the house, not with him in it, so I went out back to the broken fridge and chopped out the freezer shelf and dragged the fridge next to the creek. I got in, in my sleeping bag, and shut the fridge door. Kept the freezer door open and listened to the creek. All told, it wasn’t a bad night.”
Lucy opened her front door, laughing. She laughed at anything.
“Look at you all, hugging your elbows. Yes, this canyon keeps cold. Come on in. Jason’s out fishing with his dad.”
Inside, the house smelled like wet ground. Against the far wall a couch sat with no legs, and below the front window, where a TV should’ve been, a green-bulbed lamp without a shade rested on the floor. The woodstove leaked smoke halfway up the pipe, thin clouds drifting near the ceiling. There was nothing on the walls but a couple of paintings. One showed an animal skull next to a fence. He could barely see. In the dim light, the paintings became windows that looked out to desert. Down the hallway a dryer scraped, wheezing.
“Can we stay a while?” His mom’s voice trembled. “Marty and Jerud just got home.”
“You look wore out.” Lucy gave her a hug, sliding a hand on her back. As the dryer buzzed, Cory waved a hand through a smoke stream slanting down the air.
“Mom,” he said. “We have practice.”
“We’ll make it,” Lucy said. “I’m meeting Jason at the field. Why don’t you rest a while first?” She led them down the hall to her bedroom. “Let me throw a cover on this bed real quick. Okay, lay down. Don’t feel funny. There’s room for the three of you.”
They lay down and she came back with an armload of clothes and let the warm things tumble on top of them. “These are extra hot. I was redrying them to have warm things to wear. It’s all a bunch of sweatshirts and T’s. Don’t talk, be still. I’ll wake you up soon.” Lucy floated a blanket down, trapping the warmth of the clothes. Over the window the shade was pulled down. It was like night. “Mmm,” his mom said.
After a while, when Matt and his mom were asleep or lying there, he rolled off the bed and ran out to the living room. Lucy caught him by the arm.
“You have troubles I know all about,” she said. “Your dad’s a drinker, right?”
“No.”
He walked up the gravel drive and down the canyon road, stretching his fingers and making fists. In a field a horse jerked its head up and gazed with laughter in its eyes.
“Why don’t you look away,” Cory shouted at it.
Somebody whistled behind him. It was Lucy, standing in the road, a hand on her head. “Come on back!” When he thought she must’ve heard him yell at the horse, he ran away on weird legs.
The road left the canyon. He found a trail that cut through the fields, toward his house a couple of miles away.
They were only five minutes late for practice, but the boys looked bothered when they pulled up, all of them quiet as if they had been talking. “Hey, kids!” his father shouted from the window. He yelled it too loudly. Cory jogged over to the boys. “See this arm?” he said. “Worth ten million.” But they didn’t believe it.
His father walked to the diamond shouldering bats and hauling a ball bucket. He crashed the bats in the dirt. In jeans and no shirt he knelt on one knee, to plan the day, Cory guessed. His elbow was red, with a skin bubble on it, where he’d burned himself. He grunted to his feet and stumbled back one step. He laid a hand over his mouth. At home Cory had found him sitting on the couch with a plate of uneaten breakfast in his lap while Jerud laughed at a cartoon. Cory led him out of the house and opened the door of his truck.
Steam rose off the grass now. A dog chased a butterfly across the field.
“Think I have to sit down,” his father said.
“Already?” Jason said. “Aren’t you going to hit balls to us?”
“You boys run laps a while.”
The boys glanced at each other. A couple of them stepped back, away from his father. They ran laps while he sat cross-legged holding his face.
Across the field, Lucy sat on her coat reading a book, in a T-shirt that pinched her armpits, the mirrored sunglasses over her eyes. Cory’s mom and brother must still have been resting in her bed.
Jason ignored his mom when they jogged past her. After the second lap they stopped in the shade and paced, out of earshot of any adults, hands on their hips, catching their breaths. Teddy Larkin, who was big-jawed like his dad, said, “Worse coach ever.”
“He works two jobs,” Cory said. “All day at the prison, and then at night he’s a detective.”
“He’s a drunk,” Jason said.
“Look,” Teddy said. “He’s trying to stand up.”
“He’s rising from the deep.”
“Will he do it, ladies and gentlemen? Will he stand up?”
Jason applauded. “He’s done it again. He got up.”
The boys clapped, all but Cory. At the backstop, his father stood with a bat on his shoulder. They found their mitts and kicked up dirt heading to center.
His father swung and missed in the haze. He knelt, stood, and he swung and swung, staggering around. More dust rose into the air. Hit it, hit it, and Cory finally heard the crack. They all shoved together, gloves high. Jason fired the ball back and punched his glove like he wanted another. They spread out. Cory quickly tugged the front of his shirt. Then when his father cracked a bad grounder a boy chased the ball into the street. A car slowed fast, bouncing to a stop with a shriek of tires.
“This is dumb,” Jason said. “Why’s he even coaching? We have a game next week.”
When he finally popped another one, nobody ran for it. Sun rays filled the curtain of dust, and his father swayed with a hand against the glare, as if he had lost them.
Lucy jogged over to him. They talked for a minute before she touched his shoulder and he sat in the shade. Lucy took over, hitting mostly grounders, and swinging and missing some. Cory was glad she wasn’t much better.
Although his father was ready for a night off, he went out that night and the next and every weeknight, too, and Cory and his brother and mom went to church.
On Friday night, instead of going to mass, they met Lucy at the fair. His mom and Lucy and Matt walked together while he kept far behind. They were like girlfriends in a movie, clutching each other’s arm, pointing, one of them running ahead. Matt held Lucy’s hand. She flipped a coin into a jar and won their mom a fat stuffed horse. The three of them rode the Tilt-a-Whirl. Flashing bulbs showed their laughing faces. After the ride Cory’s mom wanted him to stay close to them, but he kept running off, losing himself in all the people.
In the morning, the boys were tossing a ball in the backyard when Jerud stepped out the kitchen door. Her music shook the windows, a rock song called Jesus Take Me Home. Clouds slid across the sky and the day flickered bright and dark. In the night the wind had shifted their yard to a new mess—trash buckets and lawn chairs, tarps and cans and plastic jugs, all scattered around.
“She won’t mind me playing her CD,” Jerud said. “I’m trying to wake up your dad for the game. That boy’s out cold this time.” He sucked a breath and panted a little, coughed. “I had too many smokes last night.”
“Will you help warm up my arm?” Cory said. “Matt can’t take hard throws.”
An upstairs window slid open. His mom clutched her robe together at the neck. “Turn that off! I got two hours of sleep last night. Stay here one more time and you’ll find a bucket of water on your head.”
“You’re not baptizing me,” Jerud said.
He leaned a hand on the shed, above a plate of rusty nails and screwdrivers in the grass. His mom walked through the kitchen. The stereo went quiet, and a neighbor lady laughed—her kids were leaping a sprinkler—and Cory picked up a few twigs wet-eyed and tossed them to the ground.
“Is he going to coach my game?”
“I wouldn’t lay money on him,” he said. “Let me tell you boys a story.”
“My game’s clear down in Kirby.”
Jerud squatted. His knees popped. He sucked at a cigarette with no filter.
“Me and your dad and the cattle dogs. I’ll tell you this because we were the same ages you boys are. That makes you old enough to hear.
“Our dad liked his herding dogs, but our mom hated them, and she wanted everything her way. Always laying in bed reading crazy religious shit. You know what I’m talking about.”
Cory glanced at his mom’s window.
“Dogs were everywhere. They thought they owned the place. One time one of the dogs got hold of Momma’s sleeve—on the road, in front of neighbors—and the next day she had a chore for us,” Jerud said. “She gave us a rifle and we boys went in the barn where she put a few unruly dogs. I did the deed first. Then your dad chased a dog, gun in hand, while I faced the big shut doors, us taking turns like that. They were slinking around close to the walls, whining. A couple of them were just puppies, but old enough to know it was time.”
Wind hissed in the trees and Matt’s hair came alive. “You shot them?” he said. Cory knelt and stabbed a screwdriver at the ground, concentrating on the slow, careful plunges.
“I want Mom,” Matt said.
“It was quite a time. Our mom speaking tongues like a preacher afire. That how you boys feel, about your mother?”
Cory looked at their bedroom window, reflecting sky. Jerud shouldn’t talk about his mom.
“I don’t know why your dad lets his wife run with that Lucy. Men in town are laughing at him. I wouldn’t stand for it.”
He picked tobacco off his tongue, looking at the fields. Weeds rolled like dogs running unseen.
“We have to be there,” Cory said. “In Kirby.”
“Don’t know what to tell you. Your dad’s in his hole.”
“Will you help us?”
“What’s your mother doing up there—surfing the Galilee? Why the hell do some women need so much rest?”
“She yells in her sleep at night,” Cory said, “and that makes her tired.”
“They say we marry our mommas. Your dad sure did. She doesn’t even go to your games. Mine didn’t either.”
“Too much noise for her, too bright.”
“Guess somebody has to take care of you kids,” Jerud said. “All right. I’ll go find my car downtown. We’ll try and do a Lazarus on that boy inside.”
The Kirby team was out fielding balls. When their coach hit a pop fly, he tipped his head and hopped on one foot, and if the ball was caught, he made a fist at his shoulder and whispered yes. Across the road, in a park, a sprinkler went ch ch ch, as if trying to water the grass before it went up in flames. There was nothing down here but desert, not even a breeze.
Teddy Larkin and Cory swung bats warming up, three at once, by the dugout. Teddy’s parents, in tennis clothes, had perched themselves in the middle of the bleachers, with the church families. Mr. Larkin had cancer the year before, but they all prayed until he had returned to his large, tanned self.
The other team jogged to their dugout. Mr. Larkin clapped. “You’re going down!” he said.
“Think I’ll ask my dad to coach,” Teddy said to Cory.
It was no surprise to see his father blinking slowly on the dugout bench. But a minute ago he’d pencil checked the roster with Matt. Cory thought he was okay after sleeping in the car. He’d said he was. When he woke up outside Kirby, he said, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Nothing wrong with me. Your mom in the car? You tell her no more from me, I’m done. No more drinking.”
“Dad,” he said now, “should we head out to center? It’s our turn to field balls.”
“I’m fine. It’s not that hot.” He took deep breaths. “Let’s start calling this a ball game.” He clapped twice. “You guys ready?” Then he jogged out of the dugout, doubled over, and disappeared around the corner. There was a retching noise in the parking lot.
Jason clawed the high fence behind home plate, shaking it. “Something happens every time,” he said. High atop the bleachers, Lucy sat alone, a book shut in her lap. “Watch yourself, son.”
Some of the church families, who sat below Lucy, talked among themselves, but Mr. Larkin used a loud voice: “Here’s a guy who drives drunk with his own boys. We saw him at the store, booze on his breath, kids in tow.”
Jerud sat at the bottom corner of the bleachers. “Don’t wreck on the way home,” he told them. “I work at the insurance company and you’re not covered, as of right now”—Jerud snapped his fingers—“and neither are your children. Nobody’s covered! You hear me? Nobody!”
Mr. Larkin turned his angry face at people’s shoes on either side of him. Everybody was quiet.
Cory twisted his glove in the fresh chalk line, messing it up, wishing that Mr. Larkin liked his family. The Larkins were the richest family in church. They led the Apologetics class. They carried up the gifts.
“You boys get on the field,” Mr. Larkin said. “We’re going to kill them!”
Cory sat in the dugout while the boys moved at his command. Way across the ball field, past the highway, a tiny plane flew up the Clearwater, wobbling in the calm air, as if guided by an unsteady pilot. Mr. Larkin shouted again. He kept shouting.
Lucy came into the dugout. She handed him a styrofoam cup of ice-water.
“Is my dad gone?” he said. “I heard a car leave.”
“Your uncle took him. He asked me if it was okay. Your little brother ran to the park across the street.”
“They’re not coming back?”
“No. Are you up for playing in this game?”
“I have to. Everybody does.”
“Not if they don’t want to. How’s your mom?”
“Really good. She’s at home, baking things.”
Lucy nodded. They left the field and crossed the park, Matt ran to them, his shoulders up and his face strange in fear. They walked between the brick buildings for something cold to drink.
In an alley, in the shade of a store, they drank the cold drinks Lucy bought them. She spoke to them. Somewhere past his inability to hear her, Cory was glad she was there. She held his hand when he reached for hers. He waited for the furious sound of the game to fade and disappear, though he continued to hear it even when the fans were silent. The ghosts of their hoarse cries hunted him through the hot streets while she laughed and told them jokes he couldn’t understand.
Red-State Freakout
I explore my BSU firing in my novel The Lord's Hacker, but I want to say a few words here, and to present Dean Tony Roark's termination letter.
In 2013, I received the flattering offer to teach Advanced Fiction at Boise State 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 college seniors. It seemed like a positive jump.
Half of my students were enthusiastic about my class. But it was a Mormon-influenced public university, 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 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.
When half the class didn't like my teaching style, I assumed a defensive posture, 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.
Soon a mother or two waited outside my classroom to meet their children after each class. I had heard from students and fellow adjuncts that the Mormon mothers had a heavy influence in matters of morality on campus. They removed theater posters that showed a clothed young woman who looked like she'd just had sex, and they managed to cleanse freshman dorms of free condoms.
I met with a dean about the noisiest student whose constant yelling disrupted workshops. 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 emailed me and wanted to bring several members of the Care Team to observe my workshop. My boss told me that all intentions were kind. I didn't believe that, but I, foolishly, swore at the dean 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.
The chair, Michelle Payne, 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 page, 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.
It seemed like a carefully coordinated maneuver. Either they were legally prevented from discussing the termination, or they were not. Clearly they were allowed to share information about it. That's why Dean Roark did so. But it served them to keep it mysterious and awful. They knew a lot more people would read the student article than Dean Roark's website.
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.
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.
Here are two screenshots of the termination letter. Notice how Dean Roark doesn't mention my refusal to let in the care team. He doesn't mention it because that's what the mothers and the administration were most worried about--the idea that a writer had said strange things in a creative writing workshop. He also doesn't mention any lifetime ban. The author of the article later said he'd received that phrase from the English department.
I have since taught at Ramapo College in New Jersey, mentored imprisoned writers through PEN America, and tutored private students for $40 an hour. A few years ago I was offered a teaching job in the NYC area, but I'm in Eugene, and my son's here.
My review of this memoir appeared in The Rumpus. The NYT essay "My Dad, the Pornographer" became the book My Father, the Pornographer. As Chris Offutt said, "The book isn't about porn. It's about my weird dad."
Outside of a small Kentucky town in the 1960s, Andrew Offutt settled his family near the Daniel Boon Wilderness and got to work writing and publishing pornographic novels. The hard-working writer had no idea that his eldest son, Chris, would go on to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and become the celebrated author of many books:Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods (story collections), The Good Brother (a novel), and No Heroes and The Same River Twice (memoirs).
Andrew Offutt was a difficult and competitive man. It’s lucky he didn’t sense that his intelligent son might be a competitor. Chris’s childhood would have been even harder.
Chris and his siblings knew what their dad was writing in his office all day. Since the office was off-limits to the kids, they were all the more curious. Now and then, Chris snuck in there to have a look around.
“As a kid,” Chris Offutt writes, “I’d left his office quickly, giving a swift and nervous glance at the closet, which was always shut. Never seeing its contents gave the closet enormous clout; it was a Pandora’s box with a doorknob.”
When his father dies many decades later, Chris inherits a singular burden: cataloguing decades’ worth of his writing, most of it porn—1800 pounds of the stuff. But he’s wary about steeping himself in this project. For many years Chris has been privately sorting through a myriad of hurts inflicted by his dad, whose pen name was John Cleve.
Now middle-aged, Chris opens the closet door. He finds on the shelves “a wreck of papers” and manuscripts.
Wadded into a musty ball was a John Cleve shirt, now mildewed and rotting. A trail of dried mouse droppings led to a large nest composed of tattered manuscript pages. Twined within the rodent’s home was the shed skin of a snake . . . Throughout my childhood, the most familiar adult refrain was: “Watch for snakes” . . . My seventh-grade teacher taught us that poisonous snakes had a vertical pupil, but getting close enough to see the eyes put you at risk.
Here we encounter a father whose work and accomplishments are forbidding, dangerous, and dirty. What Chris Offutt resents is not pornography, but the father who put alarming sexuality into his kids’ heads. He made frequent sexual remarks around the children. He was often angry with them. His talk and his anger settled into one fearful thing in the spine of each child.
Nevertheless, Chris Offutt sincerely praises his dad throughout the memoir. “My father was a brilliant man, a true iconoclast, fiercely self-reliant, a dark genius, cruelly selfish, and eternally optimistic.” His dad’s motive for writing pornography in the first place surely mitigates some of his rougher behavior: Chris needed expensive orthodontic treatment. His dad wrote pornography for the money.
Chris Offutt wisely resists making his dad a saint, a rebel hero, or even a good guy. Instead, he lays down the family snapshots all together and leaves the contradictions unexplained. Now he admires his father, now he disdains him. Here using a voice of admiration, there speaking in a voice of pain, he engages the reader with the shifting perspectives of a mind at odds with itself.
When Chris was a boy, his father told him a mean story: He said Chris had an older brother, John, but that he, Andrew Offutt, chopped him up and put him in the toilet. “To prove his point, he wrote ‘Hi John’ on a scrap of paper, led my siblings and me to the bathroom, and flushed the note.”
At this moment it’s hard for a reader to sympathize with Andrew Offutt. With some reservation, Chris Offutt does it for us: “In retrospect, it’s clear that my father was trying to be funny with the kind of joke that gets carried away until the humor is leached out and the audience is confused. I can forgive my father for a failed joke. I have made many myself. But as a young boy, I fully believed my father had killed my brother and therefore might kill me.”
Though we suffer with the child, we check our temptation to make a monster of the man who inflicted this grief.
Andrew Offutt believed he was capable of the most ghastly deeds, even murder. Once again, he taxed Chris, as an adult, with stories he didn’t need to hear. “If not for pornography,” Andrew Offutt claimed, “I’d have been a serial killer.” But the son knows the father better than he knows himself: “He was not athletic or strong and therefore was incapable of overpowering most people. He was also a physical coward, having never been in a fistfight. He never struck his children or his wife.” He also never followed through with any of his delusions about his capacity for violence. He loved Henry Miller and wrote a lot of porn.
It makes sense that Andrew Offutt admired Miller. A better man than many people knew, Henry Miller made himself look worse than he was in his books, maybe to explore the terrible nature that exists in all people, maybe to excoriate himself in the face of the human tendency to show one’s self as good. Whatever the reason, Andrew Offutt had a need to convince others that he was the worst kind of villain. Now his son has restored him to a highly flawed, troubled man.
Chris Offutt continually reaches beyond his own feeling to sympathize with a man many readers would prefer to demonize. In that regard, My Father, the Pornographer is contemporary memoir at its best. It achieves the rare miracle of re-creating the human heart on the page.
More About Chris Offutt There's a moment in the memoir when Offutt writes that his father didn't understand why any man would be a feminist. It was the 1970s, and Chris' dad, like so many men at the time, embraced an alfa, misogynistic persona. But Chris learned early on how he wanted to treat people. Emotionally he drifted from his dad's example.
Offutt was a visiting writer at BSU at one point. The MFA director, Mitch Weiland, told me they went to a bar in Boise one day, and some Marine was talking shit to a woman at a different table, using sexual and demeaning language.
Offutt told the Marine to shut his mouth. When the Marine continued to intimidate the woman and mention her physical assets, Offutt smashed a wine bottle on the table, held onto the bottle neck, and stood up. Then Mitch hustled him out of there before it came to that.
As a student and teacher at Iowa, Offutt was a wild southerner. He got into fights at bars now and then, but he confronted the ugly, mean, shitty hearts in some people when he encountered them, and I believe he does that in his writing, in part. He didn't look for fights, but he didn't shy from physical confrontations either. Often he stood up for others.
Fistfights were more common then in the Midwest, twenty years ago. Even workshop students resorted to their fists over discussions of books, once or twice, after too many drinks at the Foxhead.
When he was my teacher, Offutt had a parole officer. This seemed amazing to me. I was intrigued. I had tangled with cops and judges as a young teenager, and spent nights in juvenile detention, but here Chris was still a wild child in his 40s.
He's married now and has slowed down in his drinking, as they say. He went to Hollywood and wrote for True Blood and Weeds, then published a couple of Southern noir novels. He's one of the best writers of our time. The man is even big in France, where he has won four national literary awards. But his books, published in twelve languages, are known around the world.
He seemed to like my work pretty well, though he never said so directly in workshop. Once, I walked home in the snow through downtown, and I heard Chris shout my name behind me. He'd slowed in his Lexus at a cross street. He called, "I think you're a really good writer!"
That was big news for me in those struggling, insecure days. Many Iowa students seemed like patrician hipsters, too ivy-league, too PC, for my taste. My class had four students from Yale, and there was another, from Princeton, whose family vacationed with the Kennedys. Most of my fellow students didn't favor my working class Idaho stories. But one of my friends, Katie, a Harvard grad with acne and bright red hair, had as much social anxiety as I had, and we were together against the others.
But Offutt's compliment helped me a lot. I didn't tell anyone about it, except my girlfriend. He and I didn't talk much, but we had a rural, working class connection. He saw past the stereotypes of Idaho that were a sticking point for graduates of Old Eli. They believed you shouldn't write about Idaho, or if you did, you should do it in a disapproving, Mother Jones sort of way. Many of these people went on to be lawyers, high-end political fundraisers, or not so literary genre writers.
Beyond the many narrow students, the Iowa Writers' Workshop was an accepting place. Maybe the best evidence of their absolute commitment to writing was their warm inclusion of Chris Offutt, who was a prized author. Director Frank Conroy may have had to fetch him from jail now and then, but he always had a job waiting for him. Offutt was charming and well-liked by men and women. But I doubt a traditional academic department would have endured his southern traits.
I learned more about writing from Chris Offutt than from any other teacher. His trouble with the law only made him more interesting.
Here's a line up of Chris Offutt's books.
PEN America Justice Writing managers Robbie, Jess, and Caits
Jess Abolafia: "Ryan approaches mentorship from an unbiased perspective, accepting varied opinions and cultivating a safe space for incarcerated writers to freely express their thoughts and goals for their writing journeys."
Robbie Pollock: "Ryan's commitment to providing tailored resources for each individual reflects a genuine interest in fostering creative growth within a challenging environment."
Caits Meissner: "Ryan has also volunteered his skills and talents beyond mentorship, stepping up to edit two long award-winning pieces in our Prison Writing Contest. The editing job was a rush turn around, and Ryan not only asked relevant questions that helped inform the process of our other editors, but submitted the work in fine-tuned form well before deadline."
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. 
