Ryan Blacketter

I have published reviews about writers and bands in the Rumpus and the Observer. Most of the following pieces are tiny, less formal personal items that are a good fit right here.

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.

And oddly enough--in our current world of two ideologies--Camus endures as a more beloved writer than Sartre. It's as if we go to Camus to seek relief from our own exhausted, social presentations. That's one reason. There are many others. But Camus reminds us that each of us is layered, multifarious, and stranger than we knew.

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 a homosexual milieu in Paris, while conducting an upright heterosexual life. From a car he glimpses many butcher shops, and regards the daily lifestyle of unrestrained sexuality as a brutal reality that he ought to avoid.

But of course he follows Giovanni to his room, and he is never the same. He's repelled--repelled by himself--and he falls in love, and he despises his new lover.

“But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.”

When Giovanni is convicted of a terrible crime--the reader learns of this in the beginning of the book--David enters a darkness in which he feels that he is forever trapped. There is no longer any escape from his own nature or the young man he loves.

"People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget."

I feel 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 and she changed the world.

The literary life isn't fashionable now. Even small pockets of literary readers and writers in America are shrinking up. I fear we are becoming a nation of house flippers. I often hear the advice, Read what you want. It doesn't have to be Dostoevsky, etc., as if we need more encouragement down the mediocre road.

In this shabby moment of wealth building, of wheatgrass milkshakes and thin, longevity soups, we certainly ought to read Virginia Woolf. We ought to study her books, take notes, discover her craft, and read our favorites again. We ought to demand to understand this brilliant writer, getting a little farther on each read, allowing the books to point inward. Soon we'll feel a satisfying change happening inside us. We'll understand some things about ourselves and other people that we had never dared to admit or explore before.

In America, making some money and expiring quietly like a dandelion in the breeze is considered a satisfactory life. But Woolf was really alive in her efforts and battles. That's what matters most, really being alive while we're alive, doing vital and urgent work.

Despite her illness, she brings out the essence of a myriad psychological characters, exploring the lies we tell ourselves to buffer the shocks. She records the weather, parks, and buildings in London with the richness of the moment and the singular perception of each protagonist, and the friends and children and family who are liked or disliked, sometimes for all the wrong reasons. She explores prejudice, class arrogance, envy, greed, and wrong-headedness in sympathetic characters, because she wrote about human beings, who are flawed, and she allows kindness or a selfless gesture in the same people, all of them contradictory and real. She presents the vital passions of some, like Septimus, a soldier of the first world war, who is shell-shocked, intelligent, and doomed, and the flaccid, conventional hopes of others we 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. Amy seemed innocent but her stories were not. They were weighted with experience and personal knowledge that she preferred not to discuss too often, and they were her own stories. Few writers had such an unmistakable style.

Rain Taxi Interview

Interview with Ryan, "His Own Private Idaho," in Rain Taxi Review of Books.

The author of the short story collection Horse All Over Hell (Wipf and Stock, 2019) and the novel Down in the River (Wipf and Stock, 2019) talks about his work, inspirations, and characters.

ASO’K: I’d like to ask about Horses All Over Hell, your short story collection released by Wipf and Stock in 2019.

It’s a book of related stories focused upon a family: mother, father, and two sons. You depict problems caused or affected by alcoholism, mental health issues, and religious fundamentalism. These are adult problems, viewed by Cory, a child, who is the elder son. He also does what he can to look after Matt, his younger brother. Why did you choose Cory as the central character?

RB: A child inhabits a compelling psychological world. To a kid, a dog might have the power to read minds. A horse on the side of the road might cast a judgmental glance. Cory’s young enough to live in that magic, but old enough to grasp the troubles of his family. He’s an ideal observer.

ASO’K: The setting of Horses is rural Idaho in the early 1990s. Please forgive the cliché question, but may I ask how much of the setting and characters reflect your real-life experiences?

RB: The town of Laroy is, more or less, Lewiston, Idaho. My family lived there in the 70s and 80s. My dad was an alcoholic, but not the wild drunk that Marty is, and my mom was a very traditional, heterosexual Catholic woman who sat with the dying. My dad was an anxiety-ridden parole officer who didn’t talk much except to yell, though he was good-hearted. I was a sports kid and wore my team uniforms at home, watching TV always. My family was hyper-normal, patriotic and God-fearing without question. Once, I tried on my mom’s bra as a joke, and my 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 Lyle Rettew, commits an incredibly drastic act in attempting to come to terms with the recent suicide of his twin sister. If you would consider mentioning it to be a spoiler, we can keep mum about it, or mention it openly if you prefer. Anyway, it’s rather macabre, and truly unconventional. Can you describe how this idea came to you?

RB: When Lyle robs a mausoleum, he is flying on his mania, and therefore believes he’s doing something good. Of course, it is terrible and macabre. Lyle’s action is mitigated, though, when the reader understands he’s acting out of love for his sister, in his own cracked manner. Though his sister’s remains are in Idaho, and he’s in Eugene, Oregon, he associates this body he steals with his lost best friend and twin, Lila.

He meets Rosa, a Latina who says about him, “Oh, you’re not quite right,” but knows he’s a good person at the same time. They happen into some speed. She becomes disturbed when she discovers what he’s carrying around in his backpack, but he explains it again and again—when she’s alternately high and tired—and she stays with him.

Although there’s not much sympathy for bi-polar people in the world right now, especially ones who rob mausoleums, I felt very tender about Lyle. Once, Lyle stands up for a goose who hits the top of a bridge while flying. It sits on the pedestrian walkways below, very dazed. Lyle guards the bridge and forces two kids to turn around, so they won’t frighten the goose.

Rosa says to him, “You’re like some kind of protector.”

But some readers won’t tolerate a sympathetic story about a grave robber. That’s okay. I wasn’t trying to please everyone.

Interviews and Reviews

Pittsburgh's City Paper "Arts Feature" Interview:
City Paper Interview

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:

https://fictionwritersreview.com/review/down-in-the-river-by-ryan-blacketter/

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."

https://miramichireader.ca/2024/09/throwback-horses-all-over-hell-by-ryan-blacketter/

Largehearted Boy. Presented here is the narrated playlist for Down in the River.

http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2014/02/book_notes_ryan_5.html

Kirkus Review of Horses All Over Hell, 2023

"Told through stirring vignettes, the stories gathered here follow a family in rural Idaho as they approach emotional implosion. Cory and his brother, Matt, are at a loss when it comes to their mother, Joanna, especially since she became a born-again Christian. Cory does not understand why Joanna seems sad all the time, and the boys often try to avoid her attempts to read the Bible to them. Alternatively, the boys adore their father, Marty, who likes to crack jokes as often as he cracks open cans of beer, and they often turn to him for fun and approval. Marty leaves town (going first to Las Vegas and later to the town of Red Star, and Joanna’s friendship with an Indigenous woman named Lucy sparks rumors about 'perversion' among their town’s religious crowd. Later, Joanna and the boys drive to Red Star to move there with Marty, who, much to everyone’s surprise, has been living with an older woman named Carla. The author’s prose is as outstanding as the story it conveys, with spare, raw dialogue and deft scene-setting that is descriptive without feeling overwrought. As Marty, Cory, and Matt look at their home with Joanna inside, Blacketter writes, 'The clouds moved fast with her lying under them, and the oak scraped its branches on the roof, and bits of flying ice tapped their bedroom window. As if the day itself disapproved that she was in bed, and gathered new anger in the thickening sleet.' The titular story reads almost like a play reaching its gripping climax: Tension rolls off of each character as Joanna attempts to leave while Cory tries to stop her, Marty pleads with Joanna, and Carla and Lucy bear witness with their own romantic intentions simmering beneath the surface of the familial drama. Each character feels real and lived-in; the stories are poignant, evocative, and definitely worth the reader’s attention. An excellent and moving collection."

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ryan-blacketter/horses-all-over-hell/

Radio/Library interview in Ketchum, Idaho.

https://archive.org/details/FinalCutPodcast2_201503

"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.

When the Hippies are Gone
We’ll need a renaissance to stand our lives with iPhones and AI. It’s harder to read, harder to write, as if there is some demented spirit in tech that closes the books we are reading.

Creative rebirths occur after long periods of darkness. At such times, many thousands of people at once, especially young people, decide to go inward and live creative lives. In the 60s people left their jobs to live on farms with friends, to write poetry or play music.

An invitation to return to the 60s can be corny, conjuring Google stock images of peace signs and round glasses. But when I was a kid growing up in Eugene, many of my friends’ parents were hippies. Many had natural smiles, and it wasn’t just the pot. They had found something successful.

Most of them rented apartments or houses, built cabinets or worked at canneries or places like Genesis Juice. They had parties at friends’ houses in the woods, playing music together, and the kids joining in. They were easy inside, most of them, and deeply friendly. They had something.

When they were kids in the 50s, their parents burned to succeed in view of their neighbors. They saw their fathers’ rage play out over years as they worked at corporations and nothing vital came of the hard work except a healthy lawn. They heard their mothers speak words that only hinted at the meaning below, cheerful greetings that echoed in the mind as oblique pleas for help.

In America, a million kids grew up as outward creatures. Commanded to seem happy and correct, to avoid their inward selves, they developed a sickness, and they didn't know this sickness meant they were creative. They wanted to speak and hear true words and to create objects of beauty.

Old Eugene was a hippie town in the 80s. At 5th Street Market, there was a rear seating area where hippies and alternative kids drank coffee and smoked. People read and discussed authors like Richard Brautigan and Susan Sontag. Though I wasn't much of a reader, I liked The Catcher in the Rye. That was a favorite book among the hippies. It explores a kid who insisted on being who he really was.

Many hippies didn't look like hippies. Most of them looked like carpenters, with short hair or long hair. Women often wore jeans and faded blouses. Their magic occurred on the inside, and there was no longer any need to wear 60s clothing.

It was common to see a group of them get noisy in public, participating in an ironic square dance, for instance. They were semi-responsible parents, a bit country. They were joyful layabouts or craftsmen, not Deadheads. Some could build houses and others nothing at all. One of them could tickle a salmon's belly to mesmerize it, deep in the river, and emerge with the fish before his fellows. They might take acid on a free day, giving their teenage kids a sliver of pot brownie, if they wanted it. Many were poets and musicians, but their arts were for pleasure, friends and family.

Around 2010, in Eugene, I'd see a few old hippies driving their old Subarus or Hondas. My friends and I liked them for their graceful staying power, their ability to pursue a lifestyle while being poor or lower middle-class. They were good luck for those of us who were trying to make it happen with our music or writing. But then the hippies went away and a different kind of people came to town.

By 2020, most of the younger creative people I knew in Eugene and Portland had given up their art for tech jobs. It wasn’t simply because life was more expensive. It was because creativity wasn’t respected anymore.

I know why people from Los Angeles County seem to care only about money. I know why they're afraid of people who don't seem like them. They grew up around dangerous wanderers in the streets. They had to be careful who they talked to. Owning a home in a good neighborhood meant safety for their families.

In addition, there really are some dangerous people in Eugene, and they look like hippies.

But it's the people wearing Giorgio Armani ski jackets who worry me the most. They're afraid of me because I look poor in my winter coat I bought at Target, but I'm afraid of them, too.

Few things kill the arts like an invasive wealth culture that doesn’t respect creative life. But I'm writing for those who are coming later. They're the people of the next renaissance. They probably aren't born yet, but they are on the way.

Rebirths happen now and then. It seems to be the way of things.

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller was a bohemian writer who intended to send shock waves through the English-speaking world. That might explain why his language is sometimes derogatory toward women, the elderly, the highly normative, and many others he encounters. It seems he's actually trying to alienate. At one point, he laughs at the death of a colleague. Another time, he's disturbed by the thought of a baby squirming in a woman's belly.

But he's up to something in his book that isn't readily apparent. He presents a Henry Miller who is far worse than the actual man. In life, for instance, he had a thousand friends, men and women. Once, when he was hungry and poor, he asked several friends if he could eat at their houses once a week. They all agreed. But he never would have received such hospitality if he treated men and women like that.

While writing the book at forty, he included feelings and attitudes that most other writers left out of their books, and challenged the niceties and capitulations that many readers and publishers expected.

His hero Rimbaud encouraged authors to take up a "scummy" appearance and attitude to fight the antiseptic falseness of middle-class morality. Celine, another influence, told the truth in a thousand forbidden ways. Miller writes with these authors at his back.

Baudelaire, Gide, and, later, Genet were also part of this literary school of social combat. This describes part of their work, at any rate. They went out of their way to challenge norms, creating rebellious and sometimes low-life protagonists to strike blows against pious gatekeepers. Genet's glorified young gay criminals and prostitutes were indeed shocking, though he was beloved by literary authors.

For the most part, the French understand that exploration of taboo subjects and "crude" protagonists was part of their method and forgive them, or love them all the more.

Many American readers, on the other hand, who often fail to see the French influences in "Tropic," encounter a book that is inexplicably upsetting, as if it's a document without a context, history, or literary milieu.

Everyone knows that Henry Miller was American, but few know that his books are culturally French. That said, he can't escape his American side that pops up here and there.

Past the rude surface, the book is more inspiring and life-affirming than one might expect. On its first page, the protagonist states, “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” One finds similar Whitmanesque pronouncements throughout.

Tropic of Cancer is, in part, an experiment in contradictions, stuffing the pages full of all that is terrible and good about this fictional Henry Miller. He plays a role in the book--the vagabond artist, the womanizer, the streetwise cynic. But here and there in these chapters we find a gentler man, and he was vastly more gentle in life.

Anais Nin recorded the great respect he paid to their friendship over years in her journals. Also, she loved "Tropic."

"Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes . . ."

Henry Miller was a lifelong iconoclast--he wasn't making it up for his books. But years ago, I believed he was a creep who tried too hard to be bohemian. After watching a few of his interviews, I got a sense of this kind and curious writer who was so beloved by those who knew him. After that, I read him in a different light.

Mrs. Dalloway
Most of what I have read about Clarissa Dalloway, or seen in films, presents her as an upper-class woman who gives a lot of parties to avoid her troubled interior and the silences of her life. But she's often plunged into clear-eyed explorations of her life and her feeling.

She has an uncommon capacity to enjoy things. She throws herself into the vitality of London walks alone, noticing all the sensory richness.

At the same time, she allows the stray dark thought to emerge, and she doesn't swat it away.

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”

Such thoughts may hint at Clarissa's depression, beneath her vitality. But we know that people have such layers of exuberance and sorrow.

Though often anxious, she confronts the suffering of her past and present and interrogates it. She explores the memory of a woman she loved and precisely how the experience made her feel so alive. She doesn't cover her losses in some act of psychological forgetting.

But she does have a side of her that is respectable, fearful, wishing to do what's proper and ensure a comfortable life--always putting on a good face. She regrets abandoning the truth-telling personality of her youth.

Through Peter Walsh's point of view, we learn that she was all enthusiasm for Richard, her dull fiancé, who was sturdy and rich, a good catch, well-connected, and she quoted his banalities to her friends.

"With twice his wits," reports Walsh, "she had to see things through his eyes--one of the tragedies of married life."

But if she gives parties to avoid the silence, it's true that she sits with the silence of a perceptive interior for hours each day. She might buy flowers and have parties to take a rest from these thoughts, and she might refuse to acknowledge certain unpleasantness in life, as anyone will do. But it would be wrong to say she avoids herself or doesn't know herself. She knows she lives at only half of the vitality she once had.

Some hide from their pain and do whatever they can to escape it, chattering about all the things that don't matter, throwing parties and doing anything to hide from their own nature.

That's not Clarissa Dalloway.

Two Camps

I used to embrace a libertarian ideal of free-speech, until I discovered the right and left censor in equal fashion. Right or left isn’t the problem. Politics is the problem.

Ideology divides people and it divides the mind. It’s rare to encounter anyone who declares a love of Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, for instance. Most people would pick one or the other, as an expression of their politics.

I wanted to locate Melville’s “howling infinite,” a territory of ambiguity and possibility, in which we are open to all things human and good. In Moby Dick, Melville invites us to love the cannibal Queequeg, who shares a bed very lovingly with Ishmael. In mid-nineteenth century America, such openness was indeed risky, and may have partly explained why the book was a flop upon publication.

Such openness to ambiguity isn’t allowed in the culture right now either. I appreciated Elon Musk when he was an apolitical geek who might have been on the spectrum. Then, as if he understood he needed a political party to back his brand, he met Jered Kushner at the World Cup and transformed into a MAGA dude, and was no longer intriguing.

We seek political fortifications on a smaller level too, in organizations and among our circle of friends. God forbid we should be seen standing alone.

I read recently in the New York Times that bisexuals are no longer considered “allies.” Apparently they’re too ambiguous, when what is needed is a clear choice for the sake of politics. Never mind the deeper impulses and the desires of our hearts that make us unique and human.

The culture wars rot the conversation on both sides. Every so often, I check out what's going on in the pages of a certain famous conservative journal, as if to escape the politics of left-leaning journals for a moment, and all I find there are photos of conductors leading an orchestra in a triumphant moment of western high culture, or lectures of old men who wish to resuscitate Allan Bloom.

It seems conservative editors are more interested in buttressing grand tombs than in presenting fresh writing. But expressing an independent idea is next to impossible in America, anywhere you look.

Two camps, right and left--that's all we're allowed. Pick one side or the other and sit quietly in the cold until it's your turn to say what you've heard so many times before.

Quiet Public Libraries

In many cities I've lived in, I have wished for quieter libraries, free from the rancorous talk we hear on FOX, CNN, or (God forbid) CBN.

At Boise Public Library, for instance, many librarians spoke of their religious faith in noisy conversations. They seemed to want us all to hear them discuss the end times, etc. One of these kooks was caught throwing books away that didn't honor God.

My then-wife used to work there, and one of these women told her that I had been seen entering a bar before noon--goodness.

Libraries can offer the coolest seat in town, or they can be conformity centers where the staff expect patrons to honor local views.

At Eugene Public Library, one hears similar conversations, but they're about politics instead of religion. While they don't throw away books in Eugene, some staff dislike it if you mention the wrong book to them.

Once I asked a staff member how to order a Henry Miller biography called Always Merry and Bright. She went from cheerful to disgusted in one second. She refused to look at me after that, as if she conjured all the stereotypes about Miller and threw them onto me.

While it's not always fruitful to try to read people's expressions, I believe habitual "rude face" in a library is meaningful, whether staff are left or right.

All of that said, the Eugene library building is one of the most gorgeous monuments to books in the country, with its stained glass and high ceilings.

Moreover, management seems to favor a neutral environment in which politics is avoided, while some employees seem to insist that stern education and judgement are necessary in our admittedly dark moment.

The best library I have ever seen was the NYC public library on 5th Ave. It's vast and quiet, with patrons from all over the world, all of them observing the old rule of library quiet. At least it was so when I lived there in 1997.

Staff assisted in this pleasant reading environment, by refusing to crow about their religion or politics. It was just a nice, quiet place to read, or to sit doing nothing at all, as if they recognized that your own valid personal thoughts, your own ideas as an individual, are what matter most.

Mean Towns
Last year I lived in deepest Springfield, and one day I went to a bar near the tracks. During my two pints at the bar, I listened to the hard laughter that came after a hundred jokes and comments. Jokes about "trannies" topped the list, producing the hardest laughter.

I like small-town bars, but it seemed that Trump mania brought out the worst in this joint.

A few months later, I moved to Eugene. At a natural foods store downtown that I had shopped at for many years, the new staff were alternately friendly and rude. Many seemed to dislike anyone who looked like a construction worker, for instance, but they smiled at those who seemed "alternative."

My friends' hippy parents, in old Eugene, were kind to anyone. They shopped at this store back then. It was a friendly place.

Once, recently, a staff member pointed out a customer, and she whispered to her coworkers. They all pointed stern faces at him. This scowling at customers in the store was frequent.

But a handful of staff were so nice, open, and cool, they almost made up for the mean ones. Maybe some of the rude ones were unhappy, as I was unhappy at times.

When I asked a thirty-year-old cashier to coffee one day, she said no, and I nodded and went on my way. After that, some workers appeared to dislike it when I came into the store.

But I was disliked before I asked her out for coffee--only more so now. Though I wasn't a construction worker, I was spacy on a bad day, and talked to myself at the register. I wore normal clothes, so my behavior may have been a liability. In addition, I had complained about rudeness here. I was a middle-aged, slightly off person who entered holy ground and voiced complaint.

Once, a cashier with green hair was scanning my groceries while talking to a woman at the register behind her. She said, "Trump!" and cast a dark look toward me. It seemed meaningful, but I couldn't be sure. I never had the chance to complain about the president with them, though I'd complained about everything else, and I didn't know why I wanted these people to like me, but I did.

At this time, I read Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, and I was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's many pranks.

The natural food store is next door to the library. I carried my grocery bag over there. In the spirit of 60s hijinks, I called the natural food store from a library phone. I spoke to a manager, pretending to be the father of some imaginary girlfriend, saying, "That guy Ryan Blacketter has to be stopped! It all started with a cup of coffee! Ryan should be 86ed. He's had coffee all over town."

It was stupid and it was fun, I was giddy with a small case of hypomania.

Then I spoke to the owner, later in the day, on my personal phone. I called as myself wanting to see what was going on with my imaginary girlfriend's father.

But the owner was so warm, I felt bad that I played the joke. She referred to "Autumn/spring romances," saying they had been more common before, and told me it was my own business.

She mentioned she could see that a call was made from the library earlier. She didn't outright say I had made that call. She may have half-suspected I was playing a prank, or she may have known what I was up to.

It's never a pleasant feeling to prank someone so kind. But she reminded me of old Eugene, when liberals were nice, and asking someone out for coffee in a respectful manner was okay.

I kept returning to the store out of nostalgia for the place of my childhood. A manager finally 86ed me for complaining, and for starting the rumors I did. But there was no use complaining at a place like that. They're protected by a shield. You might as well go into a Catholic church and demand correction. Some have tried, but in such cases, it's best to let things change on their own.

Ryan Blacketter

Monday, March 16, 2026

Reviews and Bio

Sunday, February 01, 2026

Vignettes, Interviews, and Reviews