"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."
--on Horses All Over Hell, 2023
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.
Great Review of Ryan's Story Collection in Canada's Miramichi Reader
"This book is classic American fiction influenced by Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and Breece D’J Pancake. Blacketter’s style confidently takes its own place alongside these works; the clear elegant writing, the careful revelation of character, the subtle and moving transformations are the type of experience one can only access in great fiction. This book is certainly that."
“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.
"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 Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity
The Observer
When I wrote for the Observer, a traditional business news site at the time, they allowed my contradictory, anti-MAGA, anti-PC essays that were mostly about writers. My editor changed nothing but the titles. My essay on Milo was included in Arts & Letters Daily.
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."
Biography
Author of Down in the River and Horses All Over Hell, Ryan is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 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, advanced creative writing at Boise State, and composition and literature at Ramapo College. Ryan was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee and a fiction reader at Tin House. His stories appear in Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly, Crab Orchard, Image, Other Voices, and Quick Fiction. He has received grants from Oregon Regional Arts and the Idaho Humanities Council. Ryan's book KARMINA was a 2024 semifinalist in the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. A former publisher controls his Google Control Panel, but most of his reviews etc. are found on this site.
Inquiries should be sent to colorwheel22 (at) icloud.com, or 458-234-3541.
Check out "Convent Boys" at Crab Orchard Review.
Shitty Author Central Page
I have a shitty Author Central page that doesn't work right. On the main Amazon page, only typing my name and one of my book titles will bring you to my page.
You can also use this link:
A Few 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 desires to find a better way to live.
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.
Raymond Carver: A Writing Workshop
In this class we'll study the short stories of Raymond Carver. Called "the American Chekhov" by the New York Times, Carver wrote about the common people of the West—waitresses, salesmen, loggers, and, especially, the out of work.
His characters are often haunted by their own failings. But they would sooner drink or change the subject than own up. They blame others, tell lies, inflict subtle cruelties, and fail to love. Although tempted to judge them and find less honest reading, we keep turning pages for, of course, we are reading about ourselves.
His characters are often haunted by their own failings. But they would sooner drink or change the subject than own up. They blame others, tell lies, inflict subtle cruelties, and fail to love. Although tempted to judge them and find less honest reading, we keep turning pages for, of course, we are reading about ourselves.
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