"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
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, anti-right, anti-left essays that were mostly about writers. My editor changed nothing but the titles. My essay on Milo was included in Arts & Letters Daily.
I had the good sense to embrace or reject ideas on the right or left based on the merits of the moment, instead of using my position as an ideological bullhorn. But I have since quit politics. In a post about Christopher Hitchens on this blog, I wrote, "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." Like Joan Didion, I chose to stand alone.
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."
60s Writers Essay
"Joan Didion also praised black social movements and quarreled with second-wave feminism. In her essay 'The Women’s Movement' she wrote, 'To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.'
"Her point here isn’t to take down feminism—a long movement of many leaders whose views are too varied to embody any strict unity of ideas. Instead, she chose to stand alone as a woman and a writer."
Biography
Author of Down in the River and Horses All Over Hell, Ryan is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He mentored incarcerated writers in PEN America's Justice Writing Program for ten years until 2025. He has taught at Oregon State University, Boise State, and Ramapo College. Ryan was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers Conference and a fiction reader at Tin House. His story collection, Horses All Over Hell, was a finalist for the Bakeless, the Hudson, and the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction. His books are discussed in Poets & Writers, Kirkus Review, Fiction Writers Review, Paste Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Canada's Miramichi Reader, and elsewhere. His stories appear in Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly, Crab Orchard, Image, Other Voices, and Quick Fiction. His essays and reviews are found in The Rumpus, the Observer, and Atticus Review. 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.
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:
https://amazon.com/author/ryanblacketter
One-on-one Classes
I teach individual fiction workshops via telephone for beginning and intermediate writers. We spend the first hour discussing a provided short story, mining the piece for craft, including narrative arc, characterization, musical language, and other craft points. The second hour is devoted to a writing exercise based on a craft point we discussed in the story. The class is for writers who want to learn, but is, at the same time, friendly and easygoing. Students present a short story for workshop at least once a month.
"Without the Blacketter treatment I never would have gotten into the Iowa Writers' Workshop." --Jordan Glubka
* Genre: Literary
* Two classes minimum per month. Flexible Hours
* $40 per hour. $80 per class.
*458-234-3541
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