"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
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Ryan's NY Observer Essays (and a few others)--Republished in Arts & Letters Daily and Elsewhere.
Monday, April 08, 2024
Recommendations from PEN American Justice Writing
Selected Reviews, etc., of Horses All Over Hell and Down in the River
Pittsburgh's City Paper "Arts Feature" Interview:
https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/cp-catches-up-with-newly-arrived-novelist-ryan-blacketter/Content?oid=1851057
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/
“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.
“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
Saturday, April 06, 2024
Praise for Ryan Blacketter's Fiction Titles.
“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.
“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
Monday, March 11, 2024
A Christian Leader's Life in Censorship and Porn-Hacking, 1 & 2
I mentioned in “A Christian Leader’s Life in Censorship and Porn-Hacking 1” that Gregory Wolfe often engages in censorship. Whether he’s harassing people with porn or hacking publishers that his enemies are sending their manuscripts to--it all comes down to menacing, ego-driven acts of censorship. He might be the only publisher in the U.S. who devotes so much time to the activity. This narcissist must feel that he's honored, despite his very dishonorable and reprobate behaviors, or he will attack you for years.
Deleted Blog Followers
Eugene Weekly
March 27, 2024. After I posted "A Christian Leader's Life," the Eugene Weekly editor said she wanted to do an investigative article on Wolfe. When I called days later, I found a generic, robot voicemail and left a brief message. Later in the day it struck me as odd that the voicemail would be generic. He has placed fake voice messages on my phone before.
I left my house, getting away from Wi-Fi, and called again, down the block. This time there was a real voice thanking the caller for contacting Eugene Weekly, but it was closed so I left no message.
Greg has intercepted many of my calls, often just to be a creep, but sometimes to keep me from talking to someone he doesn't want me to talk to.
Social Media Censorship
Places Face on My Blog as Warning
Greg placed his face on my blog for weeks after I posted "A Christian Leader's Life." My blog has always used the picture on the top post for the site picture, no matter how popular a post below it might be. This Moses pic was on my blog for two weeks.
And Greg sometimes deletes certain texts I send to my son. I have already mentioned his creepy Digital Touch fakery. Below is a picture I sent on Easter, but he never received it, nor the words that went along with it. Greg probably dislikes it that I have a close relationship with my son.
When I applied to Portland State, Greg raised my firing notice to my high Google page, though that notice had been long gone for years. Suddenly my firing was popping up elsewhere too. It was even front an center on the display for my interview with Pittsburg City Paper. The intro to the article has been rewritten, nine years after it was published.
In his murky manner, Greg has revealed a disdain for black people, as I have mentioned. In this case, he placed this woman's video on my Google pages as a bullying move, just as he changed the dating website when I dated a black woman in Atlanta. In this case I believe he wanted to say, you can share your page with a black, though Google wouldn't catalog her name in this way. I'm proud to share my page with April.
A serious study of Gregory Wolfe would make an interesting story. In my book "God's Hacker," his character is in the background, off camera, out of reach. Greg indeed has a mental illness. So do I, but we engage in very different activities. I've seen him go for weeks on manic rides. He does a lot of terrible, even criminal things, but seems to pretend those things don't happen, or he denies them when he has to.
Like many malignant narcissists, he's charismatic and intelligent, and therefore he can seem trustworthy and inspiring at face value almost right away.
I believe he learned hacking to protect his brand, and fell in love with the power of it. He's extremely talented as a hacker. He's sharpened his skills on a lot of enemies before me. Now he can't stop. He uses hacking like a video game, and it was addictive because the avatars were actual people, and the stakes--harming those who had slighted him--were high, and it was delicious.
He is profoundly lost and his ship is listing. Christian Humanism is no longer included in his operating procedures. Maybe it never was. He won't change because he can't. Change implies recognition and remorse, and his illness prevents that recognition.
I'm not going to pray for the worst kind of evil I have ever seen in my life, though others might. But I do hope to outlive him, or see him get old and tired out soon. A tired, old Gregory Wolfe, living with the memories of a strong career, but no longer burning to cause pain--that's about the best I can hope for.
Final Questions
I had a positive reception for "A Christian Leader's Life." Though I lack an IP address, I raised many questions that point to my hacker. I placed those on my initial post, but it was two weeks after I posted it, so I want to include them here again.
I wanted to address any who might believe I have no evidence, simply because I lack an IP or a photograph of my hacker caught in the act. As Judge Charles Carlson told me at the hearing, I have evidence that would be persuasive in civil court, and my assertions raise many questions that point directly to Gregory Wolfe.
For instance, who placed Greg's picture on my blog for two weeks, a threatening gesture, after my post went live? Only my hacker would place his image on my blog.
Who removed the many followers of this blog before I posted "A Christian Leader's Life"? Some other nemesis?
Who deleted the emails from my hacker to me and then restored some of them but not all? Who else had a motive?
Who deleted my email containing the porn descriptions that my hacker used to cover my Google pages, the email I had sent to the scholars? Who else would want to?
Who edited "A Christian Leader's Life" a few times after it went live, to convey a frivolous and unedited and sometimes confusing vibe so that I had to keeping rewriting it?
Who replaced the screenshot of the fake email that contained the iPhone memory?
Who deleted the photo I took of my son sitting in front of his computer? It was wallpapered with my book cover art that my hacker had helped create. My hacker had the motive.
Who is so focused on my son that he has to keep sending me his pictures to convey a threat? Who else deletes his texts? Some other random hacker?
Who demeaned, repeatedly, working class people in fake blogs and on my blog, just as he demeaned the working class background of one of the women who fired him?
Who placed Springfield police reports and a “we found Ryan” notice on Google the same day I visited the police about my hacker?
Who else would spoof my police report about my hacker, placing my landlord’s name and email and phone on the report?
What else would be interested in my communication about my hacker to the police?
If it was a different hacker, he must have been very sympathetic to Gregory Wolfe and spent a lot of time covering for him and concealing his crimes.
Friday, March 01, 2024
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Ryan's Fiction Workshop Course Descriptions
Amy Hempel
High-Risk Fiction: A Writing Workshop
This class encourages fiction that, like all good writing, takes emotional risks. This riskiness sets literature apart from the dishonesty of bad books, TV, and movies. Workshop is not confession, but in the privacy of their writing rooms students might begin to tell personal stories that perhaps they have only told about other people.
"Tell everything on yourself," Raymond Carver urged. Virginia Woolf would have agreed: "If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people." Yet we will never assume anything in a story actually happened to the writer. Rigorous storytelling, of course, evolves into fiction, blurring and even obliterating its source material.
We will read published stories as models. Amy Hempel writes of a woman who abandons a close friend dying of cancer, and confronts the aftermath of her choice. Thom Jones explores one soldier’s psychological territory of war, aggression, and epileptic torment, in which “illness” provokes dark illuminations of self and humanity.