Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 37

An interview, a guest post, and a reading (oh my)

As I’ve mentioned (and will probably mention until you’re thinking, “God, will he never shut up?!”), The Unwanted has been officially unleashed (“release the hounds, Smithers!”), and of course I’m obsessing about it. Which is so attractive. So let’s not talk about it—at least, not right now. But, I will say first that the Arts on Air segment has been uploaded as a podcast. Check it out here. (The bit including me starts at 6:50.)

It’s always weird hearing yourself speak.

Also, I have a guest post up at The Library Mistress’s blog, wherein I talk about my penchant for genre hopping. It even includes the sentence, “I’ve never written about chainsaw-juggling erotic mimes before.” And how many times have I said that?

Right! Moving on. Let’s talk about other writers! Remember I said I’d be doing a reading on April 2? Well, here’s the main attraction: a reading by UBC professor Nancy Lee and MFA alumni Laisha Rosnau. Along with three of my fellow MFA students, I’ll be reading later that evening. If you’re in Vancouver, come check it out.

Joint Reading by Nancy Lee and Laisha Rosnau

Coach House, Green College, Wednesday, April 2, 5-6:30 pm

Hailed by The Globe and Mail as “a masterwork of revelation,” Nancy Lee’s first book, Dead Girls, was the winner of the VanCity Book Prize, as well as a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Pearson Readers’ Choice Award and the Wordsworthy Award. The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun chose Dead Girls as one of the best books of 2002, and Now Magazine named it Book of the Year. Nancy Lee is an assistant professor in Creative Writing at UBC. She has served as Writer-in-Residence for the University of East Anglia, Historic Joy Kogawa House and most recently for the city of Vincennes, France and the city of Richmond. Nancy’s new novel is called The Age.

Laisha Rosnau is the author of the poetry collections, Pluck (Nightwood Editions, March 2014), Lousy Explorers and Notes on Leaving and the novel The Sudden Weight of Snow (McClelland and Stewart, 2002). Her work has been nominated for several awards, including the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, three times for the CBC Literary Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and has won the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award. Laisha was a resident of Green College from 1998 to 2000, where she wrote her first novel in room 306.

 After Dinner: A Fireside Reading in the Green College Piano Lounge, 8 p.m.

Nancy and Laisha will be joined by Green College residents and MFA students Zach Matteson, Nicole Boyce, Sarah Higgins, Zach Matteson, and Jeffrey Ricker (that’s me!) in a reading.

Congratulations, it’s a book!

Although the official launch date of The Unwanted is March 18 (just one day away now!), a few people have already been able to get their hands on a copy, and they seem to like it. (If you’re in St. Louis, they’ve got a couple copies left at Left Bank Books. Go pick one up, say hi to Spike the cat, and check out everything else that makes them such a fantastic bookstore.) If you happen to run across a copy of The Unwanted out in the wild i.e. on bookshelves or in someone’s hands, snap a picture and send it to me. I’ll share it on the blog.

I had the opportunity to read a passage from the book at Locution last Thursday, which was great fun. The other readers were Jane Campbell, Rhett Davis, and special guest Théodora Armstrong, author of the collection Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility. Check her out; she’s fantastic, as were Jane and Rhett.

I’ll be reading a little from The Unwanted again on April 2, at a fireside reading at Green College, following a reading by authors Nancy Lee and Laisha Rosnau (more on that later). And then—yes, there’s more!—I’ll be co-hosting Swoon: A Literary Evening of Love, Sex, and Chocolate, on Friday, April 4 at Cocoa Nymph in Kitsilano. I’m sharing the duties with the lovely Ruth Daniell, the creator of this reading series. We bonded in our fiction workshop last year over a shared love of soufflés and hot chocolate. We’re lining up readers now and it looks like it’s going to be a great show.

Plus, Cocoa Nymph’s hot chocolate and truffles are amazing.

One more thing: a giveaway! I’ve got five copies of The Unwanted that I’m making available via Goodreads. Go check it out and enter!

Goodreads Book Giveaway


The Unwanted
by Jeffrey Ricker

Giveaway ends April 16, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

They said it on the air on the radio

If you’re in Vancouver, tune in to CITR 101.9 on Wednesday at 6 p.m. and you’ll hear yours truly talking with Arts on Air host Ira Nadel about The Unwanted and writing in general. We recorded it today, and hopefully I didn’t stick my foot in my mouth too far.

Look, visual proof! This was taken on the fly by producer Nicole Gibillini. The mic placement proves I have a face for radio:

Not in Vancouver? You’re missing some lovely weather then. (Last week was rainy as hell though.) More to the point, past episodes are available as podcasts that you can listen to online (or off)—I’ll post a direct link to the episode once it’s live.

Meanwhile, it’s always a good time to listen to some Donna Summer:

In case you missed it: Reading at the Cottage Bistro March 13

I know I’ve probably mentioned this already, but just in case: If you’re in Vancouver, BC, I’ll be reading on Thursday, March 13, at the Cottage Bistro on Main Street as part of Locution, the University of British Columbia Creative Writing Program‘s MFA reading series. The event starts at 7 p.m., and I’ll be reading a passage from The Unwanted (Click the cover! Buy a copy! [Did I mention I have student loans?]) and will be joining fellow MFA students Jane Campbell and Rhett Davis, as well as guest Theodora Armstrong, author of Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility.

You can find details at the event’s Facebook page. Hope to see you there! And hey, there’s always the possibility that I will stumble over my words, drop my manuscript, and make a general spectacle of myself. That’s at least worth some entertainment value, hey?

But wait, there’s more! Or “Jeff, read the whole thing”

Did I mention that I turned in the second draft of my thesis last night? And that I have a major assignment due tomorrow (more on that later) and a short story for my fiction workshop that’s overdue? (The working title is “Little Bastard,” but it’s been suggested that I change it to “Two Men and an Armadillo.”)

In short, I’m a little stressed.

This can be the only reason I can give for forgetting to add in my previous post that Rebekah Weatherspoon, one of the coolest people I’ve never met, is also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the category Lesbian Erotica for her novel At Her Feet, which is easily the hottest thing I’ve read so far this year.

(Yes, I sometimes read lesbian erotica. Big whoop, wannafightaboutit?)

A word of advice: maybe don’t read it on the bus. Your face will turn beet red and you’ll miss your stop.

Sorry about the omission, Rebekah. The memory really is the first thing to go. See what you have to look forward to as you get older?

The Light at the end of the Lambda finalists list

No really, it actually is very close to the end of the list of this year’s Lambda Literary Finalists that you’ll see under LGBT SF/F/Horror my friend ’Nathan‘s novel Light listed as a finalist. This is also ’Nathan’s debut novel, so I couldn’t be happier for him. If you haven’t read it, go order it now.

Yes, right now.

It’s okay, I’ll wait. (This is me waiting.)

Did you do it? Right, let’s move on.

Also on the list you’ll find Greg Herren’s Baton Rouge Bingo, the latest in his Scotty Bradley mystery series, as well as How Poetry Saved My Life, by Amber Dawn, who teaches in UBC’s MFA program. Congratulations to them and everyone else on the list!

AWP’d

This past weekend I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle. So did about thirteen thousand other writers, publishers, and educators. To say it was overwhelming would be a tiny understatement. Given the plethora of things to do and books to buy, it’s a wonder that I didn’t come back to Vancouver with more books and litmags than I actually did.

There were many highlights of the weekend for me. One was catching up with the fantastic Jess Wells. I also was able to reconnect with Murray Farish, a fiction professor at Webster University whose workshop I took while I was on staff there. He was a fantastic teacher, and now he’s also got a new short story collection out, titled Inappropriate Behavior. I picked up a copy and am looking forward to reading it.

I was pleased to see how broadly AWP considered representation in the mix of panels and readings that were included in the conference program. One in particular that I found enlightening was titled “Queer Double Agents: Writing & Publishing Between Communities.” I wrote a little bit about this that you can find on PRISM international‘s website, along with my colleagues’ comments on the highlights of the weekend for them. Check it out!

Map of the World

Take a look at this map.

It’s not pretty, is it? (And I love maps, so that’s saying something.)

Anywhere you see a nation that isn’t green, that’s somewhere that people like me are basically illegal. People like me get killed.

Let’s not be too complacent about the green places, either. I could tell you about the places I’ve been in the United States where I’ve heard the cat calls and threats, directed at me or at other people. Friends of mine, sometimes. Or complete strangers. But mostly, people like me.

Still, I can stay where I am and be, relatively speaking, safe enough. People who live in those orange and red countries, or that big bruise-colored one and the like, may not have the luxury of pulling up stakes and moving.

So, you know, they fake it or die. And faking it, if you ask me (not that you did, but hey, you’re here, so you must be at least a little curious what I think—heaven knows why), is a kind of death in itself.

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t share your enthusiasm about your country’s hockey medal. When people say that things like someone else coming out don’t matter, or that a law in Uganda is none of our business, showing up to or watching a massive quadrennial sporting event (or not) hosted by a country whose leader is throwing queers under the bus to distract from massive corruption and a collapsing economy doesn’t matter, I have to say, yeah.

It does matter.

(And for the person who will inevitably say, “Yes, but a) the United States is guilty of equally heinous atrocities abroad” or b) “there are 17 states in the U.S. where it’s hell being queer so hypocrisy” or c) insert ad hominem “yes but” argument here, let me just cut to the chase and say hooey. Those things are awful, yes, and your bringing them up does nothing to negate the original position. Try harder. Better yet, try telling that to the one who was burned to death by a mob in Nigeria. Or the one who got trampled in Russia, or the transwoman gunned down in D.C.

(You can’t, of course. They’re dead.)

Library Pirates!

“This doesn’t make sense,” Baxter said, but the picture was getting clearer. He turned to Rodrigo. “Where were you before you found yourself here?”

Rodrigo’s brow furrowed. “We were on our ship, The Crimson Flame, being pursued by Sam Pike and his agents.” For a moment, he looked sheepish. “We had an—ah—surreptitious shipment to deliver to the coast of Italy.”

“Smugglers,” Baxter said, not noticing Rodrigo’s look of indignation. They started climbing again. “That makes sense. Is Sam Pike the law?”

Rodrigo smirked. “He’s a despicable rogue who uses the facade of the law for his own diabolical purposes.”

It was Baxter’s turn to smirk. “Whereas you’re a lovable rogue who fortunately can’t read the letter of the law.”

At first it looked like Rodrigo wasn’t sure which comment to take offense at, his roguishness or his illiteracy. Then he smiled. “So you find me lovable, guapo?”

Remember when I said I was taking part in a Round Robin writing project on Goodreads? Well, I finally finished my installment and posted it in the wee hours of yesterday morning. You can check it out here. (I don’t think you need to be a Goodreads member to see it, but if you are a member, go ahead and add me, and check out my next novel—and that ends today’s obligatory blatant self-promotion). I’m the fourth writer in the round, so be sure to start with part one and check out the others as well. It’s pretty fun! Especially considering that the story prompt was the phrase “library pirates.”

Give it away, give it away now

Remember when I said one of my goals for 2014 was to blog more? Yeah, I’ve clearly been having trouble with that over the past couple weeks. I’ve been trying to line up some promotional things for The Unwanted, and then there’s the whole grad school and thesis business, plus the literary magazine’s contest deadlines may have closed, but that means the reading and the judging has started, which pretty much requires most of my brain’s RAM to keep track of.

Sleep? I vaguely remember sleep.

But! I do have one thing to mention, and it’s not about The Unwanted. As I mentioned earlier this year, Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction came out. It’s the follow-up to Fool For Love, which contained my first fiction publication, “At the End of the Leash.” Foolish Hearts contains my story “Tea,” and I’m giving away a copy on Goodreads! Check it out:

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Foolish Hearts
by Timothy J. Lambert

Giveaway ends March 11, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

You like free, right? Of course you do. Normally I like to describe myself as cheap and easy, but this time I’m FREE and easy. What’s not to like?