Today’s Pride Month Interview is with author Jeffrey Ricker:
Hi, Jeff! I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during current events. What are you doing to stay creatively motivated in these unusual times?
Thanks, Anthony. I hope you're staying safe as well. I’m privileged in that my day job is such that I’ve been able to work from home, and I can afford to have things like groceries delivered. As a result, I’ve stayed home for about 99% of the past… how many months has it been, three? Four?
Creative motivation is another thing, though. I have not had as much luck in that department during this plague year. I try to cut myself some slack—there’s the day job, and up until the middle of May I was also teaching a class, so time has been short for a while. Besides, discipline and focus are a challenge for me at the best of times, anyway.
So I’ve focused on trying to finish things I’ve already started: short stories, a novel revision, that sort of thing. I’ve also been taking part as often as I can in a monthly flash fiction challenge that writer Cait Gordon organizes. She posts a prompt on the first Monday of the month based on some random playing card draws—one card for genre, one for setting, and one for an object to be included in the story. You’ve got a week to write a thousand words inspired by those elements and post it somewhere online. It’s been good fun, and I’m a big fan of prompts as a way to get the creative wheels turning. I use them a lot when I teach.
Recently, I think the dam may have broken when it comes to creating new work. I started developing characters for what will hopefully be my next book. It’s not the one I thought I’d work on next (I’ve had a few ideas floating around for a while), but sometimes the project chooses you rather than the other way around.
Since June is Pride Month, I have to ask: how has being queer influenced or informed your writing?
Honestly, I don’t think anything about the way I look at the world (i.e., highly suspicious and slightly terrified) would be the same if I wasn’t queer. I’d be hard pressed to pinpoint a part of my life that being queer hasn’t influenced. It’s kind of like the water a fish swims in—the fish takes it for granted.
I don’t think I should make too big a deal about feeling like queerness has given me an outsider’s perspective, because other than that, my identity (white cis male) is pretty much packed with privilege. Still, I feel like it made me an observer—partly as a survival instinct, I guess. But being observant also comes in handy as a writer.
Suffice it to say I have a hard time writing anything that doesn’t have queer characters in it—and besides, there’s more than enough non-queer books being written as it is, I think.
Whenever I interview someone for the first time, I always have to ask: what does your creative process look like?
I’m totally a process nerd, too. Right now, my own is a bit of a mess. I used to be a “go-upstairs-and-write-until-midnight” person, but the older I get, the more the midnight oil burns out around nine-thirty. I became a “get-up-early-and-write” person, but that was before my most recent day job (so, four years ago). Now, I get to write for maybe a half hour before work and an hour in the evening, if I’m lucky. I try to cram in as much as possible on the weekends. Since my social life is nil at the moment (it wasn’t all that before quarantine, either), that’s a bit easier to do.
What are you working on now and what do you have coming out soon?
In addition to the novel revision, the new novel, and the short stories I’m trying to finish up, I’m going through edits for a science fiction novella, The Final Decree, that I’m going to put out myself. The guy who’s doing the cover design, Matthew Bright, pretty much works magic. I can’t wait to show it off.
Other than that, I’m really perfecting my skills as a sourdough bread baker.
And finally, where can people find you and your work online?
The best place is probably jeffrey-ricker.com, where you can find out more about my books and how to read excerpts from them (try before you buy!), and there are also links to a lot of my stories, including many that can be read online.
Jeffrey Ricker is the author of Detours (2011) and the YA fantasy The Unwanted (2014). His stories and essays have appeared in Foglifter, Phoebe, Little Fiction, The Citron Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and others. A 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow and recipient of a 2015 Vermont Studio Center residency, he has an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and teaches creative writing at Webster University.