Christopher Ryan is the author of the poetry collection The Bible of Animal Feet published by Farfalla Press. His entry in Nathan Bransford’s 2nd Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge was picked out by The New Yorker magazine as their favorite finalist.
Ryan received his MFA from Naropa University and is represented by the literary agency Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.
Ryan lives in Helsinki, Finland, where he is at work on his third novel. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in magazines and journals throughout the United States, including an excerpt from his third novel, Pogue, on Acapella Zoo, the short story “Work History” on Pank, a column on life as an expatriate in Finland on the Nervous Breakdown, and “Angel Lust” in the anthology Ride: Short Stories About Bicycles.
I edited Ryan’s debut novel, The Ishmael Blade, an ‘edgy’ cross-country road trip story. Young, tattooed, and scarified, Fallon and the pregnant woman he loves flee together through one small American town after another, gambling their way out of a terrible secret toward a future they neither believe in nor understand. Finally, as they reach the edge of the continent and safety on a small sailboat, their tormentors catch up with them, and Fallon must sacrifice either the old, scarred brass Ishmael Blade he carries as a talisman or risk his life in mortal terror of sharks among recently-bloodied ocean waves.
I also worked with Ryan on the development of his second novel, Heliophobia. Murray the heliophobe is terrified of sunlight, so when he falls for the mysterious, acerbic Jet and she steals the manuscript that is his one passion in life, he must track her and retrieve the manuscript without losing his sanity to the sun that haunts him. However, the secret to Murray’s manuscript is the secret of a different kind of theft. And a lonely country town eventually corners Murray under the pitiless sky.
In addition, I helped Ryan developmentally with the beginning of his third novel, Pogue, in which a solitary man seeking isolation on a small, abandoned island learns there is not only a complex community on these shores, each member fighting out their own hidden agenda, but a civil war approaching that he cannot possibly escape.
Ryan says:
“Victoria did everything that I both hoped and feared she’d do: challenged me, pushed me, and motivated me. She showed me where I was pulling my punches and where I went astray. She helped me see how excision is a means to enriching a text, and helped me bring to life the ideas and tension I was striving for. Be warned: hiring Victoria will not get you out of doing work. It will, in fact, double your load, make your brain hurt, and cause you a bit of grief. That is what you want—to become a better writer.”