What We Lost in the Fire and Other Stories

Even as they blur distinctions between fiction and memoir, the daring, challenging stories in What We Lost in the Fire stretch and expand notions of queer lives—and of queer fiction writing. The eclectic geographies of these stories—Hawai‘i, Rome, a Texas prison, southwestern Ohio, New York, Florida, and still other, hybrid landscapes—are reflected in the rich, idiomatic voices of Ricketts’ characters. San Francisco, in particular, is as much a living presence in many of these stories as it is a setting, and the novella-length title story captures the nearly indescribable zeitgeist of queer life in “the City” during the plague years at the end of the last millennium. Throughout these fictions runs a dark, occasionally lacerating humor, a well-honed sense of both existential absurdity and the harrowingly high stakes of everyday love and trouble. Ricketts’ characters are messy. They have faults. They’re nobody’s role models. This memorable, richly varied collection of tales of ennui, bitterness, and violence; of rambunctious satires and carefully-drawn realism; of love stories (and a few hate stories); of studies in working-class revenge and working-class solidarity honors the distance traveled and the scars earned along the way. Queer literary fiction has a new champion.

Praise for What We Lost in the Fire

• Honorable Mention, 2020-2021 Rainbow Awards
• “What We Lost in the Fire examines a wide array of characters living their lives without a lot of pomp and circumstance, often just getting by. Ricketts’ gift is to make each examination a poetic journey…. Ricketts finds territories where other writers only find interstices, and what results is a collection of stories that uncovers powerful meanings in the most mundane spaces and times.” – Keith Banner, author of the short-story collections The Smallest People Alive and Next to Nothing; the novel The Life I Lead; and the anthology, This is True Love: Essays and Stories.
• [A]n eclectic gathering of stories about everyday people who discover that their lives are much bigger than the small spaces they have been expected to occupy…. Sexuality—as a topic that runs along the spine of many of the stories—is elevated deftly to a more sophisticated arena, away from familiar queer territory and toward poignancy. What impressive storytelling!” — Rigoberto Gonzalez, recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and author of What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood; The Book of Ruin; and Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa.
• “Ricketts’ stories are perfectly formed vignettes…. What’s so clever about the stories is how Ricketts writes in so many different voices—the tone, diction, pace of each story is markedly different…. Big recommend for this, especially the first story, ‘Yard Ball,’ whose twist hit me like a gut punch and got me hooked for the rest.” – Miguel Head, Instagram Reviewer
• “I was consistently impressed with the number and variety of narrators and other characters…. While all the stories were good, one in San Francisco in the 1950s and one in Rome around the year 2000 were especially beautiful…. [P]eople should read it. I’m glad I did.” – Elisa Rolle, Rainbow Awards