Rickert, M. 1959- (Mary Rickert)

PERSONAL:

Born December 11, 1959, in Port Washington, WI; married. Education: Attended college and the Squaw Valley Writing Workshop, NY.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cedarburg, WI.

CAREER:

Writer. Once worked as an artist's assistant.

WRITINGS:

Map of Dreams (short stories), foreword by Christopher Barzak, afterword by Gordon Van Gelder, Golden Gryphon Press (Urbana, IL), 2006.

Contributor of short stories to anthologies, including The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin Grant; and Year's Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Ideomancer.

SIDELIGHTS:

M. Rickert is a noted science fiction, fantasy, and horror short-story writer. Her first collection of sixteen previously published short stories and a novella, Map of Dreams, "serve as a generous introduction to Rickert's to-the-bone slant on fiction," according to EDGE Boston Web site contributor Kilian Melloy. The stories often focus on family loss, such as the title novella about Annie Merchant, a woman whose six-year-old daughter was killed by a sniper while visiting New York. At a dinner party, An- nie meets a physicist whose talk about time leads Annie to seek a way back to her daughter and, ultimately, to an exploration of her grief. A contributor to the Shaken & Stirred Web site commented that the novella "is as wonderful as anything else Rickert has written." The short stories range from "Art Is Not a Violent Subject," about a statue created to live, to "Many Voices," a story about a female killer who believes she is following the instructions of an angel. "Rickert's genius, I think, is for the subjective—for making us distrust her narrators and making us question what sort of story we're in—and for evoking that discomfort amidst the detail of everyday life," wrote Niall Harrison on the Strange Horizons Web site. Melloy noted: "Love, hate, grief, hunger: all the basic drives are here, with big white teeth, and it's sometimes hard to say if they're grinning with innocent pleasure or predatory cunning."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

EDGE Boston,http://www.edgeboston.com/ (January 17, 2007), Kilian Melloy, review of Map of Dreams.

Ideomancer.com,http://www.ideomancer.com/ (December 11, 2006), John Joseph Adams, "Interview: M. Rickert"; (July 17, 2007), Charles Coleman Finlay, interview with author.

Shaken & Stirred,http://gwendabond.typepad.com/ (September 6, 2006), review of Map of Dreams.

Strange Horizons,http://www.strangehorizons.com/ (March 19, 2007), Niall Harrison, review of Map of Dreams.