M. Rickert
M. Rickert also writes under the name Mary Rickert. How did this happen and why, you might ask. It is a reasonable question but that does not mean the answer is reasonable as well. There was a time when M. was a young writer, scribbling in notebooks and on the back of envelopes, who thought she wanted to disappear behind the stories she wrote. (She still feels that way, and rather enjoys writing about herself in the third person as if she were someone else.) After years of rejections M. began publishing under the mysterious moniker, and was happy doing so, until she began to feel that she was repeating herself, or (and this is the weird part) repeating someone else who she once had been. At the age of 51 she decided to go back to school and earned her MFA as well as the rest of her name. She also wrote a novel, The Memory Garden, to be published in May, 2014.
“All life is death. You don't fool yourself about this anymore. You slash at the perfect canvas with strokes of paint and replace the perfect picture of your imagination with the reality of what you are capable of. From death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create. This is what it means, you finally realize, to be alive. ("The Chambered Fruit")”
“The dead are jealous, jealous, jealous and they will do anything to keep you from the living, the lucky living. They will argue with you, and distract you, and if that doesn't work, they will even let you hug them, and dance for you, and kiss you, and laugh, anything to keep you. The dead are selfish. Jealous. Lonely. Desperate. Hungry. ("The Chambered Fruit")”