5 Things You Didn't Know About Me - Gabriel Ricard @HmGabeRicard

5 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ME
GABRIEL RICARD

5 Things You Don’t Know About Me
 
1.) I love the goddamned Golden Girls: I’m mentioning this because I’m sick to shit of people having “guilty pleasures”. If you like something, it’s not a guilty pleasure. It’s a pleasure. 
 
2.) I was born in Canada: This always seems to alarm, confuse, and potentially arouse racists who have strong “Not to sound racist…” opinions about immigration. They always seem to forget about white immigrants. Generally, this realization is followed by “Well, I’m sure you did it the RIGHT WAY.”
 
3.) I’ve logged about 50, 000 miles on Greyhound: Ask my immigration lawyer. I sent him dozens of tickets I had saved over the years (I believe they call it hoarding, but nuts to those fuckers, since it actually served a purpose). I’ve written a lot of travel essays, mostly for Drunk Monkeys, but people still think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. When you travel from one end of the United States to the other a few times, the miles accumulate. If you include car travel or trains, I don’t even know what the number might be. Yet I’ve never been outside of North America. I hope to change that.
 
4.) I’ve been a writer for almost 20 years: Bondage Night isn’t the first novel I wrote. Hopefully, it won’t be the last. It’s just the first one that’s getting published. I had a poetry collection come out a couple of years ago called Clouds of Hungry Dogs. The next one coming out is going to be called Love and Quarters. All of this is the insane accumulation of deciding when I was 12 years old that I wanted to write for a living. I had been writing for most of my childhood at that point, but it was at 12 that I understood that there was nothing else I really wanted to do with my life. I’ve expanded on that a little, but the main idea has remained the same. When I was 12, I started looking at ways to get published, and I started working on my craft. I’m still working on it, and there’s still a lot of things I’d like to do personally and professionally, but Bondage Night is the culmination of everything I have been working on for nearly the whole of my life. When I tell you about it, that’s what I’m essentially talking about.
 
5.) I own a lot of stuffed animals: I don’t have children. I have godchildren, but thank Christ, their parents are really healthy. But I collect stuffed animals, particularly bears and elephants. It’s a hobby I picked up as a kid. I’ve never really seen a reason to stop. It’s a weird contradiction to some of the other things I like, but it’s one I’m keeping. They cheer me up, and the list of things that can do that is becoming smaller and smaller these days. 

GABRIEL'S FIRST RELEASE FROM MORAN PRESS
BONDAGE NIGHT
VALENTINE'S DAY 2017