Eric Rickstad: Why I Needed to Write a Novel About Male Violence and Guns

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Lilith was an incredibly difficult novel to write. I lived with it in my head, and worked on it on and off, for nearly a decade.

September 2, 2015, the first morning I dropped my daughter off at pre-K, was one of joy and pride, until I saw the sign by the entrance that read, if blue or red lights are flashing do not enter— and when I tried to open the door, I found it was locked and the kids and parents had to be buzzed in. 

We live in a small Vermont town. We all know each other. Why did we need to be buzzed in as if entering the Pentagon? Why was there this menacing sign?

The joy quickly turned to fear and anxiety, and anger as I realized what that sign and those locked doors meant: The place that was supposed to be a haven of safety and learning and community and growing and bonding—and that had been so for the first two-hundred-plus years after this country’s founding—had become a common place of death and slaughter of our children and their educators.

Within days of that first drop-off, I learned that the school practiced scheduled “Lockdown Days” during which they prepared for that nightmare scenario, practiced for the day a gunman entered and killed as many kids as possible. A nightmare that should never happen even once. Ever. Not ever. Yet, in the past two decades, it happens again and again and again and again. In the eight years since that first day of pre-K, the violence has grown exponentially worse. We all know this. We all live it.

When I finished edits on Lilith last March 28, 2023, our country was one day removed from the Nashville Covenant School shooting. More children dead. More educators. And in the year since, there have been a hundred more mass shootings, in schools, workplaces, stores, places of worship. An entire town in Maine was locked down for days because of a man with a gun. Was he mentally ill? Perhaps. If so, red flags would have prevented him from buying the gun he used. But these shooting are not mental health issues. Why do I believe this? Because every single one of our school shootings was committed by a male. Every. Single. One. Women are as subject to mental illness as men. They have equal access to firearms as men. But not one single female has entered a school and killed are children.

This is a man issue. A male issue. As much as it is a gun issue.  It feeds into and spawns from the American male’s obsession with and myth making of guns and equating guns and violence with some sort of epitome of strength and manhood and right. It is males killing our children in our schools and it is males on Capitol Hill who block any real protection they might afford our kids form gun violence, all for the sake of their contrived view of the 2nd amendment. What happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

I believe that that there are many men who hide behind the 2nd Amendment; they use their absolutist take on their “right to guns” behind their real belief which is their “right to violence.” What are guns if not the symbol of violence and death?  

But what about the rest of us?

How did we arrive here? What has happened to us as a people, as a country, as a civilization, as a society, that are daily being forced to accept this as normal. Made to suffer the slaughter of our children and our neighbors in places where we ought to be safe? What have we become, and perhaps worse, what are we becoming? Where does this all lead? Where does it stop? Does it ever stop? Who will lead us, truly, truly lead us? What has to be done to stop it so our kids, and all of us, are safe from mass slaughter?

For years, I thought I could not write this book the way it needed to be written. I did not know how to write it. I tried. I tried it from many angles and from many points of view. It seemed somehow a topic that could not be broached, perhaps should not be broached, a topic I feared I could not handle. Yet it kept coming back, this feeling I have, and I know so many of us have, of rage and futility and pain, every time it happens again. Enough, we say. 

Enough. 

Yet it never ends.

Finally, I sat and wrote it in first person. I wrote it from the very place where these emotions, the helplessness and futility and rage, reside inside me. I wrote it as a parent of two young children who go to school every day, to a place we all know might not be safe, a place they might not come back from but should, always. I wrote it as an author, a human being, who knows that something is torn in our society, that something has gone terribly wrong for us to have ended up here. I wrote it as a man and a gun owner who believes in banning AR-15s that are designed and made only to kill human beings. I want to see permits, waiting periods, mental health red flags, guns taken from those convicted of domestic abuse, safe storage laws, mandatory trigger locks on guns stored at home, and more. As a man I am around other gun owners in private, and I know there is something broken in many, certain men, something that goes far back in time with the systems they create, the mythologies they push, the insecurities they hide and let bubble up in anger, and the places from which they draw what they see as strength. They are ugly, ugly places.

I wrote Lilith, most of all, as a parent daring to ask myself, What would I do, what might someone do, one day when enough really is enough? When a parent, when a mother, finally cannot tolerate the slaughter of our kids any longer?

My challenge was to handle the subject matter with a necessary sensitivity while at the same time be unsparing in my look at violence and the myth of violence and of men in our society. For it is always men who commit school shootings. This is stone cold fact. Not one female has ever been a school shooter. Not one. So, from this we can extrapolate that the mental health issue argument is a straw man. Mental health affects both men and women nearly equally, and women have equal access to guns as men, so why has no mentally ill woman ever committed one of the hundreds of school shootings, and fewer than 2% of all mass shootings? It is a gun problem, and a man problem. 

For some readers, it might be difficult to read. There is violence here. A violence we can barely speak of, cannot understand or make sense of. There is the despair we feel when nothing gets done to help stop it and there seems no end in sight. But there is also, I hope, love here, a love for our children, and a desire for change.

I can’t speak for anyone save myself, but as a writer, I needed to, I absolutely had to, take a long, hard, honest look at why we might be where we are. I needed to imagine one character’s attempt— a woman, a mother, an educator—to use the very violence men have forever forced upon women to change the course of things, to claim some agency—rightly or wrongly—not knowing if her actions would bring change for the better or for the worse.

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