Patrick Strickland

@patrickobrienstrickland.com

1848 Followers 3086 Following

Writer from Texas Managing editor @inkstickmedia.com Books: A History of Heartache (2026), You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave (2025), The Marauders (2022) & Alerta! Alerta! (2018)

Chapter 16 review of A History of Heartache: “The world depicted in Patrick Strickland’s debut story collection, A History of Heartache, is thick with undercurrents of personal violence, addiction, cynicism, and economic instability. Jobs are scarce and menial. Drugs are abundant. Parents slosh their wine and whiskey. Kids get high and play too rough. Through his vivid, voice-driven prose, Strickland mingles societal crises and systemic obstacles with his characters’ attempts at personal survival or redemption. Strickland’s stories persistently braid these elements together as they work to generate the stories’ thematic power.”
Why Donald Trump Just Can’t Stop Going to War When Imperial America Offers Help, It Just Might Get You Killed BY PATRICK STRICKLAND After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs on a country of some 93 million people. Trump soon put out a video address, telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Around the time that video appeared, Iranians in the city of Minab were sorting through the corpses of more than 165 people killed in an airstrike on an elementary school for girls.
Stories of addiction and underemployment feature in the bare-knuckled fiction debut from journalist Strickland (You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave). The unnamed narrator of the title entry, a high school senior, dreams about heading to California from his hometown in north Texas, leaving behind his alcoholic mother and memories of his older brother who died at age 16 from a heroin overdose. In “Mockingbirds,” a former teacher, now mopping floors at an abortion clinic, is hounded by an anti-abortion protester intent on making him into a villain online. In “Rent Money,” a woman in her early 20s comes to terms with the shortcomings of her 41-year-old husband, a heavy-drinking slumlord for “meth monsters” who tries to goad her into collecting rent, a far cry from the “clean, simple life” he promised her when they got married five years earlier. Strickland laces his hardscrabble scenes with lyricism, as in “Screaming East on I-10,” when a young drifter living alongside crack addicts describes taking a hit of the drug, then notices how “night bruises the sky purple.” In each piece, grief underscores the characters’ recklessness, imbuing the collection with an unsentimental but tender emotional register. Strickland’s humane depictions of people living on the margins acknowledge the forces that shape them.