Ryan Dennis is the author of the novel The Beasts They Turned Away, published by époque press in March 2021, as well as the memoir Barn Gothic: Three Generations and the Death of the Family Dairy Farm (Island Press, 2025). He is a Fulbright alumnus and PhD in creative writing, and has taught writing at the University of Education, Schwäbisch Gmünd, the National University of Ireland, Galway, University College Dublin and Maynooth University, where he was the writer-in-residence in 2021-2022. His work has appeared in various literary journals, such as The Cimarron Review, New England Review, Fourth Genre, and The Threepenny Review. Ryan is also a syndicated columnist for agricultural print journals in four countries and two languages.
In addition to exploring the dynamics of rural life in literature, Ryan also seeks to serve those communities more directly. In 2020 he founded The Milk House, an initiative to showcase the work of those writing on rural subjects in order to help them find greater audiences. As part of the writer-in-residency in Maynooth, he created and edited Voices from the Land, a collection of short stories, essays and poems by Irish farmers.
You can find the official author page of Ryan Dennis here.
You can also email him directly: RyanDennis@themilkhouse.org.
When Ryan Dennis’s father was crushed by heavy machinery on their New York dairy farm, both men accepted the accident as a risk of agricultural life. But it was harder to comprehend being crushed by low milk prices, big banks, and the policies that destroyed America’s family farms.
Even though Ryan grew up watching his father and grandfather struggle to survive, he always thought he would follow in their footsteps and take over the family farm. But as he milked cows and fed calves, the world outside the barn was changing. Between 2003 and 2020, 40,000 dairy farms went out of business in the United States.
Barn Gothic is an elegy for family farmers and an intimate portrait of three generations laboring to be fathers and sons while their livelihood falls apart. Beautifully told with a farmer’s restraint and a poet’s grace, it is a story of personal loss amid corporate corruption and of finding a way forward when everything you know disappears.
Íosac Mulgannon is a man called to stand.