Kyllikki Rytov
writer. rhetorician. researcher.
impertinent curiosity.
About Me
I grew up with words. Word puzzles like Jumble and cryptoquips after school with my grandmother. Games of Scrabble with her and my mother; Boggle with my father. When my uncle upgraded to a personal computer in the early Nineties, I inherited his electronic word processor. I've never not written stories and narratives.
In grade school, I graduated from four- and five-line stories at the age of ten on my grandmother’s 1920s Underwood typewriter to stories with actual chapters on my first personal computer in 1993 (a hulking Packard Bell). The first short story I drafted, I didn’t even save because I was afraid that selecting “Save” in the menu would somehow explode the tower. My influences at the time included Lois Duncan and Lois Lowery, Caroline B. Cooney and Mary Downing Hahn, Richie Tankersley Cusick and Christopher Pike, Vivian Van Velde, and Agatha Christie, Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker.
In those same years, songwriting became an outlet for me. Influenced by Noel Gallagher, Gene’s Martin Rossiter, and the lyricism of Britpop songs like Sleeper’s “What Do I Do Now,” I crafted quite the modest oeuvre, and dozens of lyrics with personal musical notations (I couldn’t yet read music) exist somewhere on diskettes in my childhood home’s basement.
By the time I reached college and graduate school, my influences had diversified: Heller’s Catch-22, Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and E.E. Cummings, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and anything at all from the fingertips of Mikhail Bulgakov, with The Master and Margarita ranking as my favorite novel ever.
All this is to say, in an age of genAI, I have my bona fides, and they include my doctoral work—
My entrée into rhetoric as a field of study was dual-pronged: as a poet-songwriter and fiction writer, I was always obsessed with words and their abilities to create worlds—to create meaning and identity and to communicate emotion—but I was exposed to rhetoric, as its own discipline, when I was afforded the opportunity to study abroad at the Université de Caen, Basse-Normandie, during college. There, M. Rogues taught a course on Aristotelian rhetoric that opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about how words work to make meaning.
A native of northern Kentucky, I now reside in the Greater Cincinnati area with my family and pets. When I'm not writing or with my children, I can be found cooking (but not baking—"Season with your heart" is odds with the science of baking, I've learned the hard way); working in my garden, where my methods are best described as chaotic native; and swimming or biking or practicing on the silk or lyra. I have an especial affinity for the lines and shapes of Art Deco and Brutalism, and while I'm allergic to hyperbole, I quite enjoy gluten. My favorite cocktails play with the flavors of lychee, elderflower, and blackcurrant.
My worldview is rooted in social justice and in the recurring question, “Whose voices?” For me, rhetoric is never merely a neutral art of persuasion; it is always already bound up with power, authority, access, and the embodied and historical conditions under which some people are invited to speak while others are silenced, elided, or excluded. Although Sophistic rhetoric usefully unsettles fixed truth by emphasizing contingency, situated knowledge, and probability, it can still retain a speaker-centered model of persuasion wherein the (traditionally male) rhetor remains the agent of change, while listeners are positioned less as co-knowers than as audiences whose beliefs may be corrected, redirected, or improved—similarily, writing that presumes to teach the reader a lesson risks enacting ego rather than invitation. Against this tradition, my worldview stems from a different premise: that students, readers, and listeners are not empty or broken and thus waiting to be filled or repaired by someone else’s superior discourse. They are already situated knowers whose experiences, languages, histories, and communities matter. My work as a teacher and educator, then, is not to reproduce rhetoric as domination or coercion, but to approach rhetoric as an ethical practice involving listening for commonalities and for differences, curiosity and inquiry, accountability, and shared meaning-making. My work as a writer is to respect my readers and invite them into different experiences and worlds, where they might find a momentary new friend in a main character or perhaps see part of themselves in a character.
dispatches in situ (rhetoric substack)
counterfile (true crime investigations)
short fiction (selected short fiction)
support my work (no one becomes an educator for the money)