Hey Everyone,
Long time no newsletter...right? Such is life. Things have been extremely busy over my way. Lots of good stuff...lots of content creation over on my Instagram (@CoreyFarrenkopf for anyone who wants to see endless weird book recommendations and hidden/not so hidden self-promotion)...and lots of endless novel edits. I'll blame that for neglecting this little fella (and when I'm in novel mode, the short stories have to wait until I trudge through all those pages). This is kind of the cyclical pattern of my writing life. It usually takes me 3-5 months to draft a novel, then I send it to beta readers. While it's with my beta readers, I write as many short stories as I possibly can. Then I get the novel back, do the edits, and send it out for another read...and again, I get to return to short story land (such a glorious magical place) until those edits come back. Then I do those edits and send it off to my agent...and while I wait for her (much appreciated) edits, it's back to short story land yet again. I imagine this will be the pattern of my (creative) life until I die, which is cool with me. Just got to keep putting those words down.
Speaking of words, here's your Corey Story for the month!
Two Cloves For A Dollar
The farm stand only sold garlic. Bulbs were twined together, their stalks woven into rough knots, hanging from the eaves of the small shed-like structure on the side of the road on my way to the AirBNB I’d rented for the night. Business had brought me out into the rural stretch of the state, all long meandering roads and telephone poles like giant crosses stitched down the line. An older woman in a broad sun hat sat beneath the awning, a hand chalked sign at her feet. Two cloves for a dollar. She didn’t look up from her book when I parked my car in the dirt turnoff, when I stepped in front of the shed, lifting the garlic to my nose, inhaling the slick savory aroma. The dried skin flaked in my palms, small clods of dirt coming loose beneath my fingers.
“Why only garlic? Is it the soil around here?” I asked.
The woman didn’t look up from her book. “Oh no dear. Plenty else grows well out here. The farms down the way harvest the largest summer squash you’ve ever seen. They do potatoes and corn too. Blueberries when the season’s right.”
“Is it just what you like to grow then?” I asked, retrieving a small blue cardboard box from the stand. I weighed a number of cloves in my palm, dropping them into the box as I shifted around the stand. There were several varieties. Fire garlic. Elephant garlic. Hardneck. Romanian Red. Each of varied sizes and scents. I added a number of each to my bin, tallying the total in my head. Good garlic was hard to come by where I was from.
“It’s more of a necessity. Someone around here has to grow it, considering what comes in the night,” she replied.
I dropped the garlic, cloves spilling across the dirt at my feet. I didn’t know if I heard her wrong, or if I should ask for clarification as I knelt and began to hurriedly place the bulbs back into the cardboard. There were always odd rumors about this part of the state. Vanishings. Ghost girls on the highways. Things tearing through the trees, just a blur on a cellphone screen. I never took stock in it, but I’d also never traveled so far away from home.
“People seem to forget. They’ve got their doors and their locks and their alarm systems, those fancy cameras, but that doesn’t mean they’re all gone. No. It just means they’re finding more creative ways of getting in. And trust me, get in they do,” the woman said, lowering her book to her lap. Across her face were a number of furrowed scars healed darker than her pale skin. They were spread out in descending lines, almost like fingers, almost like claws or teeth or something else I couldn’t fathom. My eyes fell to her neck, searching for the twin scars I’d seen in all the movies, but she dropped her head once more, the brim of her sun hat obscuring her physicality. “Make sure you get enough.”
My tongue caught in my throat. Words escaped me. I hurriedly pulled out my wallet and tossed two ten dollar bills at the woman, a decent amount more than I actually owed. She didn’t laugh or recite some cryptic prayer as I ran to my car. Instead, she bent down to the dirt and lifted the bills before the wind could catch them and spirit them away. I didn’t know if what the woman said was true, or if she was just making the most out of an unfortunate accident and the constraints of capitalism, but either way, I didn’t want to wait around long to find out. I wasn’t familiar with this side of the state and the sun was setting soon.
I had an AirBNB to find, a door to lock, and garlic to cook.
Stephanie Feldman’s Top 5 and New Collection!!!
Our visiting author of the month is Stephanie Feldman, for which I'm pumped! I was a huge fan of her novel, Saturnalia, and when I heard she had a short story collection coming out, I knew I had to ask her to stop by the newsletter for some short story recs and to sing the joys of her new collection. There are few things better than singing the joys of a new short story collection.
So here’s a little about Stephanie’s new collection!!!
A teenage girl realizes her lifelong best friends are being seduced by a supernatural force, and must choose between being alone and being ensnared together. A young woman in a troubled relationship finds herself caught between two versions of the same boyfriend—one volatile, and one too good to be true. A lonely mother fears her young child’s best friend is a witch. And, in the titular novella, a new widow must decide how far she’s willing to go to steal her husband back from the dead.
In The Night Parade and Other Stories, Stephanie Feldman revisits the mid-Atlantic’s eerie legends and settings to explore complicated friendships, romantic entanglements, motherhood, and grief with a deft hand, a piercing eye, and a feminist twist.
And here’s a pre-order link from Fairwood Press!
And here's Stephanie’s 5 story recs:
I’ve been teaching fiction workshops at universities and online (now via the Writing Co-Lab) for over a decade, so when it came time to share five stories, I thought about the ones I’ve taught the most. When I select a story for a syllabus, I choose it because it’s instructive for a specific craft purpose: usually structure, character arc, voice, or place. But the stories I return to again are also the ones that hit me hard, and teach me something new, with each successive reading.
“Interesting Facts” by Adam Johnson
This is my favorite story by one of my favorite authors, Adam Johnson, who writes with effortless authority about everything from North Korea to Kurt Cobain to this. a marriage complicated by illness, kids, and professional jealously. Our narrator—a breast cancer survivor, mother, failed writer, and wife of a famous author—begins with a cryptic line: “Interesting fact: Toucan cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver.” She returns to a deceptively straightforward voice as she navigates her husband’s media events and women fans, her children’s fear, and the aftermath of her own illness. Soon we move deeper into her unpublished novels, the toxic give-and-take between her stories and her husband’s, and his strained relationship with his Native heritage. The narrative walks the line between bitterness and love, and then breaches that line into something much more mysterious and existentially wrenching. I use this story to teach voice and subtext, but also because it gives me chance to exclaim over the magic trick of its midpoint. It dissolves and reconstitutes itself, and draws us into the narrator’s spiraling perspective. Together, we fail to realize what’s right in front of us until it’s too late.
“Walkdog” by Sofia Samatar
“Walkdog” asks us to play along with a love-it-or-hate-it conceit: the story is a high school research paper, written with the B-writing skills of teenage Yolanda, who also attaches footnotes to each page. Her answer to Mrs. Patterson’s prompt to “Know Your Environment” is a description of the cryptid walkdog. But Yolanda has greater secrets to reveal. Her real world leaks through her initial snarky front: high school is a war, and hopeless nerd Andy is her only hope for vision and authenticity. The mysterious hound walkdog—subject of urban legends, news reports, and blues songs—can release a mournful howl through your nighttime window and draw you on an epic trek. It might destroy you, but it might save you, too. I use this story to demonstrate how character arcs power unconventional and nonlinear narratives, and how voice builds momentum and catharsis. I’ve read this story more times than maybe any other—I’ve taught it nearly every semester for the last decade—and always discover something new in the layered structure and Yolanda’s raw fury, guilt, desperation, love, and unexpected lyricism.
“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”
“Aimee’s big trick is that she makes 26 monkeys vanish on stage.” With this first sentence, Kij Johnson announces the entire conflict, story, and world. Aimee shepherds her monkeys with a traveling circus, and each night, they climb into a suspended bath tub and disappear, only to trickle back into Aimee’s trailer through the night, sometimes bringing gifts from their unknown journeys. Aimee doesn’t know how they do it, and she’s determined to find out. But this isn’t Aimee’s real problem, as the fractured narrative—broken into brief numbered sections that mimic Aimee’s own alienation—reflects. The story is elegant in its simplicity, nuanced in voice and detail, and emotionally powerful, as we get closer to the ailing Zeb (monkey), sweet Geoff (human/boyfriend), and Aimee’s own suppressed sorrow.
“Listening” by Joan Aiken
My students mostly love—or at least appreciate—the other stories on this list. Joan Aiken’s “Listening” drives them crazy. I’ve begun to feel like a troll assigning it! But I can’t stop, because it sets aside all of my easily articulable rules about character desire and plot beats as it follows Middlemass, sent to evaluate a teacher who instructs her high school students on “listening” using a vast tape library of quotidian and exotic sounds. This odd encounter triggers a series of increasingly eerie—and yet, so plausible and realistic—coincidences that force Middlemass into a confrontation with his own mysterious self. As writers and readers, students and teachers, authors and editors, we often have to boil a story down to a pitch sentence or two. “Listening” reminds us that a story requires every single word to express its true meaning.
“Monstress” by Lysley Tenorio
In my classes, I often present a lesson on some craft rule, and then assign a story that successfully breaks that rule. So while I framed this list as a syllabus excerpt, I’ve never assigned this final story—but it’s one I think about often. Reva Gogo is a would-be “Filipina Sophia Loren” who plays B-movie monsters in Manila’s film industry, and then in Hollywood (or Pasadena). But the story isn’t about her ambitions, but about her desire for love, and the complicated relationships with the men who cast and film her. The beautiful ending launches to a birds-eye view of these episodes in Reva’s life, and lets us see why it all mattered, even if no one else in her life has understood.
Upcoming (Corey) publications:
June is going to be a cool month in the short story realm for me. I have two stories I'm very proud of coming out in magazines I love. My story, "Grave Bells" about a nightmarish burial practice in an eco-horror ravaged future will be hanging out in the June issue of Fusion Fragment (there's always something in the water!!!). My other story, "The Not Dog Thing" will be landing with one of my all time favorite litmags (that has been supporting my writing since the publication of my story "What Friends Don't Tell Friends About Basements" in 2020), Bourbon Penn, in June also. This one is about a mourning father who gets way to into TikTok naturalism and finds something a little (or A LOT!!!) uncanny out in a snowy forest. I'm wicked proud of both of these and hope you'll consider checking them out when they land.
Here’s Bourbon Penn’s Website: https://www.bourbonpenn.com
Here’s Fusion Fragment’s Website: https://www.fusionfragment.com
As always, thanks for stopping by and spending some time with my words. I always appreciate the support and hope whatever you're reading at the moment is wonderful and just what you need.
Be well everyone!
-Corey