Stephanie Feldman is joining us today to talk about her short story collection, The Night Parade and Other Stories. Here’s the publisher’s description:
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.
What’s Stephanie’s favorite bit?
There are five characters in “The Barrens,” my story about a group of teenagers searching for an advertised party in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, who end up running for their lives from the ghosts, monsters, and killers native to that haunted place. As you read, you discover a sixth character: the narrator tracking their speeding car and then racing feet over dark roads, rickety bridges, and cursed hills.
Can I tell you about how much I love this narrator—their snark and compassion, their taste in music, and their secret history—without telling you who they are? What a trick to pull off—in a blog post, let alone an unspooling novelette.
My favorite trick, as a reader and as a writer, is the surprise narrator, the one who’s been talking to you all along, whispering in your ear, without you even realizing it. I love the moment you start to clock the hints about their identity, the instant you catch them in your peripheral vision, and, maybe, full head-on reveal.
I published my first novelbefore I ever wrote a short story. I thought I was a novelist by nature, single-minded and maximalist, but once I started experimenting with short fiction, I fell in love with its particular opportunities, like locking into one intense moment (like in “The Children’s Cabinet” or “The Getaway”), playing with a comic premise (“The Annual Conference of the Ladies in White”), or letting a character lean into their worst instincts without giving them a way out (“The Witch of Osborne Park”).
Short stories are also a lower-stakes way to take on new challenges. For “The Barrens,” that meant an omniscient voice carefully moving between the five teenagers, each with their own secret desires are fears. When the narrator emerged, they were as much a surprise to me as they will be for the reader. I discovered a similar turn in “The Staircase,” the other story in my collection about teenagers. It’s about best friends who explore a staircase cut into a hillside, reputed to disappear anyone who walks down. Again, I had a plan. This was going to be my “plural narrator” story, “we” being the perfect point of view for a story about intense friendships among young women.
But then… someone else showed up.
I’ll say no more about her here.
LINKS:
BIO:
Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia, a Locus Award finalist, and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, Crawford Fantasy Award winner, and Mythopoeic Award finalist. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.
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