“Ghost Stories,” “Hauntings” and “Memory”
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of this interview series here at Cemetery Dance online and over on my YouTube channel where we explore the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror, dark fiction, and more.
My stories often operate with Night Time Logic. My latest book, Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories, out now from Cemetery Dance Publications, is full of these kind of subtle, strange, and intentionally ambiguous tales.
Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to speak with acclaimed, multi-award winning author Jeffrey Ford about ghost stories and more. Here is a video of one of his appearances for the Night Time Logic series on YouTube.
Today we focus on one of his most recent stories, a ghost story that appeared in the journal Conjunctions, and we begin… at the end.
DANIEL BRAUM: Wonderful to talk to you again about ghost stories, Jeff. I recently read your story “Plunged in the Years” which is the final story in Conjunctions #83: Revenants, The Ghost Issue co-edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow.
For those who may be unfamiliar, Conjunctions is a long running bi-annual publication of fabulism and genre short stories. Over the years it has featured work from horror authors readers of Cemetery Dance will know, such as Peter Straub.
Jeff, a spoiler warning will be included at the start of this interview instructing readers to grab a copy and read the story before this interview, so our conversation will be full of spoilers. In fact, my first question starts with the last line of the story.
Who was that old writer and when did they mention that wonderful and insightful notion?
JEFFREY FORD: I’m the old writer. When I taught composition for 40 plus years, I’d start the semester by asking the students to write a ghost story. I didn’t give them many guidelines except for the fact that I wanted a story that had really occurred in life, not something stolen from the TV or a movie. I did add that they could fictionalize it once they had the kernel of a real life ghost story. If they were stuck, I’d tell them to ask their parents or grandparents or friends. I wanted them to write a story without any apparatus or instruction as far as writing went and see what they came up with. Once they had that down, we could later mess around with it and revise. At the end of my giving them the assignment, I’d always say, “Remember, sometimes for a ghost story, you don’t even need a ghost. All you need is a haunting.”
I love stories where setting is forward and clearly defined from the onset, so when I peeked at yours upon receiving my copy, I was delighted to see it begins in the Sunken Forest on Fire Island, a National Sea Shore off the South of Long Island, New York.
Tell us about this place. When were you last there for a visit?
The first time I was there was around 1970, we’d go over to Fire Island on the ferry from Bayshore on the south shore of Long Island. It would dock in Kismet and we’d bring blankets and sleeping bags and lots of booze and sleep out on the beach after traveling from one small town to the next and hitting the bars, getting chased by the cops. One night we were restless and just kept walking. Eventually we found ourselves in Sunken Forest. None of us knew anything about it. It’s an ancient ecosystem, existing behind layers of dunes. These rare Holly trees grow there and there’s a deer population. Back then, there was less deer and more forest. It was like stumbling into some enchanted fairy tale world that first time we were there. The last time I was there I was with Lynn and we set out to go there based on my distant memory. That was about two years ago. We took the ferry over from Sayville on the south shore of Long Island. Still, an amazing place.
Over the years you’ve written “yourself” or a character named “Jeff Ford” as the protagonist of your stories. What informed the choice to do so in this story. Going out on a limb here, is this story non-fiction? No matter what the answer the story has an amazing verisimilitude and emotional reality.
Everything in this story is absolutely true, which is the answer to why I used myself as a character. It’s my estranged relationship with my older brother that the story is about. After assigning the ghost story to my students for decades, I finally assigned it to myself. It appeared in the ghost story issue of Conjunctions edited by Brad Morrow and Joyce Carol Oates, Revenants. When they got in touch with me to do a story for that book, it was pretty soon after I learned, in a surprising way, that my brother had died.
The loss of him, after we’d denied each other for years from the time our father passed away, struck me deeply. When they asked for the story, I was like here’s my opportunity to get this down on paper. Was it scary? I wasn’t sure. Did it fit the submission request? I didn’t know, but I didn’t give a shit either. I had to tell that story. It’s come to me since it’s been published that it is definitely a ghost story, the kind we all experience at least once in our lives, It’s about regret, about what really matters in the long run, what we deny ourselves for reasons of pettiness and vanity, and the finality of death.
Nostalgia. Grief. Mourning. Memory. Family relations are all elements in play in our favorite ghost stories. How and why do these elements make such fertile ground for ghost stories? And how do they come into play in “Plunged in the Years”?
I think I answered that one above. But I will tell you something about this story. A couple of years ago, Lynn and I were staying in a hotel out in the middle of the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. She went out with her friends one day, and I stayed in the room. I had the computer with me, and a request for a ghost story. I sat down and banged out “Plunged In The Years.” It came to me so easily, just a matter of remembering what happened. I read through it a few times and tweaked it. I felt the presence of the past in it.
Lynn returned and we went out to dinner. Before going to bed that night, I opened the computer to read through the story again. That’s when I discovered it had vanished. Nowhere on the computer. I know I saved it. Besides, there was no reason for it to have been lost. The computer was still on and plugged in and open. If there’d been a sudden loss of power my computer would have held onto it. The story became a ghost. When I got back to Ohio, I rewrote it from memory. I think it came out pretty close to what it had been, but there was this one small part. I can’t even remember what it was about, a glimpse, but I felt its loss in the finished piece. A haunting.
How does “Plunged in the Years” approach what it means to be haunted, what it means to be a ghost, what it means for a story to be a ghost story?
I don’t know if it’s expanding anything. Once you’re haunted, you’re fucking haunted. All the stuff about expansion is stuff I never think about. I’ll leave that conjecture for someone more qualified. My interest is focused on the discovery and writing of the story.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab’s Return, and Out of Body. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, The Best of Jeffrey Ford, and Big Dark Hole. Ford’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies from Tor.com to Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to McSweeney’s to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories and been widely translated. It has garnered World Fantasy, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Nebula, awards and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year mention.
DANIEL BRAUM is the author of Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories out now from Cemetery Dance Publications.
