Our latest Flash In Five comes from Corey Farrenkopf
Winnebago (click title to read)
Idea: For a number of years, during summers, I worked as a Cemetery Landscaper for the town of Harwich, on Cape Cod (MA). There’s a cemetery called Pine Grove and it’s over on the townline, and in order to get to it, you had to pass down a road that had this dilapidated yellow Winnebago in the front yard. The windows were smashed. The metal trim was rusting. Vines were starting to grow over it. Whenever I see something like that, I’m always like “This needs to end up in a story.” Most of my flash pieces start this way. With a singular image or place and then I populate them with characters and just see what they’ll do with the object/in the space.
Development: I love ghost stories and stories of the uncanny, so typically when I settle into a specific place to write about/specific image to write about, ghosts are usually the next thing to show up. Without fail, the ghosts are almost always there…either literally or figuratively. Often times, my work straddles the literary/genre line (these days it’s almost always Horror/Sci-fi/Fantasy). When I lean into genre, I feel like I can place any kind of supernatural monster in a flash…or aliens…or like ancient squid gods, but when I’m writing more literary fiction, I feel like ghosts seem to be more accepted by magazines that lean in that direction instead of Zombies or Werewolves. I might be wrong, but based on my submissions history, that seems to be the way of things.
Living on Cape Cod, there’s always the looming spectre of turning a part of your house into an AirBNB for some extra money…or making your shed into a “unique camping experience” even though it doesn’t have electricity or insulation. A number of hotels/inns around where I live claim to be haunted and use it in their advertisements and listings, so the two ideas just blended naturally for me. Most of my stories come to me organically without a lot of pre-writing, or really much thought at all (usually when I try to outline a flash piece it just goes nowhere and dies in my head). I often just have to trust in the image/place and just start writing and see where it goes. I couldn’t tell you where the ghost doing the crossword puzzle came from, but it provided some much needed humor for this piece, otherwise it would have been wicked grim.
Editing: This went through three edits before I sent it off to SmokeLong. First I went through and polished up the language, messing around with fragmentation, reordering a few of the quick vignettes inside the story. Then my wife, Gabrielle Griffis, who is also a flash writer, took a look and gave me some developmental critiques. Then the last edit, after addressing her comments, was the standard “read it out loud and make sure it doesn’t sound like gobbledigook” edit. After Smokelong accepted the piece, we did multiple rounds of edits, most of which were focused on retooling the first two paragraphs and cutting weasel words.
Submitting: SmokeLong Quarterly was the first flash magazine I ever read, so it became the magazine I always sent my pieces to first. I dreamed of being published by them and because of this so many of my stories were drafted around their aesthetic.They were the only place I sent this one to (because their turn around time is so quick it never makes sense to do simultaneous subs with them)…and after a rewrite request, they took it. It was one of the most straightforward submission stories I’ve got. Most rack up a dozen or so rejections before they find a home.
Reflections: After writing so many stories that orbit around ghosts, you really gain perspective on the different forms a ghost story can take. Like the difference between an actual haunting and a believed haunting, actually having someone encounter a ghost or just hint at their existence in a place. There’s the humorous ghost story and the ghost story about loss that you can’t have any humor in at all or else it will sour the whole thing. The ghost story where the ghost is terrifying. The ghost story where the ghost is comforting. There are so many different directions they can take. This one really hit the sweet spot between being super doom and gloom and having a little comedic light to it.
One of the things I like to tell people if they reach out to me about being stuck on a story is kind of like that old Raymond Chandler quote, but instead of “have a guy show up with a gun” when you’re stumped, I say, “throw a ghost in there if you don’t know where your story is going.” I live by this rule and it never steered me wrong đ
Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Gabrielle, and their tiny dog, Ooli. Corey works as a librarian. His stories have been published in The Southwest Review, Vastarien, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, SmokeLong Quarterly, Reckoning, Bourbon Penn, Tiny Nightmares, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Living in Cemeteries, will be published by JournalStone in April of 2024. He is also the Fiction Editor for the Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on twitter as @CoreyFarrenkopf or on TikTok @CoreyFarrenkopf or on Instagram @Farrenkopf451 or, if that isnât overwhelming enough, on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com
He’s always writing ghost stories.