short story

My 1st book is here: Ghost in the Rain!

Matthew Jakubowski Leave a comment

It’s been a looong time since I posted here. So much has happened. (For the tldr version, head over to my fiction page. I’ve been busy!) But in the spirit of moving on, I’ll catch up on things later in future posts as time goes on.

My big news is that I’ve published my first chapbook! My first book of any kind, actually. It’s a collection of 12 microfictions and flash pieces called “Ghost in the Rain,” from indie publisher Bottlecap Press. It went on sale in late spring. I’m thrilled! I never thought I’d debut after 50, with a story collection, no less. But it’s a relief and a joy to see this book out in the world.

I’ve been very fortunate since its publication to have the book reviewed at Your Impossible Voice by Kelsey Squire. It’s a thoughtful, beautifully written (and glowing) piece of criticism. I’m honored.

I was also honored to be invited by Steve Himmer, one of the founders of Necessary Fiction, to write a short essay about how I assembled the collection. It’s a personal essay discussing pieces of my past that influenced and shaped these stories.  

Many thanks to everyone who’s bought the book, shared photos of it online, and been supportive in so many ways since it was released. I had no idea this was going to happen this year. The timeline from when I submitted the manuscript to Bottlecap Press to publication was so fast.  

I’ll share more details soon about a series of launch events I have brewing in the fall and into next year. Online events and in-person in Philadelphia. And in other cities, I hope – if you need readers or authors for your event or book group, let’s get in touch!

While I’m hyping my own book (and hopping around excitedly, but pretending to play it cool), I wanted to mention a couple books I’ve read lately that I loved. I got to hear Cara Benson read at Head House Books in Philly on her current tour. What a phenomenal reader and person. Her memoir, “An Armsfull of Birds,” is stunning, full of grief, hope, and wisdom about love. Here’s a link to an interview she did about the book with Cheryl Strayed.

I also got to meet flash writer Elizabeth Rosen this summer at the Barrelhouse Writers Camp (more on this later, I think). I picked up her chapbook, “Survival Skills” and later heard her read online with several other phenomenal flash writers, like Sumitra Singam, Travis Flatt, and Dawn Tasaka Steffler. All I can say is that Liz’s story collection is one of the best books (not just chapbooks) I’ve read in years. Her work was completely new to me and I read this collection in one sitting. From the very first pages it had me and just kept delivering. It’s a phenomenal book.

Best Microfiction & other small things

Matthew Jakubowski

Lately with my writing I’ve steered away from novels, book reviews, and novellas. I’ve been writing smaller things. Journal entries, poems, flash fiction, notes and jottings. In a way, writing in these forms feels easier, a way to keep up with the pace of life. But it also helps me feel like I’m slowing down, too, with a sort of conviction to stop and feel and listen. Revising these things also yields a different sort of satisfaction than my longer works.

I’ve been submitting these shorter pieces, too, of course, when they feel like they’re worth the effort. This past fall, I published “Ghost Story” in the wonderful flash fiction journal Milk Candy Review, thanks to editor Cathy Ulrich, who I had submitted to many times before. My luck didn’t end there, though. I was honored when Cathy nominated it for her picks for the Best Microfiction anthology. Then came the huge surprise last month–Grant Faulkner, guest editor of the 2024 edition of the anthology actually picked my story to be included. The anthology, with my little ghost story, will be in stores in June. I’m still in shock.

In terms of what I’ve been reading lately, when I gathered things up from one room and another, I wasn’t surprised. Pretty much all of it has been poetry and short fiction, even some nonfiction about the linguistic nuances of writing brief things that carry power. Not that I no longer want to read good long books. In fact, I’m itching to re-read some favorites like Nights at the Circus and The Sea The Sea. But below are some books of shorter things that I’m either reading at the moment, or have really enjoyed over the winter. Here’s to brief but mighty things!

The Wild Jesus (Part 4 of 4)

Matthew Jakubowski

The next morning my Dad is back at his camp to start his great hunt again. The heat keeps him awake. He rarely sleeps. Cicadas buzz like little machines in the trees. He has no bullets, but he wields his knife. He eats cicadas when he gets hungry, or kills a lizard. Sometimes I ride my kangaroo to bring him pork chops and apple sauce. The part of the woods that Ronald Reagan burned down are all grown back.

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The Wild Jesus (Part 2 of 4)

Matthew Jakubowski

Me and my mom and my sisters move back to the house. My father stays in the woods. He keeps hunting Jesus. He walks with a knife and studies the blood from when he shot Jesus once and gave him five wounds. He follows the trail of big red drops through the woods and into the corn field where the Berlin Wall has reappeared. He cannot cross. He has not seen Jesus for years. The weather gets hot. The heat makes my Mom fight with my sisters who skip school to fish all day and night in the canal. They dive in with sharp sticks and spear fish. One night my Mom sneaks over and locks them in their room. When she finally unlocks their door she says, “No more fish!” and breaks their wooden spears. My sisters walk past me and yell, “Don’t you follow us!”

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The Wild Jesus (Part 1 of 4)

Matthew Jakubowski

My father is in the woods far from our house. He is hunting Jesus. Jesus stalks the woods in his antlers. He is chasing Ronald Reagan. That’s when my Dad shoots Jesus. Jesus runs off, bleeding in five places from one bullet. Nice shot! My Dad waits. He lets Jesus go away to see if he’ll bleed out. When my Dad gets down from his tree he follows the blood. He follows it into the corn field and stops. He cannot go any further. There is a Berlin Wall. The blood trail goes over the Wall. My Dad will not. He can smell the blood and the scent of burnt matches on the other side.

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New story in Fiddleblack

Matthew Jakubowski

Very happy to say that my short story, “Sharpening the Sickle to Shame the Scythe,” appears in Issue #16 of Fiddleblack.

It’s about the way people cope with guilt during the grieving process. So it’s a bit different from the kind of short stories I’ve published thus far.

Many thanks to editor Jason Cook for publishing this piece. He wrote this introduction to the new issue, which features wonderful poems by Brian Kubarycz and Elias Marsten, and stories by Anna Boorstin, Maxwell Howard, and Caitlin Woolley.

Down in It: Fiddleblack #16

Here’s an excerpt from my piece. Thanks for reading. And of course I’d welcome a chance to hear your comments about the story.

In the hours before Lauren Hunter-Aikens got the news she was stuck trying to revise a story she had written in her creative therapy group.

In the story, the narrator imagined that the news of her son’s death would come by phone. She would be at work drinking coffee, clicking with intense focus through documents on her computer screen. Her phone would buzz in her purse. Not wanting to disturb the office silence, she would answer right away and keep her voice low out of respect for her colleagues on the other sides of her cube.

The voice would ask if she were sitting down. She’d say yes, why? The person who’d called would say the preliminary things she had feared for so long. Then the voice would tell her that there had been an accident. Most often she imagined the voice telling her there had been a car crash, but also very frequently it was an accident at home, where a nanny watched the boy until she and her husband got back from work around five-thirty. The boy had died in a fall down the stairs or been poisoned with household chemicals. A few times she imagined the boy had choked on something she and her husband had neglected to clean up, such as a penny or a tire from a broken toy car. In any case, in that scenario an everyday object in their home had somehow killed the boy. In the story, the woman would wail when she got the news, slamming her phone against the desk, causing the people in the cubes next to hers to jump up and look over the wall, asking what’s wrong, what on earth has happened?