Interview with Corey Farrenkopf

Haunted Ecologies!

Welcome to the world of Corey Farrenkopf! I’ve deeply enjoyed two of Corey’s books already, both his novel Living in Cemeteries (released last year) and an early copy of his upcoming collection Haunted Ecologies. Living in Cemeteries introduces us to a creepy and intriguing world where people have encounters with the ghosts of their ancestors who can tell them how they will die, and you encounter complex characters you’ll come to quickly care about. Haunted Ecologies gives us a smorgasbord of stories about the horrors of environmental degradation, with heartfelt delivery and many interesting concepts along the way (and some monsters!).

Here are his thoughts:

You’re a librarian as well as a writer! Have you always been a book-lover?

Oh, definitely. Some of my fondest memories as a tiny child are of my mother reading to me different fantasy chapter books. I was kind of slow to reading (I went to Catholic school and had to stay after and spend time on weekends with the nuns to catch up), but I always loved sitting down with a book. One of the few times my mind quiets is when I'm reading, so it was very much my happy place for most of my younger (and adult!) life.

There’s a deep sense of empathy in your stories, an intricate way of exploring your characters’ complex emotional lives. Have you always been an empathetic person, or is this a skill that comes from writing? Do you have a sense of affection for your characters?

I love this question. I've always been a deeply empathetic person...to the point where I find it very hard to be angry at anyone for almost anything...which is kind of insane. My mind reasons through decisions a person would make with a weird sort of logic to see from their point of view on why they might have done a thing (even if it's not great...even if it was pretty mean towards me)...and often to feel sympathy where I shouldn't. Is this a good trait? I'm not sure. Probably not. But it's there in my brain. I'm actually working on being less empathetic...which makes me sound like a monster. I feel like when you're too empathetic, you never put yourself first, and that's not a great way to live. So yeah, I'm very empathetic towards my characters. I always find it very hard to give them a tragic ending, though many of them end up there. I often have to seperate myself from what the story needs...If my brain got what it wanted, every one of my stories would have a very cozy ending...and that rarely works for horror or dark fantasy. It's hard to have a pleasant ending when an ancient tree cult is trying to sacrifice your family and friends to their ancient deity, you know?

Oh, I know! Now, if you were going to have dinner with the ghosts of a few dead writers, who would they be? And who are some you are inspired by but might not invite to dinner?

Hmmm...dead writers I'd like to chill with...my mind first goes to the old dudes who wrote the Weird fiction that inspires me/the authors that I love. So I'd be dining with Arthur Machen, Robert Aikman, and Algernon Blackwood. Then shifting into more modern horror, it would be great to have Shirley Jackson and Karl Edgar Wagner hanging out too. Probably send an invite to Tolkien, Kafka, Borges, Garcia-Marques, Poe, Shelley, and Stoker to round out the meal. And the one guy who I'm very inspired by but would definitely not invite is Lovecraft. I love the aesthetic he created...all the old gods and seaside gothic horror...but wow was he a terrible person.

Oh! I'd also invite Steinbeck and make him explain to me, in excruciating detail, his werewolf novel that we will probably never get to read!

Your story collection Haunted Ecologies helps us explore our collective anxieties about climate change. As a book person, what’s your relationship to nature and science?

Also an interesting question! I'm actually one of the organizers for the Blue Marble Librarians, which is an MA based group of librarians working to support other librarians/libraries in the fields of sustainability and ecological program planning. We've done a lot of work with CREW (Communities Responding to Extreme Weather) in regards to getting people educated/prepared for the changing weather patterns brought on by climate change. I host a ton of environmental programs at the library where I work and run the seed library here. In my nonwork life, I'm very into birding and converting my yard from a typical American, lawn-forward, landscape to one that is full of native plants that attract pollinators and birds.

What is your personal favorite story from Haunted Ecologies?

It would probably have to be The Tap, Tap, Tap of a Beak, which was first published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye a while back...and is also the image we chose for the cover. It's about an ornithologist making a pilgrimage to a mountain of extinct animal bones so that she can deposit the remains of the last Gabri's Woodpecker (which is not a real species) and say her final goodbyes to the bird she's spent her whole life studying. She’s confronted by a taxidermy collector along the way and has to do whatever she can to leave her little friend in his/her proper resting place. Bird despeciation is one of the saddest things to me, and this was my attempt to put that into words. I also just love the imagery of the giant mountain made of bones...and what happens to it at the end...and looking at our role in how high that mountain has climbed.

Living in Cemeteries is filled with potent and mournful reflections on death. Do you think about mortality a lot? Is that the writer’s way?

Constantly. I used to work as one of the guys who mowed the cemeteries in my hometown, so maybe I spend more time than the average person thinking about it. I was brought up Catholic...so that doesn't help...the whole idea of God watching over your shoulder, weighing every one of your actions to determine if you are going to eternally burn or get to hang out in his pleasant cloud kingdom has been anchored in my mind since I was a little kid. (I'm not currently religious, but those thoughts are still there...hard to shake things like that). Also, when I was younger, I was obsessed with myths about the underworld and resurrection...which, looking back at the short stories I've been writing for the past two years, I'd say half of them are focused on those two things...will the next collection be all portals to the underworld/resurrection stories? We will see.

How do you tend to structure your writing projects? Do you write your way into stories (long or short), or do you tend to have a plan going in?

I'm probably 75% a pantser, 25% a plotter. I often start a story with an image (kind of like a painting) in mind or a setting...and then I have to put characters into that image/setting and make them do stuff. Like for The Tap, Tap, Tap of a Beak I saw this massive mountain of extinct animal bones in this forest clearing and just went from there. After I get that first image, and I have an idea of who the characters are/what the themes are, I usually know the ending of the story/novel, and then have to write towards it. I've found that when I plot something out 100% it comes across more stilted/robotic than I would like, so I've stuck to this method for a while now. It usually gets me where I need to go...but sometimes I have to rewrite something from scratch because I get way away from where a story actually needs to go...which is a bummer...especially when we're talking about a novel.

What question would you like to be asked?

For some reason, last night I was thinking about what my ten favorite short story collections are/the ten that have been most influential to me as a writer. So that would be a cool question. I very much believe that every writer is cobbled together from their favorite texts and I always find it fun to see who a writer thinks they're mainly influenced by.

Mine are...in no particular order:

Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Orange World by Karen Russell

The Imago Sequence by Laird Barron

The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer

The Ghost Sequences by A.C. Wise

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Thin Places by Kay Chronister

Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

Pastorallia by George Saunders

The Glassy Burning Floor of Hell by Brian Evenson

(I lied...I had to pick 11)

Thank you so much for the insightful answers, Corey!