Introduction

This year, I’ve been writing a short story a month to send in the mail to friends on their birthdays. Part of the impetus was the exercise of it: I work well with deadlines, I like to play and stretch on a craft level, and I like the opportunity for productive distractions from the exciting-exhausting process of working on a novel. I was also inspired by Isaac Butler’s article about John M. Ford from Slate several years ago, where he mentions that Ford famously produced a lot of work in the form of curiosities he sent to his friends—short stories on Christmas cards, villanelle blog comments, etc. It struck me as a way to put some magic into the world, to create things not in order to sell or otherwise further my ‘career’ but rather to surprise and delight the people I care about. If some of those stories have a life after the fact, great; if only eight people ever read them and most of them toss the chapbook after doing so, that’s great too. 

The only constraint I gave myself besides the monthly cadence was that the stories should all be set in or around a fictional small town in the Catskills, modeled on the towns I live near but distinctly magical as well. Beyond that, I could do what I wished, and so some of the stories were straightforward fiction, while others took Oulipian forms like a choose-your-own-adventure chapbook or a shuffleable read-in-any-order packet or a fully-produced hour-long radio show. I like to think that I’ve put some magic into the world this year—and so here are a dozen stories that have brought me magic and shaped these stories I’ve been writing: