Robert G. Cook wrote in his own contribution to A Personal Anthology: “Someone — I forget who; certainly not me — once said that Jeffrey Ford was the American M. John Harrison. Which, like most such comparisons, sort of works and also almost entirely doesn’t.” I once described Jeffrey Ford to someone as a weird Stephen King, but I don’t especially stand by that either.

This story reached me in a contributors copy of the 2024 Fall edition of Conjunctions. It was an awesome table of contents – all ghost stories by some of my favourite writers (Paul Tremblay, Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Brian Evenson) – but I flicked straight to the very end to read Jeffrey Ford’s story first. I still well up a little each time I re-read it. It features the memory of a family dog, and a possible seagull.

Is this story about estranged brothers a fiction, an auto-fiction or something more than labels allow? (The narrator is referred to once as ‘Jeffy’, his wife is called Lynn, and he teaches in Ohio). Does it even matter?

Here, the narrator of ‘Plunged in the Years’ tells his wife he’s heard his brother’s voice calling the family’s old dog during a walk in a forest –

“In an instant, I saw him in my imagination, waiting all those years for me to show up, traipsing the planks of the wooden walkway, and bellowing for the dog. ‘Come on, you know what I mean. Just his voice. I’m telling you I heard it and it was his. Disembodied.’
‘You’re a kook,’ she said and shook her head.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Can I have your crusts?’”

Jeffrey Ford’s worlds are strange, but their hearts are so familiar.

First published in Conjunctions 83, 2024