The Ghost Town Collectives collects wonderful, unpredictable tales of loss—lost relationships, lost climates and landscapes, lost possibilities and yet they are always infused with hope and empathy. Caught between the prehistoric and the dystopian future, these protagonists range from human to animal to plant, from the extinct to the mythological to the cryptid. Never played for shock value, always treated with respect; the measured, vivid prose pulls us in, makes us believe in whatever Brittney Corrigan’s imagination conjures. Polar bear point-of-view? Yes, please. An auction house that could manifest anywhere, depending on the item up for sale? Show me. A tortured orchard? Terrifying. A mammoth brought back by de-extinction? I’m in.
— Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment, Passersthrough, and The Night Swimmers
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Brittney Corrigan’s The Ghost Town Collectives is an inventive and lyrical knock-out of a collection. With a poet’s attention to language, an artist’s attention to image, a scientist’s curiosity about the wider natural world, and a folklorist’s joy in the strange stories of our shared imagination, Corrigan has written gem after gem here. Reminding the reader of both Andrea Barrett and Karen Joy Fowler, these stories illuminate the intersections between human relationships, the natural world, and the surreal and fascinating territory of the uncanny.
—Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, author of Elita and What We Do with the Wreckage
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"The catastrophic events in Brittney Corrigan’s collection, The Ghost Town Collectives and other stories of the Anthropocene, could happen as soon as tomorrow, in a decade or three, or maybe yesterday."
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—Suzanne Heagy, fiction editor of Kestrel, and award-winning writer, author of Love Lets Us Down (2015).
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"Folding back the cover of Brittney Corrigan's stunning collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, is like parting the mist of a waterfall to reveal another world that is both entirely familiar and like nothing you've ever seen. Extinction, pandemics, natural disasters, and the resurrection of species abound in this collection. And woven throughout are the most tender of human hands, seeking to undo the damage of our species' recklessness. Haunting, elegiac, and deeply moving, this collection is vital reading for our transforming world."
—Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed To The Manticore"
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The Ghost Town Collectives
by Brittney Corrigan
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$20.00
260 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-957483-25-2
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age (JackLeg Press, 2023). Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. The Ghost Town Collectives is her first short story collection. For more information, visit http://brittneycorrigan.com/.
These are short stories whose prose functions somewhat as poems; stories are told but reveal far more depth than the playing out of external plot elements or phenomena, through a magical realism that points to the unnamed, often undervalued and authentically fantastic parts of our interiority. These stories are placed squarely in the contemporary Anthropocene, with an emerging hyper-sensitivity to other-than-human organisms that spawns compassion and behavioral adaptations. Corrigan weaves stories that serve as way stations for small mysteries that echo inside us before moving on. Stories that serve as remedy to eco-grief so pervasive in our unraveling world—complete with both natural and fantastic moments of beauty, intrigue, and open metaphors for the reader's mind to wonder through. Wonder, not wander.
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