The Charged Fiction of Jason Ferris

Starting a short story, Jason Ferris writes the first sentence, then rearranges the words. “I’ll stare at it and stare at it,” he says, “until finally it has enough of a charge that it explodes into the second sentence.” But maybe the second sentence should really be the first. He switches them. Writing is “a constant struggle to find the music,” he says. “But once I hear that hum, I can follow it through the entire story.”

Ferris, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, has mainly written short stories. The energy of the form, like an opening sentence, appeals to him. “There’s an urgency in the burst of a short story,” he says. “You’re tossing something hot in the air and trying not to burn your hands.”

Ferris grew up in Leonardtown, Md., near the mouth of the Potomac, and graduated in 2021 from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, having majored in creative writing, publishing, and editing. During his last two college years, Ferris says, “I wrote one story, then another, and another. I noticed that they all had the same narrative voice.”

After a couple of years, he thought he was writing a collection. The stories were more cohesive than that, though — they were narrated by the same person and took place over the span of a single summer. Ferris decided to call the stories “chapters.” But that introduced the pressure of novel-writing, he says. In a novel, he says, “you’re luxuriating in the text — you’re swimming in it.”