Mutable Ghosts: A Collection of Short Stories

Abstract

Mutable Ghosts is a collection of three short stories that feature unreliable narrators in the first person. These works explore the fickle nature of the self and its ability to create its own reality. They are in some way, a study of solipsism. Each narrator resides intensely in his or her own reality. These stories investigate the conditions needed to either expand or contract a person's understanding of themselves and likewise a person's understanding of their intrinsic responsibility to those around them. These stories explore a host of conditions that affect these insular worlds. Among them include personal hauntings, that is the people and experiences that bedevil us, as well as place and environment. These stories offer a tour of the Eastern Seaboard from Massachusetts to West Virginia to Florida. I am inspired by the cast of unreliable narrators that have defined my experience of fiction; from the Underground Man to Humbert Humbert and Nick Carraway, from Holden Clawfield and Richard Papin to Ava Bigtree and Amy Elliot Dunne. I am consistently moved by fiction that finds the universal truth in the utterly untrue; that which holds authentic in even the most skewed and insular of human spirits. I have always taken solace in fiction that acknowledges the subjectivity of every human being and so too, the remarkable sameness of the human experience. I hope these works are, in some small way, an addition to that project.