Thank you for reading New Dark.

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Work:

This original version of “Work” was even shorter than it is now, only about a paragraph long. But when I began to think of this book coming together, I used it as a means to get into the headspace I needed for the collection. This meant that I just rewrote it & rewrote it & rewrote it, both to open the story up a bit and to get back into the flow of conveying compact narrative information. It was always going to be the first story in the book - something simple, quiet, and strange to set the tone. 

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Pasadena Waitress:

This was originally the title story of the collection. Eventually we decided that it would make the project seem too evocative of a faux-80s, palm trees and swimming pools kind of experience that didn’t necessarily stand as a good summation of the entire book. I’m extremely happy that we found our way to New Dark. Though, of course, a swimming pool did eventually find its way onto the cover.

 

Horrendous Bichon:

A few years ago, I was sitting in the cocktail bar of a hotel in Ithaca, NY with my good friend Kyle Roberts, and he recounted being sent on the mission that Mel finds herself undertaking at the beginning of this story. He let me steal the anecdote from him, though sadly he was less successful in his acquisition of the painting.

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Of anything else in this book, “Horrendous Bichon” changed the most over the course of the New Dark project, both in its central character and the overall arc of its wandering plot. I have to thank Lucy and Kristen for continuing to push this one into the place it eventually found itself.

 

Hypothetical Daughter:

Back in 2022, someone approached me to do a stage adaptation of my first book, Honest Days. While I wasn’t especially interested in the prospect of returning to Honest Days in that regard, I thought it could be an interesting crash course in writing for the stage. My original intent was to learn enough from the experience to turn around and put together an original work.

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My initial vision for “Hypothetical Daughter” was to write it as a one-act play. Originally, I imagined the plot occurring at a cafe - Julian summoning Michael’s daughter there to confess. The stage production of Honest Days never moved forward and I eventually found a way to reconfigure my concept for “Hypothetical Daughter” into its current form. I like that it’s just Julian all alone now, emailing himself into annihilation. 

 

Sleepy Tiger:

Technically the oldest completed story in the collection. At the time, I had been writing almost exclusively in first-person for years and felt like I’d kind of wrung all I wanted to say out of that vantage point, at least for the time being. When I wrote this all the way back in 2019, I knew it had the voice I wanted for whatever my next big project would end up being. “Sleepy Tiger” was something I referenced whenever I would begin a new story for this collection, it feels like the bedrock of the whole book to me.

 

Nemesis:

For years I’ve been compiling a long list of imagined semi-serious poetry collection titles. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of fake literary works existing as major plot devices in fiction. It made sense to let the titles and their publication windows allow for a sense of free-falling through time here. So much of New Dark portrays characters shackled to the present moment of their lives and I wanted to have at least one piece in the collection that allowed for large swaths of time to pass through the narrative.

 

Minimum Radish:

The original version of “Minimum Radish” was published by Shabby in 2016 and it’s something I knew I wanted to return to and rework for this collection. The original story featured a trip to Toronto to interview a slew of child actors as its centerpiece and that seemed like the heart of the story to me. After I committed to exactly 100 interviews at the beginning of this version it all really started making sense.

 

The battle horse monologue that the well-dressed child performs in the taqueria was originally published in Cage Match, a Buffalo-based art and lit chapbook series that’s been defunct for over a decade now. The monologue was also featured in an early draft of my previous book, Honest Days, but was eventually edited out (it felt like one step too far out of reality for that narrator). I knew it would eventually end up somewhere, someday.

 

Gown:

In 2019, about a year after the publication of Honest Days, I began compiling notes for a new novel. The events of “Gown” would’ve constituted the first section of that book. In translating the idea into a short story, I removed several threads that I think will find their way into whatever my next project ends up being.

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This was the most complicated story to write for the collection. It took a long time to find the correct way for it to begin. I initially wrote the goofy detective story within “Gown” as a reference point for my own process; for a long while I was thinking that the reader would only ever hear about the story second-hand. Once I tried intercutting passages from it into the narrative the whole thing finally started to come together.

 

Palace II:

The original version of this story was conceived of during an exchange I had with Joel Brenden, the designer of New Dark’s cover, in 2017. We were hanging around someone else’s apartment after a book launch, and he was describing the liner notes of a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds compilation to me.

 

As I was planning “Palace II” I initially imagined that Joan would be reading a novel in the passenger seat while Uncle Ken prattled on. On a whim, I ended up using Bashō instead – the little bursts of images and feelings were exciting to interject and the layers of her simultaneous embrace and benign disregard for the material (you already lose the 5-7-5 structure through translation and then Joan herself further skews the poems into her own words) was sobering juxtaposed against Uncle Ken’s sincere, italicized campfire story.

 

Tim:

This story started as something I wrote to shake off a bad dream. I wrote the original version of it very quickly on a break while at work, and then accidentally deleted it. The piece was so short that I just immediately rewrote it from memory. The act of trying to rewrite it as accurately as possible felt interesting, so I began writing the same passage every day when I got home from work. I never reread the previous day’s iteration, and although I tried to stay as accurate as possible, I could feel the language and the scope of the whole thing shifting and compacting as the experience continued.

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After engaging in the exercise every day for about two weeks, I had a day at work in which I suffered a cut on my hand that needed stitches (four total). I forgot to rewrite the passage that day, and when I realized it had slipped my mind I decided the exercise was over. I picked four of my favorite iterations of the passage and arranged them in a way that made narrative sense. The fifth and final section was written months & months & months after that, far removed from the bad dream itself.