The Accidental Collection

“When I started to reread all of these pieces, I noticed I’d been working on a lot of really similar themes. I’ve been writing stories about loneliness, about loss, about the ways these things shape and haunt our lives without us always recognizing that they’re in the background,” says Henry. “I didn’t sit down to write a bunch of stories that were really thematically linked, so I think of this book in many ways as an accidental short story collection.”

Practice for Becoming a Ghost, his debut story collection, is a work of magical realism, a genre that blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality by incorporating fantastical elements into otherwise familiar narratives. The 16 stories were composed across different eras of Henry’s academic career, though he traces some of the most impactful advice he received to his time as a student in Bucknell’s Master of Arts in English program.

“[Professor of English — creative writing] G.C. Waldrep was on my thesis committee, and one of the things he told me when I was in his poetry workshop was, ‘Stop waiting to write the things you want to write,’ ” says Henry. “You can get a lot of great advice, but the lessons have to teach themselves to you in their own time. It took a good six or seven years to realize I should have followed G.C.’s advice much sooner.”

He started to follow his instinct for magical realism through his doctoral program at the George Washington University and into his current role as an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Dakota. With some input from his students, he figured out how to sequence his stories in just the right order. His writing journey came full circle when he found a publisher in his undergraduate alma mater: Susquehanna University Press.

Henry has an abiding respect for university presses, in part because of the two years he worked as an editorial assistant for Bucknell University Press. “One of the reasons why I’ve always wanted to publish with a university press is because of my time at Bucknell,” he says. “It was just incredible to have that kind of experience as a master’s student because I got to see how the press operated and functioned and learn how important the work they do is to literature, the humanities and institutional life.”

While Henry’s collection may have taken shape as an accident, its final form is one rooted in intention and constructed with care. Practice for Becoming a Ghost served as a teaching tool for publishing and editing students at Susquehanna University, where undergraduates learned about the editorial and publishing process by helping edit and market the book before publication.

Alumni & Faculty Publications