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.”
Ferris remembered a book he had read in 2020: Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Its nine chapters feel like a story collection, he says, but it is considered a novel. In the introduction, it’s called a “work of fiction.”
“I loved that,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t box you in. It doesn’t circumscribe you.”
He was writing a work of fiction, he decided. His chapters would be able to stand on their own while maintaining a larger narrative arc. He worked on his project through graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At FAWC, Ferris continues to work on it. It’s now titled Strangers by Nature.
In addition to reading Greenwell, Ferris has been enjoying authors Alexander Chee, Justin Torres, and Carmen Maria Machado, but he didn’t start out as a voracious reader. When he was handed children’s books as a child, Ferris remembers feeling distinctly bored.
“I thought, ‘Nothing interesting happens to these people,’ ” he says. He started writing his own stories, elaborating on the plots he found lacking. “I was a writer before I was a reader,” he says.
In Provincetown, he’s taking a break from reading. “I had too many voices in my head,” he says. “I needed to turn the volume down and focus on just my own.” Ferris’s narrator has a particular outlook, he says, that shapes everything. Certain themes emerge: identity, relationships, sex, power.
The story follows a young gay man, an aspiring comic artist, who has returned home to southern Maryland, “a place that’s been shaped by certain types of closeted-ness, certain types of masculinity,” Ferris says. When the narrator’s grandfather, who owns a well-known golf course, dies, the family unit shatters. The narrator, who is unnamed, remains in town, navigating frayed relationships with his family, his ex-boyfriend, and various men that enter and exit his life. “It’s a very claustrophobic book,” Ferris says.
The main character is like Ferris in some ways. They’re both gay; they’re both from Maryland; they both have family members who are involved in running golf courses. In other ways, he says, they’re entirely different. Ferris wouldn’t call the book autobiographical; it simply borrows from his life.
In one chapter, titled “An Effort of Opposites,” the narrator remembers tender and tense moments with his Bulgarian ex-boyfriend, Kristian. Sex is described in explicit terms, yet these scenes don’t feel gratuitous or vulgar.
“When I first started writing stories that were toying with queerness,” Ferris says, “I was afraid to access the sexually explicit world.” In his freshman year of college, he read Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, in which much of the story is told through sexual encounters. “The book opened doors and windows,” Ferris says. “The whole house blew up.” Sex now features heavily in his writing. It’s “where things take place, where change happens,” he says. “It’s where climax happens of the sexual nature and of the story nature.”
In that same chapter, the narrator remembers Kristian teaching him to say his name with a Bulgarian accent: “Kree…stee…yan — with that Slavic R that sounds a little like an L,” Ferris writes. “It closed a distance between us, no longer foreigners to each other.” Through learning the language, the narrator feels a connection to Kristian that wasn’t accessible through English.
“I’ve given the narrator an obsession of mine,” says Ferris, “which is trying to express things not easily expressed. Sometimes, it’s easier to say things in a different language than your own.” Ferris, whose partner is Bulgarian, is learning the language. Saying a certain slur word for gay, Ferris says, “I feel a sting, I feel pinched. It has a charge.” But when he says the corresponding word in Bulgarian, it doesn’t evoke the same negative feeling. Speaking a different language is a way to “hold hot coals without getting burned,” he says. He tries to convey this idea in his writing.
In another chapter, the narrator enters a strange relationship on a dating app with a man who pays for degradation. The narrator sends this man pages from his comic books, where he creates superheroes. The story considers the narrator’s and the man’s desires for transformation: “the superhero story, the queer story, the belief that something powerful lies dormant inside,” Ferris writes.
Like the narrator’s comic-book heroes, Ferris says, queer characters can transform themselves and transcend their circumstances. “Something that has made someone’s life difficult can suddenly have incredible potential,” he says. Superpowers, or queerness, can give someone family or the ability to make other people feel important, Ferris says. “It’s the thing that makes them special.”
When his FAWC fellowship ends, Ferris plans to stay in Provincetown for the summer. After years of moving around for school, “this is the first place I’ve been calling home,” he says. What home means, exactly, he’s not sure — he set his stories in his home state to examine that question. “When I don’t have an answer to things,” he says, “that’s when I’m writing.”
Fellows’ Exhibition
The event: Artists’ showcase with Cherrie Yu, Edd Ravn, Lucas Martínez, and Jason Ferris
The time: March 7-17
The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St, Provincetown
The cost: Free
