Author Archives: Barrett Bowlin

One year ago, the good folks at Bridge Eight Press were awesome enough to publish my short story collection, Ghosts Caught on Film. It’s a weird, little bastard of a book, featuring lightning apocalypses, orgies, nuclear fallout, and, of course, gummi bears. Thanks to everyone who made its existence possible, and thanks especially to everyone who’s read it, reviewed it, loved it, or hated it. Y’all rock!

So my extremely kind colleagues at Suffolk University’s English Department wanted me to read from Ghosts Caught on Film, for this semester’s Faculty Lecture, on Tuesday, November 8th, 2022, right at 12:30pm EST. Come join us in person if you’re in the Boston area, and, if you’re not, come join us on Zoom! [Update: Elizabeth Finnen, the department’s administrator extraordinaire, recorded & cut the video of the reading, and it’s available here if you want to see me get really awkward in the Q&A.]

I wrote a piece about getting strangled by sweaty dudes (albeit not in the fun way), and the good folks at Alice & Atlas Magazine were awesome enough to edit & publish it. Thanks be unto Lindsey Danis & Benjamin Woodward for their hard work!

Way back in July, I had the chance to talk with Jonathan Escoffery about his debut linked-story collection, If I Survive You (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It’s an outstanding book about a Jamaican-American family whose lives fall apart in and around Miami, and you should definitely check it out. You can read my interview with Escoffery here, care of The Rumpus.

Eric McDowell, the awesome editor of Fiction Writers Review, invited me up to Jamaica Plain to talk with him about Ghosts Caught on Film. It was outstanding getting to meet him in person after emailing him back & forth for years as a FWR contributor, and I can’t thank him enough for the conversation. Check it out here!

Dan Chaon, author of the forthcoming novel, Sleepwalk (among other amazing works of literature), was wonderful enough to mention Ghosts Caught on Film in a recent recommendation list in The Week. So, yeah, lots of beers.

The visual artist Ben Shattuck was awesome enough to talk with me recently about his debut book of nonfiction, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. It’s this beautiful meditation on nature and our place within it, and you should come check out the conversation we had over at The Rumpus.

You can now order it from such fine bookstores as: the Bridge Eight Press homepage (my publisher!); Barnes & Noble; Bookshop.org; eBooks.com; Booktopia (for my Australian readers!); Walmart (wait, Walmart sells books that aren’t Amish erotica?); Books A Million; Rakuten (shoutout to my readers in Japan!); and The Book Depository. Happy reading!

This was my first stab at trying to write something properly creepy, and the amazing editors over at Cutleaf were excellent enough to publish it. Thanks to Keith Lesmeister, Denton Loving, Kelly March, & Walter Robinson for this.

A huge thanks goes out to Tom McAllister and the rest of the creative nonfiction gang at Barrelhouse, for picking up my flash CNF piece. They do some damn good work there, and I’m proud to be part of it.