Fiction Interview by Joy Manning
A CONVERSATION WITH STEPHANIE FELDMAN, AUTHOR OF THE NIGHT PARADE AND OTHER STORIES (Fairwood Press)

A mysterious staircase cut into a suburban hillside. A pirate radio station broadcasting from deep in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. A widow who follows a legend into the Poconos, convinced the spectral procession that took her husband will bring him back. Stephanie Feldman’s new short story collection is steeped in the myths of the Mid-Atlantic.

The ten pieces range from a flash story to a novella, the title piece. Arranged together, they trace something like a life story — from teenage friendships through adult love, motherhood, divorce, and loss. 

In our conversation, Feldman talked about genre as a set of tools rather than a label, the way she uses technology in her fiction, and how a joke about a ghost convention became one of the book’s most serious stories.

Joy Manning: You describe this as a horror book, but reading it, maybe because of my own sensibilities, it didn’t strike me as genre fiction. How do you feel about genre, horror, and your place in it?

Stephanie Feldman: Like Beyoncé said, genre is a funny little word. When I call this a horror book, I’m really using genre as a marketing term, which I think it very often is. It’s a shorthand for pitching your book or describing it to readers. As a writer, I’m very interested in genre, but more as a set of tools or a conversation to be had.

I wrote these stories at different times, and for each one I was thinking about genre in micro-aesthetic terms. In “The Getaway,” I was thinking about weird fiction, with a creature coming out of nature that’s never really explained. “The Witch of Osborne Park” is more of a Shirley Jackson sort of story—really a story about being a woman in the suburbs.

I’ve been thinking of this as a book for readers who like storytelling about real people and the things that haunt them. I’m hoping that readers who love scary stuff will find plenty here to enjoy. And readers who think, “I don’t know if that’s really my thing, I don’t like to be scared,” but who are interested in a darker take on the human experience, the things that unsettle us, the things we don’t always want to think about, which is what all great literary fiction is about—[they] will still find a lot to appreciate too.

Joy: All of these pieces, except the novella, appeared previously as short stories. When did you realize they belonged together as a collection?

Stephanie: It was actually my agent’s idea. I always write about women’s experiences and women’s points of view. And I had been writing a lot about Philadelphia and the Mid-Atlantic, just because this is where I live. It’s intriguing to me, and I want to make it even more intriguing and enchanting. I used that as a connecting thread to pull the stories together.

“The Night Parade” is the first novella I’ve written, and when I started it, I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. But I knew I had these themes in my work, and I looked for stories that exemplified them. I found I could arrange them in a way that almost builds one person’s life, even though the stories are about different characters in different worlds. There’s a flash piece at the beginning, and then we start with teenagers and childhood friendships. The protagonists get a little older, and we move into complicated adult friendships and romantic relationships, kids, marriage, divorce, everything. It felt a little magical, how I was able to build that shape with the stories.

Joy: You incorporate several familiar Mid-Atlantic legends. What draws you to regional folklore, and what makes this region distinctive?

Stephanie: I’m really interested in place and how we experience it as individuals, with our own fears and desires, living in a particular time and context. When I’m teaching, I like to use place not as another character, but as another lens onto your character. Your setting is the setting as only your character could experience it. This place keeps appearing in my work because it’s the place I always experience.

For instance, “The Staircase” is about a set of stairs cut into a hill that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. It goes right down to a street with no sidewalk and cars zooming past. I became kind of obsessed with that image because there are so many of those in my neighborhood in the suburbs. I’m in Montgomery County [Pennsylvania], where there are so many older houses and streets that used to be very different kinds of routes. Now they might be 50-mile-an-hour, two-lane roads, but you used to be able to walk up and down those staircases. There’s a lot of history in that, a kind of forgotten history. Wherever you find yourself, if you pause to look around, learn more, and really see what’s there, you can find a very rich environment.

Joy: Technology crops up quite a bit. Sometimes a legend arrives through a radio station, Google Street View, or blogs. How do you think about the digital world and the world of your fiction?

Stephanie: That’s interesting because I usually try to steer away from technology. I think it can take out a lot of magic and discovery. It can answer our questions a little too quickly, and it can keep us from the real world. When I do integrate it, I’m very mindful about doing it in a way that feels natural but won’t make the story dated super fast.

Low-power FM—maybe it will have a comeback. But terrestrial radio, the way I grew up with it, isn’t something people experience in the same way anymore. I miss it, so that’s really nostalgic for me.

In “The Night Parade,” the main character uses blogs and the internet to do research. There’s maybe a little something old-fashioned to that at this point because she’s scouring actual posts instead of asking AI. It’s funny: in my first novel, The Angel of Losses, which came out in 2014, the character was a researcher using books in a library. So the novel is old books, and the latest novella is blogs.

Joy: Motherhood appears throughout the book, and it isn’t always a cozy portrait. What interests you about motherhood and its darker aspects in particular?

Stephanie: First of all, it’s a pretty common experience. It can rearrange your whole life logistically, like the character in “The Witch of Osborne Park,” who ends up moving to the suburbs. But it can also reorient you emotionally and psychologically.

Horror often comes back to the violation of boundaries. In scary stories, it could be crossing a threshold into a haunted place or the things you dream about happening in real life. Boundaries dissolve in all kinds of ways, and motherhood can really challenge the boundaries of your identity. That makes it really rich to write about. 

Joy: Many of your characters are hungry for something, whether it’s youth or safety or a song, and their desires take them to unexpected, sometimes unsafe places. Why is wanting so dangerous in these stories?

Stephanie: I think every story, not just the ones in this collection, is about desire and fear. In my own writing, I’m always asking myself: What is my character afraid of, and what do they want? Some of that is creative-writing-school stuff. Your character needs to want something so they can go out and try to get it, and that creates a story. So on a craft level, I ask myself that question so I can write the story. But in a story, you’re also trying to get at the most primal stuff you can. That’s what makes a story feel alive and urgent, and usually that comes back to human desire.

Usually we want something because we think it’s going to make us safe or protect us from something. In a horror story, maybe you want something that will save you from the monster. But you could also want something that saves you from your fear of failure or protects you from a friendship that’s gone bad and is causing you pain.

Joy: “The Annual Conference of the Ladies in White,” which may be my favorite story in this collection, gathers ghosts from around the world. How did you research your roster of ghosts, and how did such a funny premise become such a serious story?

Stephanie: It did start as a funny premise. I thought of the title first because I go to a lot of conferences, and the lady in white haunting a bridge or a road or a palace is a very common ghost story. I’ve been familiar with it for ages. So I put the two together and thought, what if they all came together? I’m also super interested in how stories vary across time and place, and the connections between myths from different peoples and regions.

I did do research because I wanted to be as specific as possible. I was looking up all the different white ladies I could find and even some that aren’t really white lady ghosts but more like fairy folklore, though they fit the vibe. Usually white lady ghosts are the ghosts of women who were wronged in some way or suffered some kind of gendered condition. They died in childbirth, or their lovers killed them, or they killed themselves because they were abandoned by their husbands or lovers.

I wanted the story to be more than a joke—like, wouldn’t it be funny if all these ghosts got together at a hotel conference, drinking bad coffee and going to panel discussions? So I had to think about what these legends are really about. They are often about how being a woman can lead to your death. That’s what I had to do to my main character. That’s the question she had to face because otherwise, why is she the one who ends up in this hotel?

Joy: In “The Night Parade,” only the dying can see the procession. How do you approach writing grief, in your work and in this story specifically?

Stephanie: Grief is another thread that comes up a lot in my work because, like fear and desire, it’s part of the human condition. This character has lost her husband and is sure she can get him back. She’s going to outsmart the rules of the universe to do it. How to deal with loss—when we can accept it and when we can’t—is a question we can’t escape in life.

Trying to rescue someone from the land of the dead is another classic story. I tried to make it my own with this particular woman, who feels like someone who could live next door to me, and by setting it in the Poconos, in the Pennsylvania mountains, to bring it a little closer. We’ve been traveling through the state more over the last few years, taking more road trips. Pennsylvania is really beautiful, the mountains especially, and I’ve come to really appreciate it.

Joy: You’ve written novels and stories. How does your process change depending on length? And when you started “The Night Parade,” when did you realize you were writing a novella rather than a novel or a short story?

Stephanie: My process is pretty similar. I always begin with some kind of plan. Usually that means figuring out what my character wants, what they fear, and why it matters, and then having some idea of what they’re going to do, what might happen, and where they might go. When I’m writing a novel, I do a lot more outlining and planning. With a short story, sometimes I have a vague sense and think, let me just see what happens in this draft because the stakes are lower. You don’t have to write as many pages if it goes wrong, and it’s easier to fix.

With “The Night Parade,” I knew pretty early that it would be a novella. I wanted this character to go on a bigger journey than would fit in a short story, but it was still a very focused mission that wouldn’t lend itself to a whole novel. It also didn’t need to evoke an entire world and cast of characters the way I think a novel does. To follow this one woman over these few days, I needed some time to breathe but not enough to fill a book.

I was also very excited to try a novella because I love reading them. That length can bring you very deeply into a story while maintaining a focus and intensity that a novel sometimes needs to break out of.

Joy: What are you working on next?

Stephanie: Right now, what I’m hard at work on is not a book. I should be writing a book, but I’m organizing for the Buried Creek Collective, a new initiative here in the city to educate writers about climate change and help promote informed storytelling about the climate crisis. We’re in the midst of our inaugural Climate Education for Writers program, with 24 amazing Philadelphia writers who are visiting sites, meeting with experts, and hearing from guest speakers in ecology, conservation, lobbying, and related fields. It’s really exciting, and we’re hoping to expand.

We have a weekly newsletter that includes opportunities to take action here in Philadelphia. And on November 20, we’re celebrating our first year at the Discovery Center [in East Fairmount Park] with an event called Daylight After Dark. It will bring together our writers, artists working in other disciplines, and community organizations engaged with climate storytelling and responding to the climate crisis. It’s free and open to the public, and it’s going to be a fun night. You’ll get a tour of the Discovery Center, which is amazing, with its beautiful reservoir. We’ve got video artists, visual artists, poets, storytellers, essayists, and a DJ. Everyone should come.

I’m also gearing up, though it’s far away, for my next novel, In Summer She Turns Cruel, which is out in spring 2028. It’s done and ready to go. It’s also set in a Pennsylvania college town, with some ghosts and some women at various points in their lives trying to figure it all out.

The Night Parade and Other Stories by Stephanie Feldman was published by Fairwood Press on October 20, 2026.

 Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia, a Locus Award finalist, and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, Crawford Fantasy Award winner, and Mythopoeic Award finalist. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.

Joy Manning is an editor for Cleaver magazine. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Call Me [Brackets], The First Line, and Foofaraw Anthology, and her journalism has appeared in The Washington Post, Prevention, Philadelphia magazine, and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for the James Beard and IACP Awards and anthologized in Best Food Writing. She earned her MA in creative writing from Temple University.

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