Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Matthew Jakubowski writes about Ghost in the Rain from Bottlecap Press.
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An Essay wherein an Author of a Chapbook of Very Smol Stories muses on the 12 micros and flash fictions in the Collection to see if any “Research” took place. Author has been advised not to make it all about himself or his life or how old he is (rather old!), to try to offer practical advice, or at least be Interesting.
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Ghost Story
A micro where almost all the sentences start with the word “ghost.” Which I thought was funny because I’d never written a ghost story but had the nerve to say, hm, let me take a universal trope and see if I can blunder my way somewhere new via a random constraint. I later learned this first-word repetition thing is a poetic device called anaphora. So now I get to say anaphora in conversation and pretend like I’m wise and it’s an old friend. I wrote this in 2023 and it was selected for Best Microfiction 2024.
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Cut Shapes Cut From Raindrops
This micro was a failed poem but with several moments of enjoyable confusion. It’s about love and rainstorms and passion and distance. I was newly divorced and sitting in a very good chair in someone else’s house and suddenly these crazy lines kept coming to me. It’s one of my favorite new pieces from last year.
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Little Brother
This story makes me cry every time I read it. It’s about my two younger sisters. But in the story they’re both older than the narrator and teach him everything he knows. IRL, my dad was in the army and we moved around a lot; that whole thing. It was tough. So I made everyone in the story immortal. It was both easier and harder that way.
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The Book of the Rain
This is an unpublished one I wrote last fall after walking by a soaked and ruined paperback. People in my West Philly neighborhood are always leaving out free stuff. No one had taken the book. Anyway, it had something to say to me. Something spooky. I liked its creepiness.
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Particles of Death
I don’t usually write first-person stories about narrators with questionable ethics and worldviews but this one seemed worth it. I stuck with it because she’s just trying to survive and doesn’t hurt anyone in ways they can notice right away, or ways that might even be real. I’m also proud of the moment in this story where she’s on a trolley in West Philly and as it goes underground the subway is right there next to her and she feels like she’s one of hundreds of souls being taken somewhere, intermingled among the workers of the world.
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The Hunt
This was the first major story I wrote when I moved to Philly in 2008. It’s another family story. It became a novella, which got me an agent. It didn’t sell, which is fine. Because it lived on, the seed of all that, and now it’s in this chapbook, my debut, at age 51. I’m sorry, I really tried not to make this about me me me. The novella was a finalist for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, judged by Renee Gladman. I doubt she read it, but one can dream.
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A Death in the House of Nostalgia
I wrote this back when e-books were becoming huge and people were freaking out about the death of print. Which seems so quaint to worry about now. It made the Wigleaf longlist quite some time ago.
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Demarcation
A new, unpublished piece about my late father and the Berlin Wall. (Fun fact: I was at the Berlin Wall when Reagan gave his ridiculous speech, which totally fooled young Matt at the time.)
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Alight, Astray
This one’s about a bunch of friends skipping school and going downtown to people-watch. It’s anti-corporate, anti-establishment, and makes me want to be that age again when it was a daily struggle not to scream at the world and where things were headed. Imagine a sighing sound here. I wrote this last fall.
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River Birch
One of the strangest and most successful revision sessions I’ve ever had. In the same chair as when I revised “Cut Shapes.” There’s something about certain places, and maybe chairs, where good writing can happen. It’s got one of my best endings ever, if I do say so myself, to myself, and I do, quite often. Scaffold published it on New Year’s Eve 2025.
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Caretakers
Another new, unpublished piece, about lockdown and COVID-19. It’s important to me to write about COVID and vulnerable communities. I’ve published two other flash pieces about the pandemic and I really wanted to have another in my first chapbook. We let so many people die. I still can’t believe the scale of it, and the number of people still dying from it, and how little we speak of it.
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Gathering
This micro is set in the woods, about people studying in the darkness together. It’s one of my favorites and the theme of confronting fear, not knowing what the future holds, felt like the perfect piece to end on.
Never while writing these things over the past 18 years did I think they’d end up together in a book. But here they are. In fact, I never thought I’d publish a story collection, let alone at this ripe old age. I always thought I’d be a novelist and publish one no later than age 27.
But part of my research was also making friends with older writers with kids or careers or other things that took up their time until that one year or two when they could do it and actually managed to get published. Something about perseverance, tenacity, hustle. There’s something to all those things. And I feel so fortunate to have been able to keep hustling all this time.
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Matthew Jakubowski is a multi-genre writer based in Philadelphia. He is the author of the chapbook, Ghost in the Rain: Stories (Bottlecap Press, 2026). His stories appear in the Best Microfiction anthology, Gone Lawn, and Necessary Fiction, and are forthcoming from Identity Theory, BULL, Claudine, Some Words, and Flight Literary. More info is available at mattjakubowski.com.