Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Brittney Corrigan writes about The Ghost Town Collectives, winner of the Osprey Award for Fiction from Middle Creek Publishing.
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Everything in Its Place
The research process is one of my favorite parts of writing fiction. For me, the creation of a vividly detailed setting is where world building meets character, and where the narrative of a story has its genesis. My debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives (Middle Creek Publishing, 2024), contains locations I’ve set foot in (the Oregon coast, the Colorado mountains, the city in which I’ve lived for over 30 years), places I’ve never been but hope to someday visit (Svalbard, the Namib desert, the Grand Canyon), and imaginary worlds (a possible future of climate disaster, an afterlife for extinct animals).
Many of my short stories begin with a place, long before I create the characters or decide what the story is going to be about. Most of the time, the setting is somewhere I’ve heard of or read about but not actually been: a landscape that captured my imagination. One of the beauties of fiction is that it can take readers to places they’ve never been before, be they invented or grounded in reality. But what happens when a story is set in a location that is both real and imagined? What does it look like when a setting hews close to reality in its details, and yet what unfolds in that place is completely speculative?
For me, my setting becomes the main character as I tell the invented story within it. I start by investigating all aspects of my chosen place, just as I would sketch out a human (or animal) character. And so the research rabbit holes open up. I must have completely confused the algorithm over the course of writing The Ghost Town Collectives as I Googled topics, including: CRISPR gene editing technique, rattlesnake bites, polar bear diets, leucistic crows, cheetah lung capacity, the physics of how earthquakes cause tsunamis, the rules of basketball, 17th century merchant ships, stress measurements in trees, frogs that fall out of the sky, the features of various mythological beasts, historic mountain cabins that have withstood the weight of heavy snowfall, and the death of the last Tasmanian tiger. I used these myriad facts to create vivid settings in which I developed my narratives.
In the case of “The Vault,” I immersed myself in learning about Svalbard, Norway—the location of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—which I first heard about on NPR. My goal is always to make my readers feel like they are there, so I try to put myself in my settings first through reading articles, listening to podcasts and interviews, and watching videos. When I write about a place I’ve never been, I want to make sure I get everything right, as a matter of respect. I am meticulous about real details, even though I rarely name the actual places in my stories. I create elaborate “Easter eggs,” and I love to think about that reader who will recognize the unnamed setting and get a kick out of discovering a secret that others will never realize is hidden there.
Because locations and landscapes are the main catalyst for my writing process, I keep an ideas document filled with links to all sorts of articles that have made their way into my ears, my email box, and my social media feeds. The Atlas Obscura newsletter is one of my frequent mines for these story starters and is where I first read about the phenomenon that inspired “The Great Unconformity”. This site of missing geologic time in the Grand Canyon—in which layers of rock separated by over a billion years are sandwiched against one another—is a scientific mystery, and it was the perfect location for my protagonist’s father to vanish. I did a deep dive into geology for the story, researching not only this area of Arizona, but also glaciers, erosion, plate tectonics, and the pastime of rockhounding.
I have not traveled much in my life, and learning about real-world locations for my stories is a vicarious thrill. But when I do occasionally write a story that is set in a place I’ve experienced firsthand, it still must be heavily researched. “Ichthyoforest” takes place in the Neskowin ghost forest on the central Oregon coast. When I stood on that deserted beach at low tide on an early summer morning, surrounded by the stumps of ancient Sitka spruce trees rising out of the sand through a thick mist, I knew that I had to invent a narrative worthy of such a magical place. My stories often begin by smooshing two disparate ideas together, usually a landscape and some unrelated and bizarre fact I’ve unearthed. For “Ichthyoforest,” this technique took the form of the Neskowin ghost forest meets cryptid lore. By simultaneously researching the history of the real-world coastal setting and the lore of (probably) not real creatures such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Mothman, an unusual narrative was born.
The combination of accurate detail and complete invention is my storytelling sweet spot. I create settings grounded in details gleaned from hours of deep-dive research and populated by aspects of reality that feed the engine of the story. A tawny mammoth standing inside the swimming pool smell of a genetics lab. A teenager standing on the shore of a disappearing island during a hurricane. An alpine ghost town haunted by extinct beasts. You may enjoy losing yourself in fiction. But my hope is that, if I’ve done my job right, you might also find yourself there.
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Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks and most recently, Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age (JackLeg Press, 2023). Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. The Ghost Town Collectives is her first short story collection. For more information, visit www.brittneycorrigan.com