“The Lower Forty” by Mark Farrington appeared in Issue 46 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about “The Lower Forty.”
When I was in my late twenties and felt I needed to take a break from teaching, I moved back to the town I’d grown up in and got a job as a night security guard at a resort very much like the one in this story. That summer I met a couple that inspired Richard and Barbara. I didn’t try writing the story for a long time, because I couldn’t find a way into it. Then I heard about a politician who ran off with a woman half his age, and having Danny’s father do that brought me into the family’s immediate situation in a way that opened up the whole story.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this story?
Maintaining the seventeen year-old’s perspective was a challenge, but the hardest thing came about because this was is the first piece I ever wrote in second person point of view. I never liked reading stories in second person, and I used to think I’d never write in second person, so I resisted it here, but it was how I kept hearing the voice, and every alternative felt flat. Eventually I realized I’d never quite understood second person, or never realized the voice could do what it does here, represent an older Danny talking to his younger self.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakama. I’m not sure why, but when I read Murakami, I am inspired to write. I don’t write anything like him, and the feeling is nothing I can explain, but reading Murakami pulls me out of any lethargy I may be feeling about writing and very soon, I’m off, starting on something new.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
George Saunders. I’ve seen, read, and heard lots of his talks about writing, and they always seem like they’re not only insightful, but he finds ways of saying things that make more sense than when anyone trying to say them (including myself). Plus, they’re often funny as hell.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m currently working with Legacy Press on the publication of my first novel, Loss of Life, which should be out in Spring 2026. I worked five years on that book and don’t have any immediate thoughts for another novel. But I’ve got a dozen or so short stories I’d like to put together as a collection and see if I can publish that. By then, if nothing else come to me, maybe Murakami will have a new book for me to read.
Our thanks to Mark for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “The Lower Forty” here.
Mark Farrington recently retired after nearly forty years of teaching writing, the last twenty-five of them in the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. He has published short stories in Carve, Craft Literary, The Louisville Review, and other journals. His short fiction has won the Editor’s Choice Award in the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest, the Dan Rudy Fiction Prize, second prize in the Dame Alice Throckmorton Fiction Prize, two honorable mentions for the Momaya Prize, and an Individual Artists Grant from the Virginia Commission on the Arts. He is a four-time winner of the Outstanding Faculty Award in the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program. He grew up in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, earned his B.A. from Colby College, and completed his M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from George Mason University. Farrington and his wife Christina have recently moved to Maine after living for more than thirty years just outside Washington, D.C. His first novel, Loss of Life, will be available from Legacy Books in Spring 2026.