Conrad Harrow writes literary short fiction about the figures stories leave behind — the peripheral, the forgotten, the ones the original narrative didn’t quite see.
His first collection, What Remains of Them, took up peripheral characters from children’s books, myth, and popular culture, and gave them the interior register of literary fiction. The pieces share a method more than a subject: they begin with a figure the source material treated briefly — a minor wife, a lock-keeper’s daughter, a rabbit making a nest for young she will lose, a paramedic’s aging widow — and follow that figure into the kind of attention the original narrative did not offer them. The source material is often comfort-reading. The register is not.
His second collection, What Was Never Said, works from a different angle on the same concern. Here the subject is what the source itself left unspoken: the silences a story kept, whether by discretion, by convention, by genre, or by the distance between what a child’s book would say and what the world underneath it actually contained.
His third collection, What Came After, returns to the peripheral-figure frame and moves the camera forward in time, to what those figures did and felt in the long after. A fourth volume, The Ones Who Stayed, is in progress.
The work is quiet. It is interested in what grief looks like when no one is performing it, in the particular dignity of characters who were never given one, and in the long aftermath that stories tend to cut away from. He writes under a pen name and lives in North America.
— Conrad
