About

J. Federle writes.

Well, she writes and edits. In 2011, after leaving Kentucky for grad school in England, she launched a career in technical editing. A decade later, she snapped—one misplaced comma too many—and started writing ghost stories. (That MA in 19th-century Romanticism gets put to work daily.)

As an author, she treats good horror like a hot romance: you need chemistry before the kiss.

Her fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (“Most Popular New Fiction of 2019!”) and on podcasts: The NoSleep Podcast and Creepy. Her poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review and SCUM Magazine. 

Today, she resides in Lima, Peru. If you think another country has better food, she’ll fight you. (It’ll be a cook-off, and she’ll bring the booze.)

 

Ok, now really tell me about the author…

Jessica loves the bark of birch trees, the words skuttle and skitter and gurgle, and old metal hinges creaking shut.

She grew up in Kentucky in a big, brick house. Woods in back. She misses winter sunsets: black trees against a hot pink sky. She helped search Death Valley for a man’s thumb once (he’d shot off with a cannon)—she didn’t find it, but she thinks someone did. She’s been clotheslined off a horse. Bourbon.

Vacations in Michigan put her a short dirt road down from a cemetery. Her great-grandpa was a gravedigger. Catholic school left her with a deepened love of the macabre and not much else.

Her writers’ group in Peru stokes her heart with the bare-breasted zeal only ever found among groups of women whispering their most difficult thoughts to one another.

 

And the art on this website?

J. Federle’s sketchy monsters sometimes claw out of her head. They say it’s cramped in there. Most end up safely on paper. 

Her talented husband is teaching her how to use a Fujifilm X-T3.