Patrick Thomas Henry

Finalist, 2025 High Plains International Book Award (Short Story Collection)

Longlisted for THE STORY PRIZE, for Books Published in 2024

Winner of the 2022 Northeast Modern Language Association Creative Writing Book Award

Semifinalist, 2023 Iron Horse Literary Review / Texas Tech University Press First Book Prize

In sixteen tales that smudge the line between the real and the fantastic, Practice for Becoming a Ghost tracks the malingering ghosts of grief and loss that haunt the present.

The stories in Practice for Becoming a Ghost tread the line between the real and the fantastic, conjuring the ghosts that haunt both our past and our present. A father whispers to his dead wife as his daughters row off course and their boat begins to capsize. Staff writers at a failing publication watch as the people around them are slowly transformed into magpies, cardinals, and mourning doves. A woman summons stories from the textures of bird seed, feathers, nests, and craft-store yarn. In the title story, a lawyer falls in love with a graphic designer who asks him to pretend that she is invisible to everyone but him.

From Washington, D.C. to rural Pennsylvania to the nineteenth-century Irish countryside, the stories in this collection grapple with grief and the fundamental truth that the act of living is always, inevitably, practice for becoming a ghost.

PRAISE FOR PRACTICE FOR BECOMING A GHOST

One of Electric Lit’s “15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Fall”

“What a perfect collection! Like fairy tales or ghost stories, Henry’s words evoke something universal and magical in this brilliant book. These are stories of immense vibrancy, from lakes filled with secrets to roommates obsessed with textures and former teen detectives stuck in creative writing workshops, every character and place is brimming with the thrum of life.”
– Chloe N. Clark, author of Patterns of Orbit: Stories

“What a glorious tribute this collection is to the possibilities of language, imagination, and the short story form. From the flash pieces to the character studies to the unexpected narrators, these stories introduce a brilliant new voice already writing at a high level of accomplishment. Practice for Becoming a Ghost astonished me completely.”
– Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point

“Practice for Becoming a Ghost is less of a collection of short stories and more of a constellation. Here, people burn as bright as stars against the dark backdrop of lost love, the supernatural, and the seduction of the afterlife. Reading this book is like the experience of seeing a fortune teller, and then having the fortune become true. Each story shimmers with Henry’s glittering prose.”
– Wendy J. Fox, author of What If We Were Somewhere Else

“Patrick Henry takes great care with each of his characters—whether they are children making soothsayers, a woman ultra-sensitive to texture, or the final automaton made for painting—and ensures that we see them unfiltered but respected: the truth of their flaws, pain, and joy set alight by Henry’s careful descriptions on the page.”
– Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes, author of Ashley Sugarnotch and the Wolf