Abstract
Jared Fembleaux is a fiction writer based in Brooklyn, NY. His short work has appeared in The Hopkins Review, Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Poetries in English Magazine, with additional stories currently out at journals. 

He is at work on his first novel.


10.Jared Fembleaux
Photograph by Kyle Serrano, 2023
       Jared was raised in New Jersey and left at eighteen to study screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He graduated months before the pandemic and spent the next several years inside the machinery of Hollywood—first as a production assistant on shows including American Idol and the Kids' Choice Awards, then, an Associate Story Producer on MTV’s The Challenge, and finally at twenty-three, as a producer at NBCUniversal's Peacock Kids, where he worked across animated children's properties including Trolls and Gabby's Dollhouse. The work was steady and the path was clear, which was the problem. At a writers' retreat in Scotland, he came to understand that what he'd loved all along was writing itself, not the medium he'd been chasing it through. He and his now-fiancé moved cross-country to New York shortly after, trading the West Coast lives they'd built for the ones they actually wanted—his in fiction, his partner's in photography.

       His fiction is preoccupied with loneliness in its less photogenic forms—the loneliness of voyeurs, of people who have rehearsed their lives until the rehearsal became the life, of protagonists whose isolation has begun to do strange, slightly monstrous creative work in them. He writes about queer longing, about the small cruelties domesticity hides, about inheritance that arrives as a habit rather than a possession, and about the bodies his characters live in without quite occupying. His stories tend to be set in rooms—coastal cottages, walk-in freezers, sublet apartments, the back row of a movie theater—where the surface is so familiar that any small deviation registers as seismic. He is interested in characters who would rather sit still than confront what's asking to be confronted, and he is not interested in writing the version where they learn the right lesson by the last page.

        He is also the founder of The Table Review, an independent literary magazine published twice yearly from Brooklyn. Writer-led and volunteer-run, the magazine publishes fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and interviews from emerging and established writers, with a particular commitment to voices historically underrepresented in publishing. The premise is simple: that stories, like meals, are best shared across a table, with time.

       He now manages a large independent bookstore in Manhattan and writes in the hours around it. His first novel is in developmental edits with an editor he trusts. A second is in the outlining stage. The short stories continue to return to the same psychological territory from new angles, the way one keeps walking past a particular house in a neighborhood, never quite sure what one is looking for.

        He lives in Brooklyn with his fiancé and Ranger, a nearly six-year-old white Gerberian Shepsky to whom he is, by his own admission, entirely subordinate.

---