I’m thrilled to feature one of my favorite people and writers today on What Scares You. Gary Fincke, or Dr. Fincke, as I’ve called him most, was one of my writing professors at Susquehanna University and solidly one of the reasons I’m still a writer today. He’s not only an excellent writer but a fabulous teacher as well, one of the good ones who is concerned about figuring out what a student is trying to do and help them get there.
Dr. Fincke has published twelve collections of stories, including Sorry I Worried You, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize and The Killer’s Dog, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. His stories have appeared in such journals as The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, CrazyHorse, The Idaho Review, and Cimarron Review. His most recent flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). His newest book is For Now, We Have Been Spared, a collection of poetry published in March by Slant Books. He is the Emeritus Charles Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, where he founded and then directed the Writers Institute and the nationally recognized undergraduate creative writing major for more than two decades.
And now? Let’s find out what scares him…
What is your earliest childhood memory of fear?
My earliest memory of fear is being afraid of rain falling on my bare head. There, that identifies me as born squeamish. I was four and walking with my mother when it started to rain. I still had a toddler’s lisp, so I insisted “I’ll fry” if my head got wet. My mother walked me into the A&P and coaxed a cardboard box from the manager. I wore it all the way to my grandmother’s house, square-headed as a primitive robot. My kindly grandmother set the box aside and patted my head. My aunt, who also lived there, looked at me as if she had work to do to make a man out of me.
My earliest “earned fear” arrived when I was five and playing a few blocks from home with a girl who lived in a house near the railroad tracks. Three older boys, maybe ten or eleven, emerged from where a creek ran on the other side of the tracks, then crossed and stood us against the back door of a house and terrorized us by firing BB guns over our head. The girl cried. I did my manly best by not saying a word. Not then. Not ever. But we never played together again.
What is your dumbest fear?
More confessions from childhood. I was seven, and my aunt, the one who used the word pantywaist on me when I showed any signs of regressing back to being afraid of getting my hair wet, told me a story about ants crawling up a friend’s nose while she fell asleep on a backyard sunbathing blanket. The ants, she said, made an ant hill in her head. You’d think a bright 2nd grader with all As on his report card could distinguish between fact and fiction, but all that summer I worried about ants invading me. Every tickle caused by tiny insect feet made me brush myself off with the sort of fury required for a swarm of bees. Thirty years later, I wrote a poem about it that was eventually selected to become a poster for a series produced by Penn State. Even better, that incident and a character based on my aunt became the opening scene of a story called “Rip His Head Off” that helped the story collection Sorry I Worried You win the Flannery O’Connor Prize.
“My aunt told me a story about ants crawling up a friend’s nose while she fell asleep on a backyard sunbathing blanket.”
