Why I Write Ghost Stories
Jan. 17th, 2007 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousAbout three years ago, I saw an ad for ghost tours of Lexington, Virginia. Somehow I took it into my head that what the world really needed was a short story about a ghost tour operator whose ghosts unionize. After pushing this comic project to the back burner more times than I can recall, I've finally finished it. It weighs in just under 12,000 words, or 55 pages in Courier, hot off the laser printer.
There I go again, telling a story of problematic relations between the living and the pesky dead. Why, you might ask, do I keep doing that? Goodness knows, I ask why I keep doing that. Here's where I am with it:
A man and a woman are standing beside the grave of their firstborn, a girl, who will now be seven years old forever. They have with them their younger daughter, who is two. As long as the woman lives, this younger child will never be forgiven for having failed to die of the measles along with that other.
It is 1952, and in fewer years than anyone quite intends, the little girl who lived will become my mother.
The man is an important corporate attorney in Hartford, and many important corporate people have come to show their respect for his flinty New England mind by attending his child’s funeral.
The woman begins to cry when she sees her firstborn’s coffin lowered into the ground.
The man (whose heart is broken too, of course), turns to his wife and whispers, Stop that. People are watching. We don’t do this.
The woman looks around, sees that she is seen, and stops crying.
This is the moment when it happens. In the moment when my grandparents decide together to conceal their grief rather than lay Carolyn properly to rest, she becomes our family ghost, and I become a writer of ghost stories. (I will not be born until 1970, but causality moves in mysterious ways.)
All these characters have futures ahead of them, though on the bad day in 1952, none of them are thinking about that. The man and the woman will have a third child, another daughter. As long as the woman lives, this youngest will never be forvigven for failing to replace the one who died. The two kid sisters will, despite everything, grow up to be kind, clever, quirky women with unsinkable senses of humor and daughters of their own. The two-year-old who is watching her big sister go into the ground will even find true love and see the world.
And Carolyn? Carolyn can’t quite grow up to be anything. In the only surviving photograph, she wears a girl scout uniform. She smiles, and her front teeth are all just falling out or just growing in. Perhaps she wanted to be a ballerina—my mother will keep, all her life, one pink satin toe shoe of Carolyn’s, a saint’s relic if ever there was one.
But instead of becoming a ballerina, Carolyn will become a muse. One of many, one of mine.
There I go again, telling a story of problematic relations between the living and the pesky dead. Why, you might ask, do I keep doing that? Goodness knows, I ask why I keep doing that. Here's where I am with it:
A man and a woman are standing beside the grave of their firstborn, a girl, who will now be seven years old forever. They have with them their younger daughter, who is two. As long as the woman lives, this younger child will never be forgiven for having failed to die of the measles along with that other.
It is 1952, and in fewer years than anyone quite intends, the little girl who lived will become my mother.
The man is an important corporate attorney in Hartford, and many important corporate people have come to show their respect for his flinty New England mind by attending his child’s funeral.
The woman begins to cry when she sees her firstborn’s coffin lowered into the ground.
The man (whose heart is broken too, of course), turns to his wife and whispers, Stop that. People are watching. We don’t do this.
The woman looks around, sees that she is seen, and stops crying.
This is the moment when it happens. In the moment when my grandparents decide together to conceal their grief rather than lay Carolyn properly to rest, she becomes our family ghost, and I become a writer of ghost stories. (I will not be born until 1970, but causality moves in mysterious ways.)
All these characters have futures ahead of them, though on the bad day in 1952, none of them are thinking about that. The man and the woman will have a third child, another daughter. As long as the woman lives, this youngest will never be forvigven for failing to replace the one who died. The two kid sisters will, despite everything, grow up to be kind, clever, quirky women with unsinkable senses of humor and daughters of their own. The two-year-old who is watching her big sister go into the ground will even find true love and see the world.
And Carolyn? Carolyn can’t quite grow up to be anything. In the only surviving photograph, she wears a girl scout uniform. She smiles, and her front teeth are all just falling out or just growing in. Perhaps she wanted to be a ballerina—my mother will keep, all her life, one pink satin toe shoe of Carolyn’s, a saint’s relic if ever there was one.
But instead of becoming a ballerina, Carolyn will become a muse. One of many, one of mine.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-17 06:01 am (UTC)Whatever any therapist might say about letting go, I'll never be able to forgive our grandparents for being so horrible to our mothers. How they became the wonderful, warm, nurturing, loving people they are, I'll never completely understand. I just thank the heavens for it.
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Date: 2007-01-17 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-17 04:37 pm (UTC)My mom says the main reason she and your mother got through it is that the two of them had each other. It's not a whole explanation, though. Lots of people who grow up in hell have siblings and then grow up to raise their own kids in hell anyway. Something else must have gone right. Whatever it was, I'm grateful for it, too.
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Date: 2007-01-17 08:30 am (UTC)And I have your birthday down as 15th and 22nd. I always thought it was 22nd, but now I'm all confused and second-guessing myself - perhaps I always thought it was 22nd because of Bad Poetry Day being on/close to it and that being when we did presents? I feel like an utter dork.
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Date: 2007-01-17 03:52 pm (UTC)And I don't mind being wished a happy birthday twice in a year. :)
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Date: 2007-01-17 04:09 pm (UTC)I thought I'd had a major brain-fart and just got your birthday wrong for all these years, when actually I'd had a major brain-fart and put it down a week early on the calendar. I was sitting there kicking myself for not sending your card out until the 16th!
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Date: 2007-01-17 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-17 03:58 pm (UTC)It's not just up your alley, it's in your shop. I set it in Lambertville, but transplanted your shop across the river and, um, gave you a sex change. Your double only has a walk-on part, but I needed someone with a shop full of fragile goods to be worried about poltergeist activity.
When I'm not writing epic fiction set in another world, I seem to be turning into a New Jerseyan regional writer.
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Date: 2007-01-17 05:53 pm (UTC)I love your your NJ stuff. I also like the epic fiction.
So, I guess I just like your stuff.
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Date: 2007-01-20 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 04:35 am (UTC)From latest <lj user="writersweekly">
Date: 2007-01-17 07:04 pm (UTC)CURRENT NEEDS: "Phantom Fiction - 1200-1500 word ghost oriented story. No horror. Paranormal in nature, featuring or including a ghost; The Clubroom - 800 words featuring a ghost hunting organization and the reason for their success; Tales from the Trenches - 1000 words featuring a particularly interesting investigation by a research or paranormal group; Spaces, Places and Faces - 500-800 words featuring some ghostly venue such as bed and breakfasts, ghost tours, and interesting ghostly stories which don't fit into any other department; Chasers: Celebrity paranormal researchers / mediums / psychics - 1200-1500 words. Regardless of department, copy is expected to be clean and free of the usual run of the mill grammar and spelling errors. Otherwise, it doesn't have a 'ghost' of a chance." Pays $25-$50 per article. NOTE: The company's online guidelines currently state they don't pay, but they do pay writers.
Re: From latest <lj user="writersweekly">
Date: 2007-01-20 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-17 08:28 pm (UTC)I suspect that part of your ministry is to bring harmony back to relations, people and places in which things have fallen out of balance through through words and stories. Or to mark an imbalance with grace and honor when healing is impossible.
I know your stories help me when I am feeling sad and weary. They remind me of what is important and make me laugh.
If i should ever fall into a coma, I would like Karen and other friends to come and give me massages and i would like you to sit by m y bed and read me stories, even if the doctors think I can't hear you.
love you.
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Date: 2007-01-18 02:36 pm (UTC)I'm only cruel because I care.
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Date: 2007-01-18 11:14 pm (UTC)Carry on. Nothing to see here...
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Date: 2007-01-20 04:43 am (UTC)I'm guessing that you won't be able to make it Saturday, if M is quite as sick as all that. Stay well, and wish him a quick recovery for me. We'll miss you.
If you're ever in a coma, I'll be right there with a stack of books. If you want to wake up laughing, schedule your coma for January, and I'll read you bodaciously bad poetry.
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Date: 2007-01-18 01:28 am (UTC)Part of me wants to add more, but there really is nothing else to say.
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Date: 2007-01-19 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-22 04:49 pm (UTC)Wait. Do you have my address? In Carlisle, MA?
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Date: 2007-01-22 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-18 10:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 04:45 am (UTC)