Letters From Kelly

In a keynote she gave recently (that I wrote about last month) author Carmen Maria Machado talked about what it’s like to be haunted.

“Hauntings aren’t just about ghosts,” she said. “Haunting is about what used to be, what is invoked, the way in which one thing means another.

“Whose ghost are you?”

She got me thinking, how ghost stories are popular, perennial, pervasive. They’ve been around since long before we wrote our stories down, and every culture has at least one ghost: Revenants, Yūrei, Banshees, Pontianaks, Jumbies, Tunche, and on and on.

As many and as varied as they are, ghost stories do share some elements. One, a ghost is the spirit of a person who used to be alive. That might seem obvious, but it’s important to differentiate ghosts from other spirits, like demons and fairies and river monsters, who are supernatural in some way but were never human.

Another defining characteristic is, a ghost needs someone or something to haunt.

In some ghost stories, people see someone eerie, only realizing later that they were a ghost. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Or, (in horror movies mostly) someone dies angry, and then spends the rest of the story terrorizing the living, who may or may not deserve it.

For me, those are the least satisfying of ghost stories. I prefer ones where the ghost asks something of the living. Hamlet’s father, demanding his murder be avenged; Sethe’s daughter Beloved driving all the love and joy out of her home so she can have her guilt-ridden mother to herself.

This Halloween season, treat yourself and write a ghost story, just for the fun of it. As you do, ask yourself a few questions:

1. What does your ghost ask from the living?
2. What do the living want from their ghost? This is a way of excavating how and why they are haunted.
3. What happens to the ghost if they get what they’ve asked? Will they stick around to aid and protect the living? Or once satisfied will they, like Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost, take off to dimensions unknown?
4. What is your living character holding onto through their haunting? What should they maintain, and what should they let go?

At heart, ghost stories are relationship stories. The best ones know that the haunting goes both ways. 

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley is enduring a punishing, exhausting afterlife. When he returns to haunt his only friend Ebeneezer Scrooge, he asks Scrooge to listen and to change, that he might be spared the same fate. In so doing, Marley rescues Scrooge from the miserable, lonely life he’d been living. Surely, knowing that made it easier for Marley to drag around his heavy chains.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Writers, last month, I got to hear Carmen Maria Machado, author of the short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties and the memoir In the Dream House, deliver the keynote at the Hippocamp Conference on Creative Nonfiction.

She called her talk “I Hate My Book,” and before you ask, yes. Yes, it absolutely lived up to its title.

I can’t send you back in time to sit with me in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to hear the whole thing, so instead, I’ll just share a few of my favorite highlights with you.

While writing In the Dream House, Machado kept a quote from Khalil Gibran on her desk that said, “If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom in your hands?”

Until, after a long day of reading about domestic abuse and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry and writing about her own experiences with abuse and bigotry, she threw it out.

“Because he was wrong. The fact is people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place, their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.”

On writing her second book:

“When you are writing your first book, it is so hard to think of what comes next. You spend your whole life saving up a book inside of you, and you write it, and if you’re lucky it gets published, … but then what? You have to then have, god help me, new ideas?! What kind of freaking scam is that?”

On why she hates her book In the Dream House:

“It’s gross to have a book like that inside of you, a knot of pain that’s constantly pulling your skeleton out of alignment.

“I resent the fact that I had to write it because it didn’t exist yet.

“I’m angry that it happened to me, and angry that I revisit these events during writing…and I’m mad that I had to become someone different to understand what happened to me, because to have remained the same would have been a certain death.”

On how talking to teenagers about ghosts pointed her in the right direction:

“I’d often wondered if my ex’s former house’s current tenants ever passed over a space where I’d been crying, and felt it, a cold spot, a twinge of inexplicable sadness.

“I thought about how the Gothic can be conducive to suppressed voices emerging, like in a haunted house. And how at its core the Gothic drama is fundamentally about voiceless things—the dead, the past, the marginalized—gaining voices that cannot be ignored.

This is the way that writing is haunted — the past aggressively asserts itself against the present, grappling for control.”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Recently, my former student Michael Sadowski spoke to my class about writing his beautiful memoir Men I’ve Never Been, and also about starting over.

After Michael’s book came out, he finished a novel, but his then-agent doesn’t handle novels. And so, he had to start all over again, researching literary agents, composing a query letter, reaching out, and waiting.

Even as a published author, Michael said, it wasn’t easy.

One of the most important things he learned after going through the process twice?

“Forgive yourself,” Michael said. “You learn how to do the query—how to do anything well—over time.”

The very next morning, one of the students who’d been in the class emailed me to say they’d made a mistake with their writing, and they were sure they’d ruined their chances of ever publishing their book. (They hadn’t.)

While many people are their own worst critics, sometimes I think writers take it to a whole other level. We accidentally send an email with a typo, and we convince ourselves we’re now on some secret blacklist of writers who can’t spell. We pitch a story to an editor who says it’s not their kind of thing, and we convince ourselves they’ll delete all future emails from us without reading. In our minds, every misstep is career-ending.

Not only is this kind of thinking unpleasant to live with, and just plain wrong, it can do real damage. Alice Boyes, author of The Healthy Mind Toolkit, says that harsh self-talk can actually make it harder to recover from setbacks—including rejection. Writers looking to publish work need to be persistent and resilient, and our harsh inner critics make that harder.

Self-compassion, Boyes says,  makes us not only more adaptive, but more likely to engage with other writers, where we can find support. It’s an essential skill for writers, to replace the critic with more compassionate self-talk.

What does that sound like? According to Boyes, it’s softening the tone you use with yourself to make it kinder; it’s reminding yourself that you’re doing the best you can.

“It’s recognizing that pain is a universal human experience,” she wrote recently. “And it’s taking a balanced approach to our negative emotions that neither suppresses or exaggerates them.”

It takes practice and repetition to tame the harsh inner critic. It’s worth the effort, though, not only because it helps you persist through adversity, and hopefully find a home for your work. Self-compassion can also make you a better writer.

“At a certain point,” said the novelist Angela Flournoy, “you have to be kind to yourself as a writer and … allow yourself to let loose, pursue a good story, and create people who feel real.”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty