I Am Trying To Tell You Something About Ghosts

And an invocation for the living and the gone

I am trying to tell you something about ghosts, but they keep interrupting.

Not with rattling chains or drafts that flicker the candle, no. These ghosts come as flashes of my grandmother’s hands at the laundry—the grandmother who shaped me with her absence. They come, too, as my Nana’s love of the lake and its deep rocks, the sound of my own voice in grief, the way it sounds like someone else’s, someone long gone but still right here.

They come as my great-aunt Lala who loved me without condition, who had no children of her own and who died when I was ten, who visits in the form of Raggedy Ann dolls with loose button eyes sewn on imperfectly with new thread and a foot repaired with a baby sock, and the way I sometimes crave butterscotch candy I haven’t tasted in decades. Lala was widowed twice, but her love was whole and she poured it into me, not knowing whether I would remember.

But I did.

The dead do not vanish. They reorganize as the syntax of our loves and fears, the rhythm of our inherited longings. Ghosts do not knock. They leak. Through habits, facial expressions, the way we flinch from mirrors when tired. I have never seen a ghost in the classical sense—no Victorian vapor at the foot of my bed—but I have felt the breath of old sadness pass through me like wind.

What is a ghost, anyway, if not a memory that exceeds the capacity of our bodies?

My Nana’s apartment smelled like Lawry’s Seasoning Salt and perfume—I don’t know what kind. She has been gone almost thirty years, but I am suddenly digging out her old letters. I am told this is “grief behavior.” But isn’t grief just the most polite form of haunting?

Ancestral ghosts are not polite, though. They mutter through bone. They whisper in the genetics of our dreams and nightmares. You think you’re afraid of failure, but maybe it’s your great-great-uncle who lost everything in the drought. You think you are estranged from your name, but maybe it’s because it belonged to someone who buried their joy in a barn and forgot the map.

There are also disobedient ghosts, and the ones we make up. The ones who flicker in fiction and keep us company when we write. The ones who help us get strange on the page. I have heard them. I hear them still. I follow their lead.

And me? I’m a writer. I summon. I conjure. I leave out bowls of language for the ones I’ve lost and the ones who’ve left. I let them speak through me, even when I have to invent their voices. Even if I have to split myself open to hear them.

Virginia Woolf said we need a room of our own, but maybe we also need a ghost of our own: some companion from the other side of reason, whispering to us that there is more here than we can see. Call it intuition. Call it memory. Call it the lyric impulse.

I like to think the ancestors and the apparitions meet sometimes at the edge of our awareness, like neighbors from opposite streets, nodding over the fence. They share recipes, secrets, regrets. They pass along what they can. A writer is a person porous to the past and the future. A person willing to be mesmerized by mystery. A person who leaves out tea for someone they’ve never met.

Let me say this plainly: I don’t know if I believe in ghosts.
Let me say this crookedly: I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I believe like them.

I believe in what returns.

Some of us, we know, die before we die. Absence has a texture—heavy, like velvet soaked in rain. We reach, but can’t touch.

I keep reaching.

Last week I remembered my estranged father, who died last year, leaving behind the ache of what was never built. He was more myth than man to me, more silence than story. Yet in the weeks after he died, I dreamed he was building a house from river stones. He did not speak. He only worked. When I tried to enter the house, he disappeared. I woke with empty hands, but I knew exactly what to write. Grief is a kind of architecture.

I am not haunted, but I am built of echoes.

Is this not—at least in part—what art is?

A communion with the invisible.

A translation of the murmuring.

A pact with the dead—not to stay, but to sing.

Invocation for the Living and the Gone

Come, quiet ones.
Come, beloveds I knew and those I did not.
Come, you who left too early and you who linger still,
in breath, in bone, in the folds of my thoughts.

Let the ink be your threshold.
Let the body remember what the mind has hidden.
Let the silence mean something new.

If you are here in sorrow, I welcome you.
If you are here in love, I welcome you.
If you are here and cannot speak,
I hear your absence.

May this page be a door.
May my hands be steady.
May what needs to be told come forward—not all at once,
but in flickers, in murmurs,
in whatever form it must.

And may I be brave enough
to name what I can,
and hold gently
what I cannot.

Love,

Jeannine

PS I attended a very moving funeral this morning, which inspired me to share this post from the archive.

Write With Me This Fall!

The Miracle Project on Substack

Join us in the 40-Day Miracle Project, a subversive gratitude practice based on Melody Beattie’s book, Make Miracles in Forty Days. We’re been prepping this past week, and the official start is Wed, Sept 10.

This simple 10-minute daily list-making subversive gratitude practice involves expressing gratitude for all the shittiest things in our lives, the scary, sad, annoying, hurtful, depressing, overwhelming things we might feel powerless to change, and our negative emotions about those things. Ten minutes making that list, then either tuck it away somewhere private or share with your trusted Miracle Partner. And, prior to starting the list-making, take time to identify a miracle(s) you want in your life, plus any concrete goals—things you want to change, experience, achieve, etc--in highly specific detail, and write those down, just for yourself. No one else needs to see those.

That's the practice. Super simple.

If you still have questions, please ask! We’re using our Wednesday posts for writing exercises related to what we’re doing, the Writing in the Dark chat to discuss what we’re doing, how it’s going, and what it’s bringing up for us, and Notes as a place to share small daily (positive) gratitudes as a complement to the deeper work of the Project. Join us! You can upgrade your membership here if you need to.

And for a slightly fuller description, go to the footnote. ¹

Writing in the Dark | The WORKSHOP

The November session of the six-week virtual workshop will open for registration later this month. If you want advance notice of registration, you can join the waitlist here and you’ll receive email notification a few days before general registration begins. The WORKSHOP fills very quickly!

Radical Revision in Minneapolis

We have three spots (of 10) still open for RADICAL REVISION | A 3-Day Manuscript Intensive Workshop (maximum 10 participants, live, in person in Minneapolis) October 23 - 26, Thursday - Sunday

This kind of revision is deep, transformative work for both for the writing and the writer. Your manuscript will change, and so will your understanding of your writing and yourself as a writer and person. This small (10 max) in-person workshop is for writers who have or want to have a prose manuscript in progress (essay or short story, memoir or novel) and are ready to workshop it using Writing in the Dark’s signature methods of deep attention, deep curiosity, and active search for opportunity and possibility.

Please see the full description here and don’t hesitate to email me with any questions large or small (writing@writinginthedark.org, subject line: Radical Revision).

1. Second, starting today and throughout this intensive, we’ll use all three Substack spaces for this intensive: our Wednesday Writing in the Dark posts, the Writing in the Dark chat, and Notes, and here’s how:

Wednesday posts: Here, I will offer reflection on the book, the craft of writing and how it intersects with something like a gratitude practice, and a related writing exercise (separate from but related to the forty day practice).

As for the Wednesday posts, I recommend (as always) opting to receive Writing in the Dark via email, not just the Substack app, because in general people find it easier to track posts when they arrive in their inboxes.

WITD chat: Here, I will post a guiding question every day for forty days, which you are invited to respond to. During this intensive, the chat settings will be such that members can respond to my daily post, but not publish new posts of their own. This is to keep the conversation all on one thread.

If you’re not on the Writing in the Dark chat yet, you can find it here.

Notes: On Notes, I’ll share some small gratitude each day, in hopes that you, too—if you’re on Notes—will add your small gratitude to mine in the comments. Sharing on Notes serves two purposes: first, it honors Beattie’s work and intentions by sharing some part of this process with a much wider community. Second, it helps me to show others more of what we do here at Writing in the Dark, which, to be fully transparent, means a lot in this strange climate where my U of M contract is in nonrenewal and Jon’s office is being sunsetted at the end of this year (got that news while I was at CAMP, of all things). This is one of those times when it’s not so great to both be in the same field of scientific research, which happens to be wholly under attack by the current administration. Good time for miracles in our household. So, thanks in advance if you choose to participate in the Notes aspect!

If you don’t use Notes, that’s totally fine, you can just bypass that part of the intensive.