Introductions

A novel, written in a garrett in Paris : what might happen if a castle in France wanted to increase its entries by hiring on ghosts as summer help? I hope for a narrative that strikes the right flickering note between light humor and dark, dark matter and light. I have several chapters written and it, also very ghostlike, gathers shape, if slowly, before my eyes.

I have always been haunted. Adopted, I have been dogged by a kind of shadow fate of what might have been, or again by a phantom family. This feeling is all the more acute as the stories of my childhood are sordid tales that lie outside the purview of this blog but I lay it out here as it undergirds so much of my experience. In humor dancing again between dark and light, my husband says it’s like being married to a nineteenth century novel.

And indeed I am something of the bedridden invalid, if not entirely. Profound mistreatment of our most vulnerable creatures will tell in later years and I am only one of many whose body gave out to chronic pain, long after the original sins were committed upon me. Much of what I write will be, if not seen through my bedroom window (in a Brontë nightie, under toile sheets), then imagined. Photos will mostly come from my husband serving, as one dear friend puts it, as my Shallottian mirror onto the world.

I refuse to be cursed however: I won’t be dying in a boat any time soon or expiring after one last aria into a fit of deadly coughing. I have too much to say, too much to write. I am so glad for your company along the way.