Ghosts come in many forms: visitations from lost spirits, and the ghosts of our past, memories for good and for bad. Death is not the only thing that can take from you, and hauntings can take unanticipated silhouettes. In Haunting Muses seventeen authors tell the story of female hauntings: stories, poems, and creative non-fiction considering what loss means to a life. Here are stories confirming our deepest understanding and stories to challenge what we know to be true. Stories familiar as our own lives and stories strange, poetic, and raw with real-life emotion.
Women have always written and published ghost stories. In the past, some stories were obscured. Lesbian themes and characters were half-shadowed: spinsters and maiden aunts, women on the outskirts of society, who could be coded for the knowledgeable reader. Writers, it’s argued, sublimated gay themes into a more acceptable form in the transgressive genres such as horror fiction.
Things have changed. In Haunting Muses, lesbians are not confined to the shadows. The stories told reflect lives as diverse as real life, and those lives that are not always easy. The authors, be they award winners or newer voices, confidently explore the impact of loss on women’s lives. Haunting Muses considers not only the traditional ghost, but charts the ghosts of loss: lost relationships (“Dance with Me” by JL Merrow) lost hopes, lost inspiration (“The sun rises differently” by Giovanna Capone). These are stories of ghosts real and metaphorical.
Here are stories that look to the past, present, and future. From Doreen Perrine’s engaging historical tale of betrayal, “Angel of Light,” to Elaine Burnes’ exciting “Endurance,” a story of danger, exploration, guilt, and reconciliation told under distant vistas.
The motif of the ghost is often a window into the past: in Bonnie J. Morris’ “Labor Day Weekend” women from the past send a curveball into the present, and L.K. Early’s “Lucky Strike” sees a young woman finding inspiration in the past to rise above her current troubles.
The past can also shine light upon current life: Giovanna Capone explores heritage in her poetry. And consideration of mental health is central to Andrea Lambert’s moving “My Wife’s Ghost.” The changing form of child/parent relationship is examined Bonnie Jo StuffleBeam’s excellent story, “They Come Through the Walls.”
Some stories look beyond America’s culture heritage. Pascal Scott’s “New Hope” draws on Norse mythology. Amy Sisson’s charming story “Minghun” is inspired by Chinese beliefs.
Yet American is not a monoculture. I was fascinated by the American lives described in Sacchi Green’s “Spirit Horse Ranch,” a story that manages to be both chilling and heart-warming, and by Lela E. Buis’s psychic investigators Deep South story, “Wine and Magnolias.”
These stories in Haunting Muses present a complexity of ideas that can be explored when we take one step to reality’s left. These are wide-ranging stories, from the eerie to the uplifting. They show women engaging with the shades of the past, reaching for reconciliation and transformation. These stories show very different lives, yet all of one thing is constant, all lives encompass change, and loss is woven into the fabric experience. Here are stories about what is left behind after a loss, through change of circumstance or chance of heart: loss of a lover, loss of a friend, loss of a family member, even the loss of a stranger who has something to impart to us. These stories, poems, and creative non-fiction tell stories of hauntings good and bad, but always memorable.
Deborah Walker
London, 2016