I want to thank the Spirit in all of its forms, and my husband Nigel, and my sons Dylan and Luke. Their love and faith in me is a great source of inspiration. Anne Edelstein has encouraged me endlessly and given me smart advice, and Jamie Raab at Warner Books read my manuscript with a rare kind of detailed attention. Without her perceptive editing All That Lives would be a different book.
My grandmother Mary Kathleen Self is responsible for telling me this story when I was little and for keeping it alive as I grew. My mother, Sharon Mayes, and David, Connie and Henry Katzenstein all helped turn my idea of this novel into a reality. In 1997 I had the good fortune to receive an artist’s residency at the Djerassi Foundation, and I am extremely grateful to that program. I am also fortunate many of my best friends are willing readers: Barbara Joan Tiger Bass, Jim Bier-man, Kit Birskovich, Karen Donovan, Ann Friedman, Lindsey Roscoe and Valerie Rich read my rough drafts, and I owe them. I am also grateful to Jenny McPhee for her early and insightful editing.
Harriette Simpson Arnow’s work on pioneer life in the Cumberland was invaluable in my research, as were the writings of M. V. Ingram in his Authenticated History of the Bell Witch, published in 1894. I am also indebted to Charles Bailey Bell’s publication The Bell Witch: A Mysterious Spirit and also the investigations of Hereward Carrington and Dr. Nandor Fodor into the psychosomatic possibilities that might explain the recorded phenomena. The Foxfire Books, edited by Eliot Wigginton, provided me with all I needed to know about hog slaughter, spinning, weaving, wild Tennessee plants and herbs and other affairs of plain living. All biblical references in this novel come from the King James reference edition.
Finally, I want to thank all the people of Adams and Robertson County, Tennessee, those with us and those no longer present, who kept the tale of the Bell Witch alive, passing it down over nearly two hundred years. All those people unknown to me made this book possible.