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| Illustration by Celina Hicks |
No Ghosts Allowed!
About five years ago, I started out to write a mystery—and did—the first of three books out and a fourth due in September.
And they're doing pretty well. The first, Indecent Exposure, sets a young, widowed Episcopal priest in a small village in Alaska, and gets him involved in village life and in finding the solution to a murder. In fact, the story opens when he goes out to collect the body of the victim, found deliberately spread-eagled, frozen solid in a snow drift ... darn hard to haul home by dogsled.
My big problem with this book, early on, was the scene when the ghost shows up. I found myself typing the ghost scene that I never planned to include and frankly, didn't want. "This is a mystery! No ghosts allowed!
But, as many writers know, you don't always get to choose your characters ... and you certainly don't get to choose what they say or do. It can play heck with plotting your narrative.
So, is it a Ghost Story or a Mystery?
The answer is "yes." But ultimately it's a mystery. The main character, the young mission priest, is based on the broad outline of my father, at about that same age, moving our family to the town of Nenana.
We had been going to go to Africa, to Liberia. Even at age seven, I was so relieved to not go. Today, after having worked a bit in southern Africa and in the Middle East, I'm still not a hot weather guy. I loved everything about moving to Alaska and can still feel my roots in that little town, and the muddy river flowing on in my heart and in my soul.
I've been re-reading an unpublished manuscript of my father's from 2001, titled Nenana. There was an excerpt published that year in the literary Massachusetts Review. In it, my father, whose mukluks were planted pretty firmly in the snow, talks about a kind of thinning of the membrane between those alive and those dead. He met people in Nenana who talked—and listened—to 'old ones,' long gone. And easily felt that presence in the abandoned, and frankly spooky, old mission school, the land slowly being devoured by the river. It gave him a kind of three-dimensional view of life and death. One that stayed with him.
Standing here in this moment, Nike's firmly planted, it's easy to think ... "well, that's silly." But we recently met a woman here who summed it up pretty well: "If you believe in the Holy Spirit, then believing in other spirits isn't that much of a reach.
Writing from the gut.
Years ago, a woman I was fond of, said "don't ever write about me." And I haven't, at least not intentionally. I don't do that. If I write about a real person, like Alaskan Orie Williams, who used to run the movie projector at the Pioneer's Hall, I just say so.
But the point is, a writer brings everything to a book, not just the neat and tidy stuff, and not always by intent. I remembered this, recently, doing a reading from one of my books, when I saw that woman walking through a scene, unmistakable.
It is very much a mystery, but I left the ghost in ... all the ghosts in ... where they belong.
