Ghost, Writing

I was a ghost when the ghost writing opportunity came along. 

My mother had taken her own life one week after I gave birth to my youngest child; a year and a half later, I was still a shadow of myself. I was milk and tears and lullaby; I was insomnia and stumble and mindless social media scroll. I was a writer who couldn’t write. I knew I needed to write about my mom, knew it would help me grieve, help me heal, but I just couldn’t. I was too tired, too sad, my arms too full of baby. I wasn’t sure what needed to happen for the words to flow again. I feared they never would.

And then I got an email out of the blue from a beloved former agent. She had heard of a ghost writing opportunity, and thought I’d be the perfect fit. A woman who had started a farm sanctuary—a place where she and her team cared for animals rescued from slaughterhouses, rodeos, and other circumstances—was looking for a collaborator to help write about her life and her mission. Something sparked inside me at the thought of this project; while I had been struggling to get my own story on the page, I felt instantly confident I could write hers, and loved the idea of helping her and her organization with my words. The edges of my ghost self started to  coalesce; the center of my ghost self started to warm. 

I visited the farm sanctuary with my husband and baby (who was thrilled to see the cows and pigs and horses and goats) and sat down with the owner, a lovely and dedicated woman. The kindness and goodness of this place were palpable in the air, both throughout the farm, and at her kitchen table. I felt myself getting even more excited about telling her story and left brimming with thoughts about how to structure the book, how to adjust my language to capture the rhythm of her speech. My limbs vibrated with possibility, came into sharper focus. 

The owner ultimately didn’t hire me—she loved me and my writing, she said, but she had regretted going back to work so soon when her own son was small, and was concerned about my taking on the project when I had such a young child. I was disappointed, but I was also grateful; the potential opportunity had awakened something in me, had helped bring me back to life. If I could summon the energy to write her story, I realized, I could summon the energy to write my own. And slowly, carefully, gently, I did.  Writing became its own sanctuary.

Now, several years later, my book about my mother out of my body and out in the world,  I recently found myself doing some unexpected ghost writing with a friend. Together we rewrote a few chapters of a completed book under contract with a publisher, one that had missed its mark. It was a fun challenge to take someone else’s story and help it shine, in a different way than I regularly do with my students and freelance editing clients—I give them tools to help their own words shimmer, but for this project, I wrote in the author’s voice, and I loved how it required new writerly muscles, new creative flexibility. 

I also have entered a different kind of ghost writing—after I finished my memoir, I found myself writing about ghosts. My new book—a novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns—is narrated from the afterlife by girls and women killed by Hungarian Countess Erzebet Bathory around the turn of the 17th century. The book is told in multiple voices, as well as a collective voice, all the ghosts speaking in chorus, and it was an energizing and liberating leap, moving from my story, my voice, to theirs. I have no doubt that writing my memoir helped me feel firm enough in my own skin to take on a grief far bigger than my own.

And that’s what all ghost writing (perhaps all fiction writing) is, isn’t it? Writing beyond ourselves—stepping out of our egos to speak from another’s mouth (or even speak from beyond the grave).  As disappointed as I was when I lost the opportunity to write the book for the farm sanctuary, I can now see the wisdom of the owner’s decision; I may not have been grounded enough in my own body at the time to dive into her story and have energy left over for the rest of my life. Now when I disappear into someone else’s voice—a ghost writing client’s, a ghost’s—I trust I can find my way home. 

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—Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony) 

MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS

In her first novel in poems, award winning author Gayle Brandeis gives voice to the hundreds of girls and women killed
by Countess Erzsébet Báthory of Hungary between 1585 and 1609. The ghosts of these girls and women speak in chorus, compelling us to bear witness to the violence enacted against them, and to share their quest for justice—not only for themselves, but for all girls and women to come.

A lyrical, polyphonic protest against silence, Many Restless Concerns speaks to today’s upswell of voices claiming their own worth.

“‘Just know we all have stories worth your time. Just know we’re just starting to understand our own worth.’ This is how Gayle Brandeis opens MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS. Countess Bathory of Hungary allegedly killed up to 650 girls and women between the years 1585 and 1609, in a variety of cruel, heartless ways. Brandeis brings these words to our attention–stab, strangle, pummel, hack, burn, drown, freeze, scald. ‘Your body remembers even when you no longer have a body, some tender part of you still flinches; some immaterial nerves still flare,’ she writes. ‘We want you to bear witness,’ voices the chorus. I urge you, the reader, to bear witness to these centuries of silent voices rising up clearly, often beautifully, more often tragically. Bear witness.”–Alma Luz Villanueva

“Feels like a terrifying and gorgeously lyric fairy tale but never once does the author let us forget that the pain is real and the point is empathy, understanding and protecting the ones who come after. Ethereal and beautiful as its ghostly chorus, but with ‘muscle and scent,’ ‘meat’ and ‘bone,’ MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS is quickened with the blood of the victims, the essential, and ultimately healing, blood of story.”–Francesca Lia Block

“Gayle Brandeis is a miracle. From the forgotten memories of murdered women, she’s created a monument of hope, pain, and demands for the justice of recognition. This is a startling, glorious, gorgeous book. What a vision. Read this book and be transformed.”–Rene Denfeld

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing