Telling you about something cool someone else has done is fun, but not a blog entry. Besides, you do need to know what paths those ghosts walking through the shopping centre took me on.
While I did my housework I took a good look about me. I might have shut my eyes when I cleared out a few things from the freezer, I admit, but basically I was thinking about culture. I wasn't thinking about it in any new way. I was looking at what I have carried with me from my past. Presents from family and friends. Food cooked to favourite recipes in the freezer. Engagement and birthday and wedding presents covering a full century of my family's history. A culture of reading and writing and thinking and cooking and remembering carried with me wherever I go.
Many North American writers have used the things we carry with us, the cultures, the traditions, the consequences of importing traditions into a strange land. Fantasy writers are particularly good on this. Charles de Lint is one of my favourites - most of his work is set in a Canadian version of imported Europe combined with refigured indigenous material. Coyote and fairy tales. Seamless and beautiful.
For some reason fewer Australian writers are interested in exploring these ideas in novel-length works. Howard and his mob have announced to us that we have to dump our cultures unless they're mainstream. But we all have ghosts. Denying them doesn't diminish them - it just sends them into hiding. Whatever Howard says.
Many of my ghosts are personal. I've simply lost too many people. Since I was a child I have known that the world not only doesn't owe me a living but is likely to turn around and attack me at any time. Ghosts of people and ghosts of terror: my ghosts.
We all have ghosts and I am wondering about the ghosts of others. I have done a bit of research into haunted Canberra places (not a lot - I don't want to start being scared when I walk down the street) and there are a surprising number of haunted places here. A different type of haunting to mine, but no less ghost-filled for that.
My next few months will be dreaming of narratives to tell about hauntings. Real hauntings, emotional hauntings - the pasts we carry - and cultural hauntings - the stories we tell that make the world feel safe or unsafe.
The carriage of ideas from one part of a culture to another and from one culture to another is what my academic research is about much of the time. I love looking at how we structure our realities and describe them. I hate writing theoretical papers, though.
The theme of my fiction, therefore, will be these ghosts. If I used the ghosts of the Middle Ages I would have ghosts who hide secrets, poltergeists, lilitim who steal the breath of babies at night. Scary stuff. That is there, under my belt, should I need it.
Really, though I want to look at contemporary fears. Trying to settle in an alien society that wants you to deny that you are haunted is something that has fascinated me for a long time. Creating a legendary landscape for Canberra has also. The notion of ghosts fits with this - it allows me to bring a bunch of deep fears together and see what happens.
Expect more ghosts.
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