Girl Meets Ghost: The Inspiration for I Scream Man

Today's guest post is by my friend, kindred spirit, and sister-writer, Katherine Ramsland, who discusses the inspiration for her recently published crime novel, I Scream Man. Katherine has played chess with serial killers, dug up the dead, worked with profilers, and camped out in haunted crime scenes. As a professor of forensic psychology and an investigative consultant, she’s vigilant for unique angles and intriguing characters. She's as fascinating as she sounds, and when the two of us get together, our conversations roam the world and go on for hours, especially when we talk about writing and crime. Take it away, Katherine!

What do ghost hunters, crime writers, and forensic scientists have in common? They all seek to solve mysteries. This shared goal, and some overlapping tools, inspired me to approach paranormalist Mark Nesbitt to co-write Blood and Ghosts: Haunted Crime Scene Investigations. 

Scientific methods come first. Only when we run out of options do we use paranormal tools, such as mediums, dowsing rods and recorders. Even then, all leads must be corroborated. A case in point: When a medium told us that a murder had occurred in 1936 in a specific room at a haunted winery, we looked for news accounts. There were none. She “divined” that the murder was covered up. This explanation doesn’t fly. No records, no credibility. 

My investigations with Mark inspired my current fiction. I Scream Man is the first novel in the Nut Cracker series. Forensic psychologist Annie Hunter manages a PI agency that “takes on hard nuts to crack” – including some with rumors of ghosts. Her core team includes Ayden, a private eye, and Natra, a cadaver dog handler who doubles as a data-miner. Annie also has a network of forensic experts to call on, as well some skilled paranormalists. 

She’s a skeptic. She swiftly exposes phenomena that can be explained by other means. However, she’s open to the possibility of a genuine ghostly encounter. She’s heard about some that she can’t discount, such as the report about ghosts dancing on a grave near Philadelphia that inspired a search that uncovered a mass murder. (I do inject actual incidents like this into my stories.) 

I first introduced my team in a short story that I based on a case where I live. Frank Smith had a business partnership with offices in a hotel. His firm was going under when Smith suddenly killed himself. He and his partners had taken out a life insurance policy with payouts meant to cover their share should any of them die. But the plan had a suicide clause, and Smith had died before it expired. His wife and partners contested the coroner’s finding, to no avail. 

Three months passed before the first ghost report. A maid was cleaning the former office. As she wiped the bathroom mirror, she saw the reflection of a man in a brown suit staring at her. She turned. He was gone. She quit. Rumors floated of other such sightings in and near that room over the next few years. 

My real-life paranormal investigators thought we should explore this case. Maybe Smith hadn’t killed himself. Maybe he’d been murdered and his ghost was trying to get someone’s attention. There’d been rumors of a contract hit. We asked the current coroner for the death report. 

On the morning Smith’s body was discovered, his secretary had tried to enter the bathroom that served as their copy room. When she couldn’t get in, she’d called security. They’d discovered the body, bleeding from shots to the leg and stomach, propped against the door. With no other way in or out, the coroner had decided Smith was alone in the room at the time he died. The gun was there. Ergo, suicide. 

However, he’d been shot twice. Not impossible but certainly worth a closer look. When we learned that someone had shot at Smith’s home three weeks before his death, we reconsidered the contract hit. But first we had to determine that someone could have shot Smith and escaped the bathroom while leaving him propped against the door. 

We reconstructed the incident with a mannequin that was Smith’s size and weight. I included this in my Nut Crackers short story, “The Case of the Staring Man.” Renaming Frank Smith as Barry Ross, here’s how Annie Hunter tells it: 

I closed the bathroom door. With some difficulty, we placed our mannequin against it, slumped like a man who’d just been shot. From the other side, Natra pushed. The door didn’t budge. She pushed harder, moving Barry slightly, but she couldn’t get in. Ayden and I repositioned Barry and tried to get out without disturbing him, as we thought his killer would have done. But neither of us could exit and also keep him in place in a way that blocked the door. We even stood the mannequin up. We still couldn’t manage it. 

Natra had an idea. She grabbed two foam pillows off one of the double beds. Standing them between the door’s edge and frame, she made a space large enough to squeeze through. Ayden went in to place the mannequin against the door. Then he worked his way through the gap without disturbing the body and pulled the pillows free. The door closed. He pushed. The door resisted. He pushed again and finally got in. 

“Okay,” I said. “Good enough. As long as the killer took the wedge item with him – or her – our locked room mystery is solved. So, by using a removable wedge in the door, a killer could have shot Barry Ross, posed him, and squeezed out.” 

Like the Nut Crackers, my actual team used recorders to collect electronic voice phenomena (EVP), asking questions to elicit a name and a reason for the haunting. We got a word wrapped in static that we all agreed ended in “er.” Murder? Maybe. In addition, we used dowsing rods to acquire answers to “yes” or “no” questions. An infrared trail camera was set up in the room and to record anomalies that might occur overnight. (No results.) 

When a records check on the Smith case prevented us from learning more and we couldn’t locate his former wife, we had to accept the dead-end. But the Nut Crackers had more luck. That’s the beauty of fiction. They solved the murder of Barry Ross and found the culprits who’d staged it. 

I Scream Man uses a similar coordination of methods for a much more complex case. Traditional investigation comes first, but paranormal tools are always ready. Annie cites their effectiveness in other cases to justify using them. Her favorite is remote viewing. 

I hope to continue this series for a long time. Under the right conditions, forensic science, crime writing, and ghost hunting can supplement one another in a way that meets their respective objectives. 

                                                                

                                                                      I SCREAM MAN 

When a boy vanishes under strange circumstances, forensic psychologist Annie Hunter collects her team of sleuths, the Nut Crackers. They link the boy to a network of powerful people, the “I Scream Men,” who gain political favors through a juvenile sex trafficking ring. As Annie tries to hide a victim they seek to silence, head predator Alder Plattman – nicknamed “Plat-eye” – snatches her young daughter. Relying on coded clues, some quirky allies, and the mysterious method of remote viewing, Annie sets out to rescue her daughter and cripple the criminal network. Among her associates is attorney Jackson Raines, a youth advocate whose brother stole the network’s secret records before he was murdered. As a hurricane bears down and Plattman chases Annie’s team, they race to recover this vital cache before he can find and destroy it. 

                                                              Katherine Ramsland

Katherine Ramsland spent five years working with “BTK” serial killer Dennis Rader to write his autobiography, Confession of a Serial Killer, and has been featured as an expert in over 200 true crime documentaries. The author of 69 books, she’s been a forensic consultant for CSI, Bones and The Alienist, an executive producer on Murder House Flip and A&E’s Confession of a Serial Killer, and a commentator on 48 Hours, 20/20, The Today Show, Dr. Oz, Nightline, Larry King Live, Nancy Grace and other shows. She blogs regularly for Psychology Today and once wrote extensively for CourtTV’s Crime Library. She’s become the go-to expert for the most extreme, deviant and bizarre forms of criminal behavior, which offers great background for her Nut Cracker Investigations series. I Scream Man is the first novel in the series.

My Love Affair with Samba...

Baiana from Salvador

"'She came from Bahia, from centuries of dancing and sorrow…' Even that long-ago day in a darkened theater—the first time I heard samba—I knew there was no first time. My ears recognized the whispered words, my mouth tasted the sadness behind the joy, and my feet moved to the rhythm."

My love affair with samba began in that darkened theater years ago, and like all long love affairs, it sparked mysteries, surprises, and discoveries. Music of resistance, music for lovers, sensuous and hushed, it speaks in a whisper louder than a shout. It has been the soundtrack of my life: I've written, dreamed, danced to its rhythm. 

No one expressed the multitude of voices of samba more than the "Little Poet," Vinícius de Moraes. 

Vinícius de Moraes

Vinícius was my introduction to samba, and I knew that one day I'd need to travel to Brazil, and in particular, to Bahia, where samba was born-- and where he wrote some of his most influential music. The voyage itself was transcendent and transformative, as was the experience of writing an essay about it.

                                                   Baden Powell (l) and Vinícius de Moraes (r)

"A Mouthful of Sadness: Listening to Vinícius in Bahia" came out today in Off Assignment, and I'd like to share it with you. An interview follows the piece. Please follow the link:

https://mailchi.mp/offassignment/vinicius-in-bahia/

I'd love to know what you think, and if you've experienced similar voyages-- through the mind and the world-- that resulted in unexpected revelations. 

Sarava!

Dreaming for a Living

 

                                                    I dream for a living. --Steven Spielberg

Thanks to my son, director/editor Ishai Setton, I was privileged to attend the all-star lineup at the DGA's roundtable with the five directors nominated for the 2022 Director's Guild of America Award: Paul Thomas Anderson, Denis Villeneuve, Jane Campion, Steven Spielberg, and Kenneth Branagh. For nearly three hours they answered moderator Jeremy Kagan's in-depth questions about their ways of creating new worlds on screen. It was interesting to note that all five nominated films-- Licorice Pizza, Dune, Power of the Dog, West Side Story, and Belfast-- take place in the past or in another universe. How did they bring these "foreign" worlds to life? How did they rehearse their actors? How do they deal with fear? 

It was one of the most inspiring, fascinating panels I've ever attended. I was torn between taking notes and simply absorbing their words and insights. I found their observations very helpful as I'm in the process of creating a fictional world for a new novel. I've jotted down some takeaways that I hope you'll find useful in your own creations.  

Steven Spielberg: the godfather of the group. Wise, witty, humble, at 75, a father of seven and grandfather of six, he was terrified when he began West Side Story, his first musical. The storyboarding process was critical to block the scenes and find the right setting. It was filmed mostly on a set in Paterson, NJ, and in Harlem. The biggest challenge: crosswalks and stoplights. They had to block them out after filming. He rode around the set, taking pictures with his iPhone, seeing the movie before filming. 

A great example of how to think visually: The brilliance of the fire escape scene, which was modeled on the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. For Spielberg, the key was to keep the lovers apart. Tony just got out of jail, and as he tries to get to Maria, one obstacle after another confronts him. The difficulty is reflected in the lines and bars that shadow his progress as he breaks through to freedom. Musical numbers were filmed live. No over-dubbing in the studio. 

His advice to actors: "Faster and funnier. Go faster than you think it should go." In the cutting room, the first things to go are the gaps and pauses in scenes, which you don't see until later.

Jane Campion: The process of pre-production is the key to all the directors' films, but her route to the film was particularly interesting. Her script was adapted from the novel, Power of the Dog, by Thomas Savage, about two brothers on a ranch in Montana, but when she went scouting in Montana for the actual ranch, she discovered the land was not how she'd imagined it and there was no house. Writer Annie Proulx told her: "The West doesn't exist. It's a myth."

She returned to her native New Zealand and scouted locations there. Much cheaper. She had the house and barn built with special attention to interiors and space so when characters look out the window they feel the distance is right between the barn and the house. 

She hit a block in terms of understanding her film and her story and underwent dream therapy. She described a recurrent dream she was having of herself on horseback--a horse she didn't know--riding down a path that grew narrower and narrower until she knew she'd fall of the horse at the end of the path--there was nowhere left to go--and she'd die. Through the therapy she understood that she needed to know the horse before riding it. She needed to know her characters and her story before filming. She talked to her characters and heard one of them say: "She's got to get dirty." Jane had to dive deep into her story in order to direct the characters and make this movie.

A fun tidbit: before filming the drunk scenes, Kirsten Dunst would spin in circles. Sometimes she'd have a small drink as well, Jane admitted with a laugh. Also-- Jane said that Benedict Cumberbatch is such a sweet, helpful man that he played totally against character, and Kirsten would tease him constantly on the set, insisting that he wasn't "bad enough." 

Denis Villeneuve: The key to filming Dune was in the storyboarding process. As a boy, Denis and his friend, Nicolas Kadima, mapped out storyboards for the film of Dune they hoped to make one day. During the planning for the movie, Denis and storyboard artist, Sam Hudecki, planned the visual progression of Dune. He forbade Hudecki to go on the internet or to look at previous depictions of the worlds of Dune, Denis wanted to return to the images he'd drawn as a kid. For him, "the key to the story is how you interpret it through images."

While Spielberg admits he doesn't rehearse his actors-- "The first take is the rehearsal"-- Villeneuve talks to his actors, one on one, long personal conversations before shooting, during which they privately explore the actor's thoughts and ideas about the character. "I need to understand who is in front of me," he said. He admitted that getting high on "spicy" banana bread his son baked helped him describe his vision of scenes to actor Timothée Chalamet. "Timothée got it," said Denis.

About fear: "Always. I am always afraid." He's now working on the second part of Dune, and when people ask him on set what to do next or how to solve a certain problem, he no longer pretends he knows. He admits, "I don't know." 

Kenneth Branagh: a marvelous storyteller, talked about recreating the world of his childhood in Belfast through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. "Your imagination expands to fill the vacuum," he said, when he looked back at the small flat he'd lived in with his family and how vast with possibility it had appeared. In Belfast, he tried to recreate that sense of promise, danger, and wonder of that time. 

He also spoke about his awe of the great Judi Dench who plays the boy's grandmother. He wanted to show the love between Judi Dench and Ciarán Hind, who plays her husband in the film. Ciarán read her a short romance story in "that glorious voice." After he left the room, Judi looked at Branagh, her eyes sparkling, and said, "I'm in love with him." 

About being a director: he asked Annette Bening about the most important characteristic a director can have. She told him, "It's not sexy, but being organized is crucial." He has kept that in mind with every film. To be as precise and clear as possible. To prepare before the filming. All that work beforehand frees the director, the actors and the crew during the actual shoot. 

Paul Thomas Anderson: He described driving from his home in Tarzana to drop off his daughter at school in Studio City, and on the return trip scouting locations for Licorice Pizza. "The Valley hasn't changed that much," he said. He found the actual waterbed store he remembered though the store sells something else now. 

He recalls the experience of working "through the Covid of it all." And the extensive preproduction process. For him, it involved driving to the locations with two partners and filming scenes on his iPhone, mapping out the entire movie before shooting. He explained, "It's a mix of attack--telling the story a certain way that you have in mind, and accept--working with what's in front of you." A mix of planning and improvisation, always staying open to the moment. 

He had the whole auditorium laughing when he said, "Working with teens, you realize that the real shooting starts at 3:30 in the afternoon, when they're finally awake."

 Later that evening, during the awards ceremony held by the DGA, Denis Villeneuve admitted that as a boy in Canada, it was a tradition to wear a hockey jersey with your hero's name on the back. He put the name "Spielberg" on his jersey. He spoke to a visibly moved Spielberg:

“Mr. Spielberg, you are a giant for me. I am here tonight because of you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart of what you’ve brought and what you still bring to this day to cinema. After all these years, you are still a pure source of inspiration, so sir, I salute you.”

Jane Campion won the best director award for Power of the Dog, and in her acceptance speech, said:

"The road here has been long. I remember being the only woman in the room. I remember that outsider feeling as I fought to get my stories told from undeserved perspectives to light in a male-dominated field.” 

Campion then added to loud applause, “I think perhaps it’s time to claim a sense of victory on that front. We’ve come so far, and what’s more, we’re never going backwards. That sense of the eternal horizon invigorates me.”

That sense of the eternal horizon is evident in all five directors--seasoned, experienced, brilliant-- yet always looking for the next project, the next challenge, the next world to share with us.

The Serpent and the Seventies

 

    We're in Kanit House, a stylish yet shabby five-story apartment house in Bangkok in 1974. Balconies face a sun-drenched inner courtyard with a swimming pool where young hippie tourists from Europe and America share travel experiences, swim, get stoned, and listen to music. Alain Gautier, a suave dark-haired gem dealer wearing aviator glasses, stands on his balcony and watches the people frolicking below. He watches with purpose until he selects his prey. 

   Gradually, we come to recognize what he looks for: the vulnerable, reckless, needy, trusting. He studies them the way he studies jewels through his loupe, searching for genuine gems or fakes. Even before we learn what he's capable of, we sense danger. Even before he invites the unfortunate one to his room for a drink, and afterwards, coldly watches the person convulse in mysterious spasms. Even before we glimpse the man and his accomplice carrying the sick person down dark stairs. The following morning, there is one less hippie in Bangkok. But their money and passport remain-- to be stuffed in a safe with many other passports to be used later by the man and his two accomplices: Ajay, an Indian criminal, and Marie-Andrée Leclerc, a young French-Canadian woman.

    On the other side of town Herman Knippenberg, a young Dutch diplomat, Third Secretary in the Dutch Embassy in Thailand, studies newspaper reports of a couple who were knifed and set on fire while still alive. Although the couple is identified as Australian, the diplomat wonders if these two are the young Dutch man and woman who disappeared and whose parents called him to find out what happened. Knippenberg's investigation leads him down a dark and twisting path that uncovers the serpent's den and opens to an unimaginable web of horror that spans countries. 

                                                        Billy Howle as Herman Knippenberg

     The Serpent is a chilling, sinuous eight-part miniseries coproduced by BBC One and Neflix that reveals the world of the seventies as it tracks Charles Sobhraj, a real-life gem smuggler, escaped convict, and serial killer who preyed on backpackers on the Hippie Trail-- Bangkok, Kathmandu, Hong Kong, and Delhi. in the mid-seventies. He drugged and robbed countless people, and murdered at least twelve, and probably many more. Half-Vietnamese, half-Indian, he was raised in Vietnam, and later, in Paris. By the age of sixteen, he was in jail for petty crimes and theft. For the rest of his life, he'd be in and out of prison for increasingly violent crimes.

                                            The real Charles Sobhraj and Marie-Andrée Leclerc

    Sobhraj, played by actor Tahar Rahim, has nothing but contempt for these young drifters. He, Ajay, and Marie, now known as Monique, roam the Hippie Trail in search of victims. By observing how Sobhraj manipulates Monique, grooming her into his pimp luring potential victims to their room, we see how he manipulates everyone. A hollow man, he mimics human emotions, tests his followers' limits, demands utter obedience. Monique admits he turned her into a slave. Those who dare to challenge his authority or disagree with him are doomed. A vengeful god, he wants payback for every time he was mistreated for his mixed heritage. From The Guardian's review of The Serpent: "In the series, as in real life, he uses valid complaints about racism and neocolonialism to justify his crimes as a kind of revenge on the embodiment of careless white privilege." But the truth is he mistreats and abuses everyone who comes in his circle.

    Watching busloads of young tourists from Europe and America get off in Nepal and India is a revelation. They are mostly white, traveling to third-world countries with no sense of caution or danger. Disgusted with wars, capitalism, and society's rules, they've come to Asia to seek enlightenment, experience, community, drugs, and the meaning of life. In Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion describes their mind-set: "drifting from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins." They are here to transform themselves.

    So is Sobhraj, who shifts his identity with each passport he steals, and with each person he encounters. Poor Knippenberg, back in Bangkok, tries to make sense of this chameleon and to follow his winding, dizzying trail. He must fight the indifference, hostility, and threats of the diplomatic community and local police who view these hippie tourists as disposable. No one cares to investigate their disappearances, no matter how suspicious they are. In addition, at that time, there exists no powerful DNA analysis, and police departments in different countries barely communicate. The world was a playground for serial killers. 

    If you weren't alive pre-cell phones and internet, pre-social media updates and CCTV, it may be difficult to imagine how different the world was. How private you could be. How possible it seemed to attain true solitude and freedom. For those who went on the Hippie Trail in the seventies, their only contact with the people back home was the weekly mail pick-up. If you wanted to drop off the face of the earth for a while, you could. 

     Why can't I stop thinking about this show? I've just finished writing Zigzag Girl, my first crime novel, in which an amateur sleuth confronts a serial killer. My sleuth lives in the 21st century and has the advantages of modern technology. She searches the web for clues, and she carries her cell phone, but she still must face the heart of evil. I've been thinking a lot about the monster that hides behind a human face, the inner rage that simmers and eventually explodes in violence. Sobhraj's cool mask hides the seething fury inside him.

But it's more than that. The show is brilliantly constructed: Knippenberg-- the force of light-- attacks Sobhraj-- the force of darkeness-- without ever meeting him. Knippenberg forms his own small team to investigate: his intelligent wife, a courageous French neighbor in Kanit House who witnessed suspicious activities, and a jaded Belgian diplomat. He nearly loses his wife and his job, but he is driven by the pursuit of justice. The storyline jolts back and forth in time, showing us how Sobhraj has been robbing and murdering for years. It's depressingly clear that he will never stop, and more depressingly, that it's unlikely he will ever be caught. 

    By the third episode, we've seen what happens when Sobhraj gets angry, and we tremble for Dominique, a young Frenchman. Drugged and held captive by Sobhraj, Dominique struggles to escape with the help of the French neighbor. It's edge-of-your-seat suspense. The final episodes can be frustrating, but the task to capture a charismatic manipulator who shifts identities, freely crosses borders, bribes his way out of prison after prison, a man for whom everyone is prey, is gargantuan. Amazingly, he has met his match in the stubborn Dutch diplomat, a true hero. He cannot give up. In his words, Sobhraj "got inside me like some sort of tropical malaria." 

Thanks to Knippenberg's efforts, Interpol finally enters the case, and Sobhraj is arrested in India. That's not the end of him: he served 21 years in India, returned to Paris a free man in 1997, and in 2003, went back to Nepal, where he is now serving a life sentence. In yet another improbable twist, he married a young Nepalese woman, who, of course, claims he is innocent. But he is still in prison, and that is thanks to the efforts of one man. 

                                                The swimming pool at Kanit House        

   Despite the darkness at the center, The Serpent portrays a time of hope, innocence, and seeking, when the world seemed vast and uncharted, and adventure and knowledge waited around the corner. That may be why I'm ultimately so fascinated by the show. I'm haunted most by the image of the group gathered around the pool at Kanit House. Like all the young, they feel invincible. They dream of tomorrow-- the world they yearn to explore, the love they hope to find-- unaware that from his balcony, a man watches. For a terrifying moment I picture myself in that group. Don't look up! I want to tell them. Please, whatever you do, don't meet his eyes. 

    The show is dedicated to them.

Remember Writing Letters?

I didn't keep a quarantine diary, but I wrote letters. 

During the pandemic my husband and I went on a nostalgia kick. We watched movies from the 70s and 80s, delighting in a time before cell phones and computers were widely used. In our isolation, we already cringed at crowd scenes, but we loved how personal and intimate the characters' worlds felt. People met in person rather than communicated on a phone, they wrote letters and missed important phone calls because they weren't home. It lasted for months, this yearning for a time before plague, a time that seemed more innocent, for a thriller that relied on human ingenuity rather than technology.

I began dreaming of letters I'd received and sent. Letters that changed lives, perfumed letters, witty letters I wished I'd kept, love letters that bared souls. I wrote new letters I didn't mail: to people I 'd lost touch with, people I'd never met but who intrigued me, those I'd met only once but who left an impact, historical figures, characters in my stories who puzzled or infuriated me, and old lovers.

Remember writing and receiving love letters? It was so much more than the words on the page. First, the scribbled rough drafts. The careful selection of pen and paper-- oh God, remember stationery? The torment of writing the letter-- finding the exact words that conveyed the message you wanted to communicate, stopping before you said too much.... If you were a girl, adding the faint trace of perfume before you sealed the envelope. Then the anxious wait for a response. Checking the mailbox, hourly sometimes. 

It wasn't just love letters, it was letters themselves-- those mysterious missives from somewhere else, exotic stamps from different countries, the suspense of opening the envelope. Handwriting that revealed so much: impatient scrawl, precise printed letters, words that crawled uphill or diagonally across a page, back-tilted timid letters, misspellings before the days of auto-correct. A non-business typed letter brought its own set of questions: why so impersonal? is their handwriting that bad? what's the underlying message here? Then there were aerogrammes-- those wonderful thin blue sheets sent home from travels. You had to squeeze everything onto the side of one page. Unfolding them without tearing away part of the writing presented its own delicate challenge.  

At the height of the pandemic I taught a creative writing class on Zoom and described letters to my university students, all born in the 21st century. They sat in their little Hollywood Squares and stared, baffled, while I explained the art, passion, and power of writing and receiving letters. Replacing the shortcut of emojis with the search for the exact words to convey mood and intention. The built-in delay before pressing, "Send." The fact that you can keep them, concrete and solid memories. Once they figured out that letters went way beyond text messages and emails, I sensed a shift in mood. One young woman said with a sigh, "I wish I could get a love letter." Another said, "I want to write one, but I don't know who to send it to."

I decided to give them an assignment: write a letter to someone far away and tell them something you can't tell them in person. You can make it up or make it real. You can send it or keep it. But write a letter with a pen on paper (on paper? with a pen?!). Bring it to class. You can share the letter or not.

They shared them. Amazing to listen to 19 - 21 year-olds read letters they'd written by hand... on Zoom. 

The letters were moving, funny, heartwarming, and tender, and often illustrated with drawings. I thought, plague or not, we're still here, still the same yearning hearts and souls straining to connect. 

Afterwards a few students thanked me for the introduction to letter writing. 

I feel like a visitor from another planet. What can I show them next? Ah! I know. That inscrutable monolith of power that sat grimly silent for hours while you watched and waited... and waited... for it to shrill to life. 

Why is this night different from all other nights?

According to some friends, every Jewish holiday can be summed up by one of two responses:

“The King (Pharaoh, fill in the blank) tried to destroy us, we won/lost, let’s eat.”

That brings us to Passover, the eight-day holiday that commemorates the Exodus—the Jews’ flight from slavery in Egypt to a 40 year-long trek through the desert that led to the Promised Land. The metaphor of an entire nation of people journeying from slavery to freedom is so powerful it’s no wonder many groups and nations throughout history have borrowed this story, remade it in their image, and used it as a banner of hope when times are dark.

It’s an understatement to say that we’re living through dark times. I’ve hesitated to write about it and generalize in any way because I can’t presume to know under what conditions you are experiencing the plague. It’s so wildly different for all of us—except for the aura of uncertainty that clouds our thoughts and actions. Which brings me to the first of the 4 questions traditionally asked during the Passover seder, the ritual meal in which Jews remember (and in a sense, relive) the plagues suffered during the time they were slaves to the Pharaoh and their subsequent escape:

Why is this night different from all other nights?

During the seder in 2020, the experience of naming the plagues and journeying from darkness to light will be different than it has ever been. For the first time, many of us will celebrate alone, away from family, and will rely on Zoom, FaceTime, and Skype to connect with family and friends scattered all over the world. For many of us this will be the first time we’ve lived through a plague and watched it destroy lives. For many of us it will be the first time we suffer from a virus that seems to have come from both the ancient world and a dystopian future.

Below is a passage from my first novel, The Road to Fez, in which a family celebrates Passover/Pesach in Morocco while trying to decide whether it’s safer to remain in Morocco or to take the chance and travel to Israel. Papa Naphtali is the American heroine’s grandfather, a mystic and musician who was inspired by the memory of my own grandfather:

“This is what Pesach means to me,” Papa Naphtali says. “It represents the most courageous, terrifying decision human beings have ever made, to leave a known life of slavery, and to enter the unknown, dangerous promise of freedom. They had to lose the habits of slavery, to learn to straighten their shoulders and to look strangers directly in the eyes. It took forty years of wandering in the desert before the first generation of slaves was gone, and the new generation born free and wild in the desert was ready to fight for the promise. Imagine the terror. Imagine looking over the rocks into the land you thought was a myth, and seeing that it was real, that you could touch the ground and smell the air. We’re always on the verge of freedom, but frightened to take that last step. So what will we do, mes enfants? Remain in the desert for another forty years? Or advance to the vision of light, which may be a mirage?”

Uncertainty may be the most frightening thing of all: we simply don’t know when, where, how this plague will end. We don’t know how long the quarantining/isolation will last. We don’t know what our post-Pandemic world will look like. It will certainly need to be navigated and explored as if we are entering a new country.

“Travelers’ reports differ as to what they saw when they entered the Promised Land. Bananas, oranges and pomegranates growing wild, or shimmering desert; a place of death, or one of life.”

Today is one of those dreamy days when I find myself voyaging to times I wandered freely: doing Sun Salutations at dawn on the Observation Deck of a ship, telling stories to my students on a lower deck of the ship as we sailed directly into the setting sun, digging at an archaeological site near Jerusalem (see photo), exploring a stage set on the Paramount lot in LA, or simply walking into a restaurant and hugging friends. More than anything, I miss hugs!

Each Passover, Jews are urged to relive this experience of plagues, exile, freedom as if we were the ones who lived through the first Passover. Each year we make it a time of reckoning for ourselves and our world: which plagues have we survived? What exiles are we suffering? How has our world changed? What does freedom mean to us? And each year, the traditional wish is: “Next year in Jerusalem.” This year, we may alter that wish to… wherever we hope to see ourselves next year.

Papa Naphtali says, “Time circles and returns to that endless moment in the desert. For the Jews, it’s always that moment. For us, it’s always now.”

And I circle back to the first question: there are many answers, most involving the Passover meal, the ritual foods and songs, the four glasses of wine, and the matzah, but for me, the answer to why this night is different from all other nights is because it returns us to the wanderers in the desert. They are us, and we are them. We have fled plagues, slavery, starvation, and thirst, and now we are poised on the edge of darkness. For a moment we stand together, remembering how it felt to press against each other in the uncertain darkness, before we take the next step, before we know whether it will bring more darkness or light.

That moment.

And then we take a deep breath, drink a glass of wine, and carry on toward the promise of the sun. One step at a time. I'll close with my favorite quote by Camus, a fellow North African:

"I realized, through it all, that in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger – something better, pushing right back."

           

Drinking Coffee (and Other Things) with Writers

 

During these strange times we're living in, the more we realize how important it is to connect with others. Today, I'm pleased to welcome Joyce Hinnefeld, a dear friend and writing sister with whom I've bonded over countless cups of coffee, to discuss how crucial these human connections are.

Take it away, Joyce!

I must have drunk a thousand cups of coffee with various writer friends through the years. In kitchens and living rooms in apartments and houses in New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In countless Starbucks and Paneras. In a number of independent coffee shops that have come and gone in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Drinking coffee and talking to other writers are two of my favorite things to do.

Usually, of course, we talk about projects we’re working on. There have been conversations about alternatives to traditional burial, the secret lives of magicians, feminist re-readings of the New Testament, working-class lives in New England mill towns, and more. I remember lots of helpful advice about my own work. To give a mother’s realization about her young adult daughter a physical manifestation—a gesture, a stirring in her daughter’s sleep. To dig further into a seemingly passive character, a young woman from the Pennsylvania coal region who won’t admit her deepest desires, even to herself. To keep an eye out for too many meandering, clause- and comma-filled sentences. (Like my previous one was, until—picturing the furrowed brow and raised eyebrows of a couple writers’ group members through the years—I broke it up into fragments.)

Every writer I’ve known has dreamed of having a Maxwell Perkins-style editor—brilliant, gentle, as fully invested in your work as you are as the writer. But writers today seldom have editors with the time and inclination to edit in that way. As a writer of books published by small presses, I’ve been fortunate to have smart and attentive editing—but my work has always traveled a long, circuitous route before landing on an editor’s desk. And fortunately, as it’s traveled along that winding route, it’s often landed, first, on the desks (or more recently the tablets) of trusted readers. Of friends who are also writers.

In my experience these friendships with writers might have begun in more formal writing workshops—at the 63^rd Street YMCA in New York City many years ago, in graduate school at SUNY Albany in the early 1990s—but the lasting ones have continued well beyond that context, or, more recently, have emerged in other contexts. A colleague in the art department at the college where I teach has a party, where I meet a friend of a friend: a writer. A new writer is hired at the college in the next town over, and someone suggests I get in touch. A young writer, seeking a lower cost of living and more time to write, moves to the town that I never thought I’d call my hometown and asks if we can meet for coffee or a drink. And so it begins. (And what’s great about my friendship with that younger writer is that besides coffee we often go out for drinks—something I hardly ever do anymore!)

My relationships with writer friends now are markedly different from those I had with the people I knew in workshops; these writer friends have offered so much more than suggestions for a manuscript I’m struggling with. They’ve helped me negotiate the tricky challenges of being a writer and a parent. They’ve talked me down from my panicked terror over figuring out how to use social media to promote my work. And they’ve understood, and sympathized with, my frequent “fish out of water” feeling as a writer in an academic setting.

I’ve taught creative writing at a small liberal arts college in Bethlehem, PA for longer than I would have ever thought possible when I started the job back in 1997. These days I can’t believe I was fortunate enough to land such a job, and in an age of near contempt for the liberal arts and humanities, and of exploitation of contingent faculty, I know not to take this job for granted. I’ve been lucky in lots of ways, and one way in which I’ve been lucky has been in meeting young people, year after year, who are passionate about language, literature, and writing. Still. Even now.

It’s not easy to keep going with writing, when you’re often working long hours elsewhere to make rent and pay your bills. I know this, firsthand, from my former students. I miss our workshops, they sometimes tell me, when I run into them a few years after graduation. Find some writer friends, I tell them.

Six years ago I started a writers’ conference at the college where I teach. I must have been on drugs when I decided to do that, I’ve since told a number of people. But in fact I wasn’t on anything at all when I first conceived the sort of weirdly utopian vision I had for a conference that would, I hoped, help writers—of all ages, and at all levels of experience—find each other. And in many ways I think the Moravian College Writers’ Conference—scheduled to run for the fifth time at the end of March—has done just that.

I’m pleased about this of course. But I think the best thing the conference has given me is a chance to spend a day with some of my favorite people in the Lehigh Valley: other writers who live here and, in many cases, teach here. To join these writers in recognizing new talent, young and old, and in urging that talent to keep going with the work, no matter the limited prospects for publication, or for teaching jobs.

And to drink a lot of coffee together—even if it’s the coffee from the college catering department and, to be honest (don’t tell anyone I said this), it’s not very good.

      

Joyce Hinnefeld is the author of the short story collection Tell Me Everything and the novels In Hovering Flight and Stranger Here Below. Her new book, the story collection The Beauty of Their Youth (published this month), is the latest title in the Wolfson Press American Storytellers series. She is a Professor of English at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA, where she directs the Moravian College Writers’ Conference. Learn more a www.joycehinnefeld.com and like her page at https://www.facebook.com/jhinnefeld/.