Haunting

Earlier this week, I attended a writing webinar taught by Carmen Maria Machado. The title of the webinar was, “Every House is a Haunted House.”

To begin, let me note two important points. One, Ms. Machado is a wonderfully dynamic teacher. Her enthusiasm is contagious, and her knowledge of the subject matter is obviously wide-ranging.

Two, I clearly misunderstood the topic. I assumed she would be talking about the notion of something haunting a character in a more psychological sense, such as visiting their childhood home and being haunted by the memory of a mistake, a lost love, a missed opportunity. Instead, much of the webinar focused on horror (or horror-adjacent) works involving haunted spaces. For example, the writing exercise involved making lists of five times when we experienced a haunting (including metaphorically) and five times when we should have been haunted, but weren’t. Then, we were to spend five minutes writing about one of these times. Unable to come up with such a list—especially on the spur of the moment, and without any real understanding of what she meant by “haunted”—I checked my email instead.