Hauntings Galore

I recently had the pleasure of asking renowned editor and anthologist Ellen Datlow some "crackpot questions" about one of her latest projects, the anthology HAUNTINGS.

The interview was published by SF Signal today.

In her Introduction Ellen writes that "Ghosts are persistent memories, refusing to let us forget the people and things we had thought gone, the people and things whose loss had grieved us, and especially the people and things whose loss had brought us relief."

This idea is specially present on my mind as I've been spending some time recently reconnecting with my sister, who lives in Spain and has spent a few weeks visiting here in Southern California. I've rediscovered a number of memories I had no idea I still possessed, often dazzled by my sister's power of recollection. Some of these memories had seemed vanished for perhaps a decade and have now been reawakened. Ghosts, perhaps, or simply the ordinary hauntings of memory.

As Ellen goes on to write, "ghosts stay with us because of something in their own lives--a need for familiar comforts, a desire for revenge, a powerful love. The emotions that drive us also create ghosts."

Indeed they do, and the same emotions that create ghosts, I've found, can bring them back to life, so to speak, when we had long thought them dead.