Following the Stories That Haunt Us

When a ghost is an event, a place, a memory, the ancestors, your life.

Happy Halloween!

In my previous post earlier this week, I discussed writing real-life ghosts and some tools of the “write-around.” Today, I am asking us to consider, with even more intention, how to tackle the stories that haunt us.

When my kids were younger, I used to read them this children’s book, “What Do You Do With an Idea?” by Kobi Yamada. In it, a little egg creature (an idea) follows around a child, who worries: “I was afraid that if people saw it, they would laugh at it. I was afraid they would think it was silly.”

But the child comes to realize it’s okay if the idea is “different and weird.” Soon, they decide to protect the idea, work with it, give it attention.

I loved this simple metaphor as an example, even for adults, of nurturing those glimmering ideas that follow us around in daily life, on our walks or runs, into the shower, on our drives, the mind-wandering moments of creativity and contemplation, when we daydream, ponder, and question. The ghosts that could become stories, whispering to us in the background of the bustle, telling us to tune in and take notice.

Here are a few examples of how nonfiction storytellers have started the process of pursuing ideas that have haunted them.

A GHOST CAN BE AN EVENT.

This story forever haunts me: “Really Long Distance,” by This American Life producer Miki Meek. I wept through the entire audio piece, which told the story of a phone booth in Japan that attracts thousands of people who lost loved ones in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake. Like Meek, I have family in Japan, and couldn’t stop thinking about this devastation years after it happened. But how does someone even begin to tell a story about such grief?

I asked Meek about her approach to this story, and others.

When you came across this story idea, did you already have a feeling (or haunting) that you wanted to find a way to tell a story about the tsunami? 

After the tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I couldn’t stop watching the new coverage. I have family in Japan and wanted to find a story that would document the aftermath in a way that wouldn’t feel like a news feature. My first thought was to reach out to the writer Haruki Marukami. I really admired his books “After the Quake” about the 1995 Kobe earthquake and “Underground,” a collection of oral histories about the gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. But he couldn’t take this on for us. So I put this project on hold, and then on the fifth anniversary of the tsunami, my mom called me. She’d just seen a one-hour documentary about the wind phone on NHK, the main TV network station in Japan, and wanted me to watch it right away. I did, and immediately knew I wanted to run an excerpt of some of these phone calls on This American Life. They were such raw and powerful expressions of grief.

What are you looking for in a story, especially one about such a tragic event? 

I’m looking for intimate ways into people’s experiences I have not heard represented in U.S. media before. I’m also looking for some kind of emotional change that people can reflect back on, so that there’s some forward momentum in the story and the story doesn’t just exist in tragedy. That’s why I ended this story with a family who decided to go to the phone booth together. This was the first time they’d talked about their dad, who was a truck driver, since he went missing while driving along the coast when the tsunami hit. Each of them going into the phone book to “talk” to him is what finally facilitated a conversation about how much they’d all been holding in. 

When and how did you know this could actually be a story you could report and air?

All reporting credit goes to great and sensitive NHK journalist Tomohiko Yokoyama. He’s the one who first heard about the wind phone and sat outside it for days, getting permission to record. He produced the NHK TV documentary that my mom and I first saw. On my end, the process was pretty straightforward. I had to get permission to license the audio from NHK and then seek consent from the individual callers to run their audio in the U.S. 

I also had to figure out what to excerpt and decided to focus on six calls that were quite different from each other, both in age of the caller and their individual circumstances. Next, I had to do the translations and add a lot of commentary in my script. So much of what moved me in these calls would not be obvious to an American audience if I only ran the translations. Japanese is less direct than English, and often these callers were using subtle phrases to actually say, “I love you” and “I miss you” to their dead loved ones. Beliefs about death and the afterlife are also quite different in Japan and added another layer of emotion to these phone calls for me. My goal was to set the context for American listeners to feel as much as I did the first time I heard these calls. 

A GHOST CAN BE A PLACE.

Sometimes locations haunt us. A home, a school, a town, a workplace. Ghosts always reside in the history of a place. If you look closely at the layout and history of any town in America—its marriage, death, and birth records, its cemeteries, its housing and redlining histories, police and budget line items, educational records—this kind of excavation will expose truths, even when the place itself has lived in denial. Study its structure through transcripts, court records, newspaper archives. Speak to its historians, its memory keepers.

I have been working on a ghost story about a place that haunts me. It won’t be finished for a couple of years. But one resource that has been magical for me, when it comes to collecting decades of archival work online (in addition to Zotero), is Google Pinpoint for journalists. I’m on the planning team for The Institute for Independent Journalists, which recently hosted this free webinar on using Pinpoint. The webinar is available on

The IIJ’s YouTube page, or you can watch below.

GHOSTS MAY BE YOUR ANCESTORS.

Kerra Bolton

has written beautifully on deep diving to learn from her ancestors. She has also taught a class for

Narratively

on “Writing With Your Ancestors: Infusing Memoir With Family History.” Bolton won a New York Times Award for Outstanding Journalism, is also a filmmaker, and is currently working on her memoir, “Water in My Bones,” as well as a documentary film, “Return of the Black Madonna.”

I asked Bolton if she could share a few of her teaching tips.

What does writing with the ancestors mean to you?

Writing with my ancestors means participating in a creative conversation with all those who came before me. It is a practice requiring curiosity, grace, and patience.

Curiosity propels me to ask questions, even the hard ones, about the patterns, strengths, and joys that calcified my family line. What are the patterns that need to be let go? What joys can I embrace?

Grace comes when you uncover uncomfortable truths and you decide to forgive what you cannot change. You accept the apology that never comes. You decide that living with compassion is better than living with contempt.

Patience is the hardest gift of all. The answers (if there are really answers) never come quickly. It’s a process. You write or create an essay or story about your family. You learn things. You integrate what you’ve learned and you create something else. Some stories unfold easily and feel like they fly off your fingertips. Others are molasses-slow, they take years, even decades to unfurl.

Finally, there’s joy. Many people like to talk about generational trauma. Many of these people can’t even name their ancestors. However, you have to think about generational joy. There’s always joy, even in the hardest situations. I don’t believe that my enslaved ancestors never laughed, fell in love, or felt the spirit of God deep in their bones. To think such things would deny their humanity. The overseers, systems, and institutions have already denied my ancestors their humanity on slave ships, in the fields, and at work. Why would I do that?

How do you suggest students start to think about writing with their ancestors and where can they begin?

I am sunsetting my “Writing With Your Ancestors” class for the time being because I have taught it for the past five years. However, here are some steps I recommend.

Step 1: Broaden your definition of “ancestor.” Many people stop at their grandparents or great-grandparents. That isn’t far enough. Go back as far as you can. Use a genealogical website like Ancestry or another online tool to learn their names and where they lived. If you are in separation with your family of origin, think in terms of lineage. If you are a writer or journalist, who do you admire? Read about them and find out who inspired them. Research the influences of people who inspire you and think of yourself as part of that lineage.

Step 2: Naming is important. You must know their names. Otherwise, who are you writing with? Who are you creating with? That’s why research is important – to learn their names, where they lived, and what their lives might have been like. For example, when I researched my family tree, the matrilineal and patrilineal lines had their own personalities. My mother’s family were social climbers. They weren’t afraid to move to find new work and financial opportunities. My father’s family were farmers. They were rooted in and around the same region for at least five generations.

Step 3: Create a ritual by which you can communicate with them. Mindfulness and meditation practices help. Prayer is a way to communicate. You can light a candle. Even research, as I mentioned with the example of learning my family lines’ personalities, can be a means of communicating. Your ritual doesn’t have to be elaborate or complicated. Your ancestors want to talk to you if you listen. For example, I always feel a presence on my left palm when I sit to meditate. One day, I asked the presence who it was and why it came to me only when I meditate. I heard a voice, clear as day, say, “Baby, I never sat down when I was alive. Now, I finally get to rest.” I don’t know the name or the source of presence. However, I remain open to everyday magic.

THE GHOST MAY BE YOUR LIFE.

Jenisha Watts, a senior editor at The Atlantic, led a project on ghosts of our nation’s past, the Inheritance series. But when she set out to write a story about her own life, she found herself chasing down childhood ghosts that she did not even know existed. Watts is now writing a book based on her cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky.”

Watts recently told me this process has involved tracking down documents, interviewing relatives, and poring over thousands of pages of official records from her past, which may hold secrets from her own family history, and also about herself.

A GHOST CAN BE A MEMORY.

Reconstructing your own recollections or someone else’s involves unearthing details, anecdotes, scenes, and pivotal moments, which I delved into a bit last week.

On 'Pivotal Moments'

In coming weeks, I will include a post on The Reported Essay specifically about interviewing for narrative and reconstructing scenes, featuring my recent conversation with another storytelling buddy, Kim Cross, who recently published this powerful narrative piece, “The Alchemists,” for Bicycling magazine. Cross writes on LinkedIn: “It took three years, two major rewrites, and 14 rounds of revision to bring my latest story into the world.”

Please do give it a read.