Nothing but Ghosts and Chanticleer Garden: The Transmutations of Fiction

Yesterday Lenore enabled me to return to Barcelona, the setting of key flashback scenes in Nothing but Ghosts. The majority of Ghosts, of course, is set in a fictionalized version of a garden not ten minutes from my home, a paradise called Chanticleer. Many of the photos that I post on my blog are of this place. The book trailer for Ghosts (posted in the left margin) was filmed, Blair Witch-style, at Chanticleer. My fifth book, Ghosts in the Garden, was a true account of the two years I spent walking Chanticleer and coming to terms with the issues I then faced, the questions I had about living forward.

Transporting a real, living, vibrant landscape onto the pages of a book requires smear and lift—the willingness to imagine what isn't into the richness of what is. I sepia washed the color that lives. I pinned the moon to the back of a stream. I opened doors and windows that I have not crossed through. I floated the ghost of a woman up high, over a sill.