Write Your Ghost Story

This one-day creative writing class led by Cassandra Lewis is for adult writers of all levels. For inspiration, we will take a literary tour through sample passages and encounter ghosts in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Isabelle Allende’s House of Spirits. We will witness how superstition shapes the story of “The Oblong Box” by Edgar Allen Poe and visit with metaphorical ghosts in Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. We may even dare to gaze upon haunted landscapes painted by Edvard Munch and Caspar David Friedrich for visual writing prompts. By exploring the narrative functions of ghosts, we will respond to a series of writing prompts and create our own ghost stories. Whether your story is supernatural, a psychological haunting, an experience of what it’s like to disappear from your own life, or an anecdote about being ghosted, the possibilities are endless!