December 2015

October is not the only time for ghosts.

You’ll all be familiar with Dickens’ Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, but you may not be with some of the stories Colin Fleming collected last year for The Paris Review. 

Fleming discusses the classic English Christmas ghost story, meant to ‘scare you out of your mind come December, but in a fun way.’

The writers of such stories would offer lists about how to make these stories work, but these guidelines often conflicted with one another, and the makers of the lists would often violate their own.  Fleming gives his own advice anyway.

This month, write a ghost story.  It can be a scary one, or a funny one.  It can be a story about a ghost who is bored by the vastness of time, or a ghost embarrassed by the intimate moments of living people he or she experiences, without actually being intimate with them. 

Responses:

Yule by Talia Hale

The Old Ghosts by M. Vigrald

Little Jimmy’s Christmas to Remember by Devon Heffer