Author and illustrator Lisa Brown dropped off a copy of her latest book Picture The Dead at my house late one rainy Friday morning last month--a perfect day to curl with a ghost story, which is exactly what I did. Illustrated by Lisa and co-written with Adele Griffin, Picture The Dead is a creepy 19th ghost story. Our heroine is Jennie Lovell, a young woman who lost her twin brother Toby and fiance (and cousin) Will in the Civil War. If that weren't bad enough, she's also an orphan. The low-rent cousin who's had to be taken in by her mean Aunt Clara who lives a lavish life. When the story opens, Jennie is not only lonely and bereft, her future is in jeopardy. Without the security of her would-be marriage, Jennie knows she can't stay at Aunt Clara's forever. And if all that weren't enough, the story of Will's death rings false to Jennie and she is determined to find out the truth. Enter Henrich Geist, a spirit photographer, who claims he can photograph the spirits of the departed and where Jennie feels Will's is particularly tangible. As Jennie collects evidence, helping herself to anything around the house to help her piece together clues--letters, photographs, which she meticulously pastes in her scrapbook, she continues to visit Geist, gaining insight and strength. Picture The Dead is not only a ghost story, it's a story of survival and it will haunt you.
Avakian: I love young adult novels, and it’s clear from reading Picture the Dead that you and your co-author do to which is one of the reasons I wanted to interview you. While reading I saw so many homages to classics in that genre, Harriet the Spy, Jane Eyre, maybe even a little Phantom Toll Booth, how conscious were your efforts at that? Did you ever say to yourself anything like, hmm, have to get an Anne of Green Gables reference in here or did it just happen organically?
Brown: No, not really conscious at all. Which is not to say that we weren’t influenced, and a whole lot at that, by our various young adult lit obsessions. One in particular set the tone for the project: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, an historical fiction set in colonial New England, complete with witch trials. Other more contemporary young adult novels that were influential, especially when it came to our main character’s voice, included The River Between Us, by Richard Peck, Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson, and Catherine, Called Birdy, by Karen Cushman. We felt that all of these authors had mastered the art of creating a narrator of historical fiction who was neither too modern-colloquial nor too antique-ee. And then, of course, was Little Women, read over and over and over. Where better to steal one’s historical voice than from an author who lived through the era in question?
S.A. So what are some of your favorite titles from your young womanhood?
L.B. OK, I already mentioned The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which has always been number one with a bullet. Richard Peck’s The Ghost Belonged to Me was another favorite, as was The Girl With the Silver Eyes, by Willo Davis Roberts, about a little girl with ESP. When I got a little older, it was A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan, and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Leguin. Are you sensing a pattern here? Adele (Griffin) and I have this theory that there are two types of bookish girls: Jane Austen-ites and Brönte acolytes. We are both firmly in the Brönte camp. It’s all about dark hallways and gothic brooding.
S.A. I know you’re a big believer in authenticity. What was the research process like? Did you go to the South to watch any Civil War battle reenactments? Or visit Fort Sumter?
L.B. You got me here. I did most of my research from the comfort of my own desk. That, coupled with a youth spent hoofing it on Boston’s Freedom Trail and wandering through the homes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain and Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables.
But there are so many incredible resources online. I spent countless hours in the digital archives of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress website, as well as in the National Park Service’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. It’s a database chock full of information about those who fought for both the Union and Confederacy: regiment rosters, prison camp rolls, cemetery headstone photos, and medals of honor received. My blog entry about it is here. You can see how obsessive I became in terms of detail. . . . Also online were countless pages of primary source materials, most of them from well-kept university archives: diary entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper articles, maps, menus, even dance cards. There was no lack of historically relevant material.
S.A. This is also a story of class separation. Can you talk about that a little?
L.B. Oh, we definitely had an eye on class: for instance, the change in Jennie's position after her father and brother’s deaths; as a woman without means she was completely dependent on others for her place in the world. There were really very few ways in which women could support themselves at that time, which made the Civil War all the more tragic to the families dealing with the loss of their menfolk. However, we did discover that photography, as a profession, was open to women (albeit in small numbers) in a way that other trades were not.
We also paid attention to the class differences between the Irish servants and the "American" Pritchetts. In the 19th century, the Irish were considered to be second class in the United States. One reason why we choose Brookline, MA as the setting for our book; that town, affluent and suburban even back then, was settled in the 1850s by Bostonians fleeing from the huddled masses of immigrants in the city. But that didn’t stop them from hiring the Irish to serve them. . .
S.A. Have you ever seen a ghost? You and I are both from New England, which, I think, is just somehow spookier than California. Do you think New England has more ghosts than California?
L.B. I feel that there are plenty of ghosts in San Francisco. There are ghosts, in fact, anywhere that someone has died, which is to say, everywhere. Not that I believe in ghosts, exactly, but I do believe that there are things in this world that we are absolutely unable to explain. When I speak with school groups, I like to ask the kids for “real ghost stories,” not a camp story or work of fiction, but something that happened to them or to someone they know. And almost every hand gets raised. I’ve heard some creepy stuff.
S.A. Like what?
L.B. There was one about an antique rocking chair that had belonged to the kid's grandmother that rocked all by itself. A lot of dead grandparents appearing and disappearing.
S.A. Were you a big fan of the ouija board as a kid?
L.B. Oh, absolutely. That is, until Poltergeist came out and then there started to be all these rumors about the ouija being a portal for the devil himself and I got too nervous to indulge as often as I might have. I still have my ouija board, frayed from years of taking it back and forth from summer camp. It was made by Parker Brothers. Doesn’t get more Satanic than that.
S.A. Mary Todd Lincoln supposedly held séances in the White House—but she was also known to be a little crazy, probably brought on by grief from the deaths of three of her sons, though. Hillary Rodham Clinton, while first lady, claimed she communicated with Eleanor Roosevelt, yet is not (widely) considered to be crazy, in fact, is now our Secretary of State. Maybe our perceptions of communications with the dead has actually become more open to its possibilities—less narrow-minded.
L.B. It’s true, Hillary Clinton is never criticized for anything that she does. I read this fictional biography of Mary Todd Lincoln where not only was she portrayed as a Spiritualist with a penchant for shopping sprees, but also as a bit of a nymphomaniac when it came to her husband, the president. Huh.
S.A. What was going on with that raffle at the Booksmith? There was definitely some evil spirit intervention there. You know about the porn raffle right every month at the Rumpus events? Have you and Stephen talked about merging porn/ghostly ephemera for the Rumpus event? I doubt it’s been done before.
L.B. That raffle was f*cked up. Can I say that? Tons of evil spirits at work, probably summoned by rival publishing houses. Pornographic ghosts sound like a terrific idea. I just today bought a Victorian corset to wear to the Rumpus event, (though I may have to go back to the store to get myself laced back into it properly), where I plan to present a slide show of 19th century photography, both ghostly and non-, to accompany my cinched and boned waist.
S.A. At that event you mentioned that your grandfather kept his discharge papers from the war in his safe deposit box. I love that. Can you talk more about him?
L.B. My mother’s father fought in WWII. Apparently under General Patton, but my great-uncle disputes that. He was stationed in Europe and Northern Africa. We went on a family cruise at one point, and he [grumbed about it] saying that he’d been on a boat before and didn’t care for it. (He meant the boat bringing him to Europe with his brigade.)
He was supremely unfit for service in every way: gentle, fastidious, prim and proper, and a strictly kosher Jew. It wasn’t just the fighting bit, though that was certainly part of it, but was [also that] he had to live with a bunch of other men; smelly, messy, crude, brawny men. He was threatened with court martialing because he had become so thin from not eating the unkosher food; the charge was “destroying government property,” i.e.: himself.
He didn’t see a ton of action, I think his duties were mostly clerical, but the action he did witness was bad enough to haunt him for the rest of his life. He hated to talk of the war, and in fact had recurring nightmares about it into his eighties. There are those people who can fight a thousand battles and emerge psychically unscathed, and those, like my grandfather, who are completely undone by even one event. So he kept his discharge papers in his safe deposit box until he died in 2007. Just to be sure that nothing happened to them, in case the United States ever had need of him again. He felt that his obligation had been met, and wanted to make sure that there was no chance of ever serving again.
S.A. Wow. Great story. I imagine him comforted knowing they were safe there even as he grew older and older. On a lighter topic: About your Baby Mix Me a Drink book. What sort of drinks is your six and a half year old son particularly good at making for you? Do any of his teachers ever look at you and your husband, Daniel, who is rumored to be Lemony Snicket, a little sidelong?
L.B. Our family holds cocktail hour on a fairly regular basis. Our son has his own special plastic martini glass, in which he drinks water with a twist, or limeade. And he really does help bartend; he knows the difference between sweet and dry vermouth, knows that Mommy prefers vodka but Daddy insists on gin (which he never shakes, because it “bruises the gin”), and he makes a mean brandy sidecar. No joke. Our kid’s teachers might look at us sidelong because of our odd sense of humor, more than anything else. It’s the San Francisco Unified School District. Those teachers are way too busy whipping our kids into shape to care about Lemony Snicket.
S.A. Will there be any surprises at the Rumpus event?
L.B. A Corset. Jewelry made from human hair. Photo of myself at age 10 in Victorian drag. ‘Nuff said.
To watch a raffle vexed by evil spirits (but not porn), go here. To see Lisa Brown live and in person at the Make Out Room on June 14th at 7 pm, plus authors Richard Ferguson, Piper Kerman, Raina Bird, some some Six Word Memoirists, and get comic relief by Will Durst and music by Dave Smallen and Amores Vigilantes. Click here for your tickets; they're only ten dollars, my goodness!
Food will be provided by The Girl From Empanada. And one more thing: this event is happily co-sponsored with Smith Magazine.
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