This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
Writing the Haunted
What do we mean when we say a place or a person is haunted? Hauntings can be supernatural, psychological, or historical, but they are always deeply personal encounters with the past—often rooted in the places we inhabit. In this two-day intensive workshop, writers will draw on memory, imagination, folklore, and cultural tradition to explore the ghosts that linger in their own lives.
As a class, we will take inspiration from contemporary and classic ghost stories by Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Mariana Enriquez, George Saunders, Henry James, Toni Morrison, and others. We’ll explore how writers transform settings into haunted landscapes, conjuring ghosts out of war-torn cities, elegant mansions, and everything in between, while deepening our understanding of setting as a vital source of tension and agency.
Through generative writing prompts focused on key elements of gothic fiction—setting, atmosphere, suspense, and the irrepressible intrusion of the past into the present—writers will leave with new work that engages the meaning of ghosts in their own lives.
Charlotte Pattison is a fiction writer and educator with an international background. A graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program, she has previously taught creative writing at Cornell and in the New York State prison system. Her work appears in Passages North, Smokelong Quarterly, The Yalobusha Review, and Epoch, where her story was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
