In an irregular column in The Washington Post called The Writing Life, writer Ana Castillo wrote:
I am haunted. I am haunted by my ancestors. I am haunted by a paternal grandfather who was brought to the United States in the '20s to work on the railroads. And I am haunted, too, by the knowledge that in 1929, when my Nebraska-born mother was 2 years old, my grandparents and two infant U.S.-born children were deported in a cattle car along with other Mexicans who were no longer welcome to work here after the Crash.
Those ghost stories rose up one morning as I gazed out my kitchen window at the Franklin Mountains in southern New Mexico. The other side of that range is Mexican territory. It was January, winter in the desert, and had rained quite a bit the night before. The treacherous peaks were draped with mist. As I looked out at that surreal vision, a ghost spoke to me. It said, "Someone is on the other side even now, trying to get across. He is hungry, cold and afraid. His family is waiting for him on this side. They are worried to death."
"Who are you?" I asked, sipping my morning espresso, staring at the fog on the horizon. Behind the gray were the mountains, the desert and someone's beloved, trying to cross.
"I am his sister," the ghost said, "waiting."
With that, I went to my desk and began to write. It might have started as an essay or a poem -- the muse comes in many guises. But what I ended up writing that day was a short story. When I was done, I had some idea of who the ghost was, but I wondered whether my story told all she wanted to say. What if what I had was only a beginning? Where would I go from there?
…
In fiction, we have to let our ghosts speak. The story I started that morning by merely listening has become a book. It is the way all my novels begin.
Copyright 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
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