BY MONIQUE QUINTANA
Hillary Leftwich’s multi-genre collection, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press/The Accomplices 2019), is frighteningly beautiful and natural in its scope of voices and reverberates long after its first read. Leftwich is an editor, organizer in her literary community, and an advocate for writers existing in liminal spaces. Here she shares about her book and an impulse to create from the beats of memory.
Monique Quintana: As the title, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How To Knock suggests, the idea of being haunted is pervasive in your book. I read haunted psyches, haunted landscapes, and haunted bodies in the collection. What is the most outrageous ghost story you heard growing up and how did it shape your paradigms about the dead and the living?
Hillary Leftwich: Intriguing question, Monique! The reality is, it wasn’t so much the ghost stories I heard or read about, but the ghosts that were interacting with me directly. I didn’t know much about mediums are all the various mediumships back then, but I was always aware of certain presences coming in and out of my life. This shaped my paradigms about the dead and the interactions with the living heavily from an early age by normalizing its manifestations. It wasn’t until later I realized not everyone is visited by their stepbrother’s dead girlfriend, and not everyone can communicate with the dead when they come to you wanting a favor.
Via CCM Press/The Accomplices 2019
One of my favorite pieces from the collection is “Bang, Snap,” quite a stunning story about a teenage girl who runs away with her father’s friend to the dismay of her family and small town. I believe that story compels me because it is so visceral and cinematic. What kind of films and music were you feeling when you were putting the book together? How might they have lent to the energy, spirit, mood of the book?
I love that “Bang, Snap!” is one of your favorite pieces. That story came about from a news article I read about an underage girl and her adult lover committing suicide in the middle of a police standoff. I think it was less of a musical or cinematic influence on me and more of a situational and environmental influence. Many of the pieces I wrote in my collection are a result of my life experiences. Being a solo mother, working as a maid in a pay-by-hour motel, even being a private investigator. All these experiences, along with the unstable environments I was living in, shaped this collection. It’s a reflection of the working class and the people overlooked in a society that celebrates the beautiful and deranged. It’s not what you would call a “Suburban Mom” collection.
I find nature to be radical in the book. Can you describe a place in Colorado that you find both dangerous and beautiful?
There are so many stories of people dying in the mountains in beautiful ways that feels both tragic as well as intriguing to me. The couple found frozen on their way up Pikes Peak during a summer day. The young bride who fell to her death on the natural rock bridge, tripping over her wedding gown. The ghost towns that are scattered throughout Colorado that echo the dead and their tragedies. It’s a reminder that beautiful unknowns can kill us if we aren’t careful. But that’s what makes us humans, isn’t it? Curiosity can kill the cat, but it still has nine lives.
If you were asked to put just one of the pieces from Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How To Knock in a time capsule that would be opened 95 years from now, what piece would it be and why?
This is a hard question to answer! I would pick “Huckleberry” because it’s a very whimsical piece despite its heaviness. It’s a reminder we all have a voice, and what we choose to say or not say can continue to haunt us. Words, especially now, are essential. Who knows where we’ll be 95 years from now, but one thing I do know is our words will always matter.
Hillary Leftwich is the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press/The Accomplices 2019), which is featured in Entropy’s Best Fiction list of 2019 and is a finalist for the Big Other Book Award. She is the poetry and prose editor for Heavy Feather Review and runs At the Inkwell Denver, a monthly reading series. Currently, she freelances as a writer, editor, journalist, and teaches writing at Lighthouse Writers. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in print and online in The Rumpus, Entropy, The Missouri Review, The Denver Quarterly, Hobart, and others. She lives in Colorado with her partner, her son, and their cat, Larry. Find more of her writing at hillaryleftwich.com.
Monique Quintana is a contributor at Luna Luna and her novella, Cenote City, was released from Clash Books in 2019. Her short works have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. She has been awarded artist residencies to Yaddo, The Mineral School, and Sundress Academy of the Arts. She has also received fellowships to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat, and she was the inaugural winner of Amplify’s Megaphone Fellowship for a Writer of Color. She blogs about Latinx Literature at her site, Blood Moon and lives in the sleepy little town of Fresno, CA. You can find her at moniquequintana.com.