1. Words are souls.

    They are ourselves, extracted from our bodies, and they live forever.

    After death we speak through words. It is the only way — but a potent way. Words live. They are real things in the world, and readers are not a passive audience, they are champions who take these words, our clues and promises, and with them shape the world. It is this, more than anything else, that Ghostwriter illuminates.

    Words can touch you — physically alter your body — raise hairs at the nape, hollow the gut, send shivers shoulder to toe — and does this not change our understanding of presence and absence?

    I have written these things and you have read them, you have felt my touch, and there is no distance between us at all.

    From Abbey Fenbert’s The Pitch Meeting for Ghostwriter. I love The Toast.