This is the ereader cover of Spirit Lost, my favorite of all this book’s covers. The artist got that the book was about creating something new, conjuring something from thin air.
But it’s also true that in Spirit Lost I was dealing with the anxiety and loneliness of a new wife in a new place, a town where my husband knew everyone and I knew no one. I was passionately in love with my husband, and jealous of his memories, his past. Maybe even a little obsessed. Those emotions were the basis for the book and the character of Willy.
I was also, like John, an artist, spending each day alone in a room, trying to connect with invisible mysteries. As a writer, I could – can—see what others do not see. I hear voices others do not hear. Were the “daydreams” Southey warned Charlotte Bronte about producing a distempered mind?
Some of John’s concerns were grounded in reality, and valid. How does any artist, writer, musician, actor balance the desire to create honestly and from the heart with the requirements of the marketplace that provide money for food and shelter? How does any artist believe that what she is producing is good? When a writer writes a novel, is she seeing ghosts?
And what about Jesse Orsa, the ghost, the widow of the whaling ship captain, who is trying to woo John into bed and out of life? Where in the world did she come from?
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have written Spirit Lost if I hadn’t lived in Nantucket, where talk of ghosts is commonplace. It’s hard not to believe in ghosts when your feet touch the same cobblestones and bricks that people touched in the early 1800’s. Mention a ghost at a dinner party of ten people, and you’ll get at least ten accounts of ghosts they’ve encountered in the old houses on the island.
I had this early draft of the British edition of Spirit Lost framed because the artist wrote something a bit eerie at the bottom.
“Dear Michael—Here with a rough for Lost Spirit. . .As an aside, one of my neighbours (who modeled for the rough and agreed to do so for the finish) is American, comes from Nantucket and was brought up in a very grand captain’s house complete with widow’s walk.” Littlebury, Saffron Walden, Essex.