I’ve always loved ghost stories, as a reader and as a writer. And I’ve always loved playing with ideas of what you can do with them, creating them in writing as nuances and possibilities and the occupants of liminal spaces and the borderlands between reality and the imagination. My first novel, the theatre-set The Beloved Children, plays with ghostly presences. So when the opportunity came up to attend a ghost story writing workshop in my area with Adam Z. Robinson – awriter, performer and theatre-maker who brings classic ghost stories to life on stage – for Halloween in October 2019, it had my name on it. I signed up straight away.
It was a brilliant workshop. And in one of the exercises, along came this voice. Bitch has only gone and locked me in the cabinet, I wrote.
That’s now the first line in my second novel, which was published on International Women’s Day in March. The voice belongs to Madge, the main character in the book and one
