Lorna Gibb
When I was young, our Scottish council estate was worst in the winter months. The lack of sunlight, just a few hours a day, meant that days were short, and night time was always a worry because of the sectarian violence that would break out at odd times, between people you hadn’t even known didn’t get on. But our home was a warm one, a loving one, and there were books in every room. Dad loved Steinbeck and Bradbury. Mum loved biographies, especially of the movie stars that had been the escape for her own youth. And so, like them, I read my way out of the drabness, into worlds far worse than mine, or places far more beautiful. Then I began creating my own. I had a predilection for fantastic tales, but also of pretending to be famous historical people and writing imaginary diaries. Writing didn’t seem a way to make a living then, not with any surety. So I studied and found that I loved teaching at University, and kept writing anyway, academic writing that my heart wasn’t in and which didn’t have the magic of the other work I did, at night or early in the morning, my guilty pleasure, my adult escape, as reading had been my childhood one.
But then I sold a book. The money wasn’t enough to live on but I was a professional writer at last. Then another, then a novel, A Ghost’s Story. The story of Katie King had intrigued me for years. A famous 19th century figure, turning up at séances all over the world. The widowed congressman Robert Dale Owen was a victim of a cruel hoax and fell in love with the spirit who came to him night after night. He was committed to an insane asylum, an illustrious philanthropic career ended in madness, for a ghost who didn’t exist. I weaved the Katie King stories, and the John King ones too, a male version of the ghost, originating in Ohio, who went on to become the toast of London society, together in the book. Of course it was about trickery and deception, but also about illusion and the longing to believe. A book about what books are made of, with fake references and real ones, because books both give us knowledge and deceive us, a biography of someone who never existed, a book that hopefully makes the reader question what is real and what is not. My apologetic homage to the reading and writing that had made my illusions and dreams for me. Now I’m working on a non-fiction book. After that, who knows where the words will take me.