THE FIRST FIVE PAGES
VOICES COMING THROUGH
Tina Jackson talks the reader through the choices she made in creating the first-person voice from beyond the grave that we meet in the opening pages of her new novel, Spirit Burns
Tina Jackson
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 Spirit Burns, 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 of four first-person voices whose interrelated tales of what happens when the only choices you can make are bad ones are set against a backdrop of Northern women’s lives in textile factories, the music hall, and the suffragette movement at a point when it turned militant, more than a century ago.