About Haint Fiction
Haint Fiction was created by the Archivist to keep from losing what he cannot forget: the past. The Archivist is a trained historian who never finished his Ph.D. and never abandoned his devotion to research and finding the truth. He remains convinced that the worth of history lies not only in what survives in collections, but in what ordinary lives remember and leave behind. He believes that by telling and sharing these stories, he helps keep them from being lost to the silence of memories.
When means allow, he travels across a Carolina that never existed on any map. Much of what he collects comes from Oak County and the towns scattered through it. He spends time in small local libraries, where fluorescent lights hum and pages sometimes crumble at the touch. When the string of a story pulls him, he visits musty courthouse basements and the rarified air of university Special Collection rooms, searching in all these places for the stories time has worn thin or simply forgotten. He remains determined to preserve not only what happened, but also what was silenced, erased, or left unspoken.
Voices — or maybe they are spirits — he calls ghostwriters began to appear during those journeys. The ghostwriters did not arise from the shelves and stacks of repositories. Instead, it seemed they came from the places themselves: the crossroads, swamps, mill towns, and fields where events had taken root. On the long rides home from his searches, he began to hear the voices of men and women bound to those landscapes whispering to him. At home, their whispered and hushed voices grew stronger as they lingered at the edges of his desk lamp.
Now, as he turns reels of microfilm or reads through old files of newspaper clippings, fragile letters, and courthouse records, their voices press against his desire to share only what is documented and accurate. He tries to balance historical truth with the ghostwriters’ stories that come from a nearness to the ground where they once lived.
Whether they are companions of imagination or something less easily explained, the Archivist leaves for you to decide. Trained to believe every fact must be cited, he is torn by what he hears from the ghostwriters and the absence of anything he can footnote. Is it history, fiction, or are the strongest stories always a mixture of both? When the line blurs, he will offer a historical note to help tie them together.
Haint That the Truth, the flagship anthology of Haint Fiction, is where these voices converge with the Archivist’s desire to share both the history and the forgotten stories of this fictional Carolina. Within Haint That the Truth lies the meeting ground where history and invention blur, where the ghostwriters speak most clearly, and where what was nearly lost is carried forward again.
