In a post on DIY MFA, Suzanne Moyers shares how the revelation of family secrets inspired her to “write what haunts you.”
For Moyers, the ghost was her great-grandfather, a loving family man who disappeared when Moyers’ grandmother was a girl, leaving his family abandoned. That loss haunted Moyers’ grandmother, especially in her later years. “On the rare occasions she mentioned her father, a sadness would fill her eyes, and she’d quickly change the subject, adding to her mystique,” Moyers writes. As she began showing early signs of dementia, Moyers’ grandmother would sometimes call out to her father, wondering why he’d abandoned them. “When I started asking my mother questions about this chapter of our family history, I soon understood its power to haunt.”
The truth of the father’s disappearance was sinister and painful, involving a deep betrayal. Moyers used the bones of this story as the basis for her novel, ‘Til All These Things Be Done. To do so, Moyers adapted the phrase “Write what haunts you.”
“As I made my first attempt at writing fiction, this was the story that poured forth—or at least three chapters of it, which I soon filed away,” she says. She returned to the story years laster. “Casting about for ideas, I came across those earlier chapters, surprised by how they still resonated,” Moyers writes. “That emotional connection, and my instinct to make sense of the story, became the purpose I needed in tackling the novel, a journey that took more than ten years of hard work and dedication.”
Local history, photographs, and a memoir written by a girl who’d lived in the same orphanage as her grandmother supported Moyers’ exploration of the times. While Moyers’ grandmother never received the closure she needed, Moyers provides it in her novel, thanks in part to a real-life discovery her family made. “While we’d never quite understood what that eerie detail implied, I’d long ago used it as the basis for my own imaginary postlude, one that involved an enigmatic stranger bearing irrefutable evidence of Papa’s love,” she writes.
