Meet Your Ghostly Hosts

 

Not so long ago, before there were smart phones, but after the X-Files premiered, two young women met at NYU, where they studied musical theater and lived in a haunted dorm.  Carrie and Betsy, we’ll call them (because that’s their names), became fast friends as they both adored gothic literature, Shakespeare, and They Might Be Giants. Over the years they’ve acted, directed, and produced together (most notably a dystopian version of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure which took place in a former deli on the Lower East Side), written really bitter, wine-fueled Dorothy Parker inspired poetry (hey, it was an awful break up), and spent countless hours reading and discussing books, especially those of a romantic or ghostly nature.

Okay, it’s us. We put away the tap shoes years ago and found real grown up jobs in the arts. Betsy was a magazine editor for seven years at two arts publications before joining a communications office at an NYC museum. Carrie has held arts administration positions at an orchestra and a children’s theater. But despite getting to do creative work for a paycheck, we always wanted to get back to those days of stormy brains when the wine and the ideas were messy and overflowing.

Inspired by some wacky ghost experiences across the globe, and our New England and New Amsterdam family roots, we set out to write ESSEX HILL, which we describe as Gilmore Girls meets The House of the Seven Gables. Read full description here.

We hope you’ll join us in our journey to see it published, and to write our work in progress. We don’t want to say too much about it yet, but we can tell you that it’s a quirky YA Contemporary novel and it has been a lot of fun to write so far.

We’ll also be spending time on the blog posting ghost photos, talking about other author’s books, and chatting about any other topics that are rattling around our book-addled brains.

Yours in paper cuts,

Betsy and Carrie

Photo of our haunted dorm, Brittany Hall. We don't own the photo, only the student loans. Apparently, Edgar Allen Poe wrote his famous poem, "The Bells," about the church directly across the street. Spooky, right?