Gathering Our Ghosts: Writing, Memory, and Creative Dialogue with the Dead // with Sharon Pajka

As autumn deepens and the veil between worlds grows thin, Gathering Our Ghosts invites writers and artists to step into the shadowed spaces where memory, grief, and imagination meet.

This six-week Transformative Language Arts course centers ghost stories, poems, and haunting texts as portals for exploring death awareness, remembrance, and ongoing relationship with the dead. Rather than seeking closure, participants are encouraged to dwell in uncertainty, listening for what lingers, whispers, and refuses to disappear.

Through guided discussion, reflective writing, ritualized storytelling, and collaborative dialogue, participants will engage language as a transformative tool for inquiry and connection. Writing practices include letters to the dead, elegiac fragments, invocations, and collective ghost stories, allowing participants to experiment with creative dialogue across time and absence. Visual art and symbolic practices further support embodied reflection and ethical imagination.

Grounded in care-centered facilitation and community engagement, the course creates a supportive container for exploring personal, ancestral, cultural, and imagined ghosts.

Participants will practice deep listening, respectful witnessing, and consent-based sharing while engaging difficult and tender material. The course emphasizes reflection, relationship, and meaning-making over answers or resolution.

Gathering Our Ghosts affirms that when we tell ghost stories, our own and those passed down, we strengthen our connection to the living world. By writing with and to our ghosts, participants cultivate creative resilience, deepen their artistic practice, and discover how language can hold what is unresolved, sacred, and still speaking.

Week by Week

Week 1 (Oct. 28): Summoning & Silence — Who Are Our Ghosts?

We begin at the threshold, where the veil thins and voices begin to stir. Through ghost stories, poems, and visual texts, participants engage in reflective practice by naming the ghosts that haunt their personal, cultural, and imaginative landscapes. Language becomes an invocation calling forth memories, absences, and presences while group discussion establishes a shared ethic of care for engaging death awareness and creative uncertainty.

Week 2 (Nov. 4): Memory & Murmurs — Grief as a Living Archive

This week lingers with what refuses to disappear. Ghostly texts guide participants into an exploration of grief as a living archive stored in objects, places, and half-remembered stories. Through expressive writing and reflective inquiry, participants practice attending to murmurs of the past, allowing fragmentation, silence, and echo to shape creative work and deepen understanding of loss as an ongoing presence.

ZOOM SESSION

Week 3 (Nov. 11): Correspondence & Conversations — Writing to the Unreachable

Here we write across impossible distances. Drawing on spectral letters, laments, and ghost stories, participants engage writing as relational and transformative practice. Through care-centered rituals of correspondence, writers experiment with addressing those who cannot answer, cultivating ethical imagination while allowing language to carry longing, unanswered questions, and the unsettling intimacy of continued conversation with the dead.

Week 4 (Nov. 18): Rituals & Remains — Art as Remembrance

This week turns toward the remains, ancestral, collective, and imagined, that shape our stories. Through haunting narratives and ritual-inflected texts, participants explore how creative acts become containers for grief and memory. Writing and multimodal practices emphasize symbolic language, shared witnessing, and cultural care, inviting ghosts to be honored through intentional storytelling rather than explained away.

Week 5 (Dec. 2): Darkness & Dialogue — Shared Ghost Stories

Ghost stories are rarely told alone. This week centers communal storytelling and dialogue as transformative practice. Participants gather in shared darkness to read, listen, and contribute their own ghostly narratives, engaging language as a tool for collective inquiry into mortality and grief. Emphasis is placed on deep listening, consent, and the power of being haunted together without the need for resolution.

ZOOM SESSION

Week 6 (Dec. 9): Blessings & Beginnings — Living with Our Ghosts

We close by considering which ghosts we carry forward. Through lingering stories where the dead remain as guides, companions, or quiet witnesses, participants reflect on transformation and integration. Writing and ritual support the articulation of ongoing relationships with the unseen, affirming language as a living practice that allows us to walk onward—changed, accompanied, and attentive to what still whispers.

Who Should Take This Class

Writers, poets, artists, and anyone drawn to the spooky vibes of the season. All backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome.

If cost is a barrier, we offer scholarships based on income as well as some partial scholarships for people living with serious illness and/or disability or people of color. Please fill out this scholarship application form so that we can find the best way to make the class accessible to you.

What People Are Saying About Learning With Sharon:

"I already miss this class for the depth, creativity and intimacy of the subject matter, our facilitator and classmates, and the safety provided. I am very grateful to TLA; Sharon P. our facilitator; and all my classmates for a rewarding, informative and challenging experience."

"LOVED this class, and the instructor. Would love to learn more in follow up class."

"How fascinating, intriguing and rewarding the subject matter was; and how accepted and truly connected I felt — with the facilitator and classmates; especially considering my current level of writing and participation (first class)."

Where and When Does This Course Meet?

This is an online course, hosted on the online teaching platform, Wet Ink and includes two Zoom sessions.

This course meets online in a Wet Ink classroom for six weeks from Wednesday, October 28 through Tuesday, December 15, 2026 supported by two Zoom sessions (dates and times TBA).

The week before class begins, registrants will receive an invitation to the Wet Ink classroom and the Zoom session information.

The Wet Ink platform allows students to log in on their own time to post comments and critiques directly to authors’ works. You can also view deadlines, track revisions, and watch video or listen to audio. At the end of the class, each student will receive an email that contains an archive of all their content and interactions. Wet Ink is mobile-friendly and there are no browser requirements.

About the Teacher

Sharon Pajka is a Professor of English. She holds a Ph.D. in English Education and a graduate certificate in Public History. Her writing combines a love of words and the stories of those who came before us. She is the author of Women Writers Buried in Virginia (2021) The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of His Family, Friends and Foes (2023), winner of the 2024 Saturday Visiter Awards by Poe Baltimore, and Haunted Virginia Cemeteries (2025).

On the weekends, you can find her in the cemetery volunteering, giving history tours, researching and writing about cemeteries. Find more information on her website: https://www.sharonpajka.com/