Alice Quinn-Makwaia

I am a great lover of the preternatural—a great lover of the otherworldly, the unexplainable.

It’s a peculiar characteristic of mine. But, I often think it relates to a sort of nostalgia. I used to be scared a lot as a child by things that I couldn’t explain. The ghost stories and urban legends that swirled around every sleepover or summer campfire left me bone-scared. I’m not sure I enjoyed it then. But now, every time the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, I feel like a child again. It’s a special kind of wonderful.

Writing itself is preternatural—it can create the unfathomable, it can explain the unexplainable. It doesn’t make sense that harmless marks on a page can twist one’s insides in such a physical manner. Sometimes, I think, writing can open a window into one very specific other world: the world of the dead.

My manuscript, entitled The Night My Dead Friend Comes to Dinner, tells the story of one very preternatural event: the visitation of a dead friend. This dead friend is “graceless and ungainly,” and leaves sopping fingerprints all across my tablecloth. She loses a shoe on the fly over to my house. She smells “mostly rotten,” but “a little sweet.” She is otherworldly and special and incredible, but also awkward and a little grotesque—all at once.

If you read my manuscript, I hope you notice that, for just these twenty pages, the limitations of reality as you know it are a little looser. The dead can fly, breathe, chime, and, of course, stay over for dinner. While you read, you might find that the door into the otherworldly isn’t quite as closed (or heavy) as you originally thought.