Ghosts In The Wings (or, Writing With Phantoms)

Theaters have ghosts in the “wings” -- the sidelines of the stage, the place where actors wait, a place of imaginary worlds -- ghosts hang out there, and trust me, they have something to say. They take notes. They want you to get to the truth, please, just get to the truth!

When I decided to write The True I knew that I was haunted. I knew that writing about the empty places within me, and the fear I let spread into my life when I believed a con artist’s lies about the death of my lover, was the very phantom I most needed to share in language. And, since I grew up in a theater I was sure that I would bring the ghosts into the story, and that they would remain there until I figured out how to find the life that got buried in death.

Isn’t that the case for writers everywhere? We house our stories in our bodies like plays in a theater, and then, when we find the strength, put words to our inner ghosts -- to those voices -- our voices -- that won’t let us go.  Recently, I had a conversation with the poet, Chiwan Choi who suggested that writers create stories that intrinsically create ghosts, he says, “what are writers if not ghostmakers?” I’m not sure if I am a ghostmaker, perhaps that is truly the gift of poets, though I do know that as a theater person, haunted by those who left us too soon to AIDS, that I am walking through the world hoping language will help me reconcile with the dead.

Though, Americans are generally eager to be scared. We like horror movies. We are obsessed with heaven and hell (for me, another form of horror). We rally around the phantasmagorical, yet we cannot truly accept our own history. In this way we are a totally haunted country, and our writing reflects that conflict. We fight over the truth of our past. We battle with our own language, something that slips in and out of meaning in an abbreviated social media world. Though, I think the ghosts in the wings can teach us a lot about how to focus on our stories. Here’s what I have always heard my theater ghosts say when I am writing:

Do you really feel that?

Where are they coming from? Where are they going? What do they want?

Stop thinking, just breathe.

Theater ghosts, perhaps, and especially because they are dead, want you to be present. They want you to notice the small stuff, and they want you to keep it real, and for god's sake, stay in the action of what you are writing, not the idea of what you are writing. It’s in the presence of my ghosts that I find I can stay in the life of a story, sit patiently for the long novel to release herself -- it’s in knowing that I am alive (and not a phantom myself) that I have a duty to record how the world shapes itself for me in the crevices I find myself; in the spaces and time I have left.

Though it’s not easy to be present since most of us are running from death. It could be that we don’t want to die yet. It could be that we haven't figured out what to do with our past. It might even be that death is a bit too appealing. But we are running. And, so, writing, the very slow art of gathering the syntax of our fear is a good way to come into parallel play with the dead. 

Yes, perhaps that is how we live in this current world that is glutted with dead ends, dead ideas, dead policies, dead jobs, dead love, dead textures all sanded down by soundbites and promises, writing, the pulling up of our own dead spaces inside, that’s the way we lead ourselves to a new life: to a place with the ghosts in our wings supporting our flight. Because phantoms don’t live in a specific time. They float in and out of our timezones. They bounce and weave and are the model for allowing ourselves the flexibility to curve our own time, bend our patience and wait for what we really need to say. 

So, I figure we should just let our ghosts have a seat at the desk. Allow them to lie down on the floor with a pillow under their head. Let them smile as our eyes wander the walls looking for that word. For, the presence of the dead is the gateway to our inner stories, they are the guides to our journey into the worlds of our deepest hope; that we have a bit more time here, a bit more life with which to write.

THE TRUE Has Her Birthday

Today, October 28th, 2021 THE TRUE has her birthday.

The book launches in English and Romanian and I simply wish to thank the people who have supported it here with these quotes — from them. I am deeply grateful and hope their words inspire you to read the book.

"The True is a shocking testimony about a reality that we, those who live in Romania, still refuse to acknowledge...A lesson in sincere self-analysis, which also contains the truth about us here. It should give us the courage to tell more."

Istvan Teglas, Actor/artist, The National Theater, Bucharest

***

“The True is Sarah Kornfeld’s personal exploration of grief and loss. What begins as an examination of a long-ago love affair masterfully propels into a page-turning thriller. Raised in the theater world Kornfeld plays right into the theatrics finding herself center stage struggling to decipher fact from fiction. A hauntingly beautiful tale of love, loss, politics, and art that dares us all not to look away from our own disillusionment. Culminating with a crash and return that reveals while the world perhaps is not as grand as it once was, love even in death, may be the only truth that lives on.”

—Courtney B. Vance, Tony and Emmy Award-winning Actor and Producer

***

“I was happily swept away by the passion, politics, pace, humor, heart, and finely tuned skills Kornfeld brings to The True, her astonishing new book.”

—Lynn Crawford, author of Shankus & Kitto : A Saga and Paula Regossy

***
”The True is a gorgeously written twenty-first-century postmodern literary work convincing us that we only truly know where we are when on the wrong side of the looking glass. Passion, politics, lust, and theater drag us between the surreal and the real, on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a “now" age romance-political thriller.”

—September Williams, MD, Filmmaker, Author of the Chasing Mercury Toxic Trilogy

***

“The True is a compelling, troubling, and painfully honest story about the world we live in now -- a world of fake news and alternative facts in which we believe what we want to believe and ignore or deny those nagging voices that tell us otherwise. It's also a story about theatre -- that most ancient art of dissembling; a world of artifice in which nothing is quite what it seems, but where deception is deployed in search of profound truths. And it is also a story about Romania, and about the twisted western view of that troubled eastern nation. Our narrator travels there in search of her undead lover, with Bucharest standing in for Transylvania, and bloodsuckers lurking at every turn. But in Kornfeld's deftly woven tale, there is sympathy even for the devil. The True lures the reader in with its dark poetry, and then refuses to let us go.”

— Stephen Scott-Bottoms, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at University of Manchester and Author, “Playing Underground: A Critical History of 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement”

***

“Intimate, funny, and page-turning, The True simultaneously expresses the ways in which we are haunted by memory and the ways we continue to con ourselves. What starts out as a love story that transcends time becomes a paean to the world of theater set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and crumbling Romania. This book has everything: romance, Ceaușescu, Diana Ross. Interwoven throughout, the terror and pathos of being Jewish in Europe. The long tail of the Holocaust, the (c)overt antisemitism that still comprises common parlance. What does it mean to be a Jew searching for a Jew? What is Jewish identity? What is identity? Kornfeld's lucid prose cuts close to the heart and lends an immediacy to the whole crazy story as we watch everything unravel. The downward spiral has such a tentacular pull. I couldn't put the book down!”

—Emily Stone, Author of Did Jew Know?

***

“Storytelling is a contract of trust between speaker and listener—the promise that the suspension of disbelief will be rewarded with deeper truths encoded in fiction. But "in this time of virtual lives," Kornfeld warns, such trust is easier to manipulate than ever, and the magic of theater degenerates into propaganda and psychosis. Against the backdrop of Trump's threat to American democracy, she goes on a fever-dream of a journey to understand the death and legacy of her former lover and mentor, Romanian theater director Alexandru Darie, who believed art was the only defense against the greed and delusion of Ceausescu's dictatorship. But when she's elaborately scammed by a young woman claiming to be Darie's girlfriend, Kornfeld is humbled to discover how anyone, regardless of political beliefs or intellectual sophistication, can cling to wishful thinking as a defense against personal and historical trauma. The True is a funny, tragic, essential cautionary tale for our post-truth era.”

—Jendi Reiter, author of An Incomplete List of My Wishes: Stories

How Bulgokov's ghost helped me not go crazy.

I began writing THE TRUE in a fever state:

It was early morning and there was fog outside my window.

The cats were resting at my feet.

I was having an anxiety attack.

I could only breathe if I held the computer tight and let my fingers tell me what my brain would not.

“Where am I?” I asked myself, “Where am I?”

This was the state of my mind when I began to write for myself and no one else, as I was beginning to see that I had been trapped in a Con for two years. I was culling through the book I had written a year earlier, now realizing that what I had researched was in fact all lies. I was also trying to write as quickly as I could so that I would not forget the truth — that I had fallen, like a love-sick girl into a metaverse of corruption.

All I could think of was Bulgakov and his remarkable book, The Master and Margarita. I had learned of the book’s importance in 1990 when I left America for the first time and met artists who had been recently freed from behind the “Iron Curtain”. I was told that if I wanted to understand the true experience of Soviet rule I could get all I needed from it. So, I read it — and did not get it. That was 1990. I was twenty-one and in love for the first time with a Romanian whom I idealized. I was just a kid.

The Master and Margarita was beyond me:

I hadn’t understood a magician conning an entire theater to give over its money.

I hadn’t understood a talking cat that everyone seemed to believe was human.

I hadn’t understood a search for Jesus Christ that leads only to ruin.

Then, I got conned by a child of the Soviet way.

So, early in the morning of 2021, I picked up the book with new eyes. I read The Master and Margarita and only it could slow down my heart rate. I understood the shadows of lies, the illusion of connection, and the way magical realism was the only way to describe your brain, how all of its understanding of reality could be pushed through a metaphysical meat-grinder. Yes, Bulgakov was right. Bulgakov was real. Then, he haunted my dreams.

Now, here’s the thing: I grew up in theaters with ghosts. If you don’t have a ghost in your theater your theater is probably only half-baked. So, we had them and you did not want to piss them off. My dad, a theater director, before any opening night, would give an offering of cigarettes and a coke to our resident ghost. Our friend, Charles Ludlam, would kick anyone out of the theater who was stupid enough to whistle, speak any Shakespeare, or generally speak ill of the dead — if he caught you he’d make you spit, turn around three times and leave with your tail between your legs. It was serious fucking business.

Europeans are even more serious about phantoms because they have truly ancient ghosts. Ducu (whom I write about in The True, and was a “theater brat” like me) had very strict rules about his ghosts. In Paris, he sat and waited for Moliere to tip his hat on the stage of Le Odeon theater — “I felt him! His energy was pure humor!” Ducu cried. In Romania, Ducu was sure that dead actors and directors blended with the paint and formed a thin wall between him and the art he was making. Ghosts for theaters are the energy of the past, and they are imbued with the possibility for success or failure for any show. So, to be aligned with them helps to spread the luck you need to not have a flop. Ghosts are the true critics.

In 2021, I was truly in a “flop”. I had believed a woman who fed me lies that I was happy to accept. I had written a book about Ducu that was all fabrication. I was alone and left with the hollow sound of my breath. What was I going to do but admit I was in the ghosting of the past, a Soviet-style lie and I was a piece of fiction. So, I read Bulgakov, drank strong coffee, and let him take over my dreams.

Bulgakov told me this, “Accept that it’s all a lie. Accept that you are true even though the lies are all around you. Find a way to write the truth without leaving out the lies — write them all down with equal importance. Write!”

So the end of my book ends in a dream. In it, we are trapped in a theater where ghosts take over and try to come to terms with my mess. Bulgakov, Moliere, Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Bernhardt, and others take the stage of my inner life and try to lead me home.

In the end, the past haunts us, and this is a part of our deepest meaning — that we are haunted. That we long to connect with the unknown. That we too are bound to be ghosts, and it is better to understand your ghosts so that you can be a proper one when, eventually, you take your final curtain call and pass over, the audience of your life — applauding.

THE TRUE: When Truth is Crazier Than Fiction

My forthcoming book, The True is about how the ghosts of my past saved me from a global con. (The book launches on October 28th, 2021 in English and Romanian.)

That sounds strange, right? Well, no stranger than what happened. In 2018 my lover and dear friend, Alexandru “Ducu” Darie, a beloved theater director in Bucharest, Romania was very ill. He would not tell me he was sick. He would not say goodbye, for he was dying. So, I started to use social media to try to find out what was wrong with him. This was my first mistake. I should have demanded the truth, but you see, the lie of social media made me feel safe, made me convinced that everything was the reality I yearned for.

I spent two years searching for the reason for Ducu’s death. His “girlfriend” (who I met on social media) convinced me there was a conspiracy, and then all hell broke loose. What makes us fall for lies? What makes us believe those who con? What did Trump and global corruption have to do with any of this?

Everything. It had everything to do with it.

We are living in a time where the truth matters last. We present ourselves in a way that makes us feel like a projection of who we really want to be. And, under the Trump administration, the very essence of the truth (you know, facts and logic) were cast aside for a narrative that led us in circles around reality. If you break down how we are learning to trust lies as truth it’s a pretty scary picture.

Here is what I did wrong:

1. I really believed that people were real people on Social Media — no one is real “there” (it’s not even a place!)

2. I really believed that my grief was something I could “share” in a meaningful way — nope, grief is private

3. I didn’t understand how deeply corruption was part of the currency of my country, and most of the world, fueled by social media — if you think your country is free of corruption guess again.

And who was “Anya”? Who was this girlfriend of his who brilliantly convinced me of Ducu’s fate, legal courts for artists, contracts with Netflix, and a book? In the end, I still have no idea — but she is a metaphor for the world today: pictures of a life on Instagram, promises of freedom and fame through tweets and emails, a never-ending story of how life is better “over there” because we are disconnected from our own meaning.

Once I took the “red pill” and woke up to the fact that I was in a con, I actually felt a deep sense of relief. I had burned down my own “house” and found that at my foundation was my soul, my true feelings and I could see I had been asleep at the wheel.

In the end, the memory of what it was like for me to grow up in the theater (another place of illusion) gave me the grounding to accept reality. But, I guess you need to read the book (on Amazon and in bookstores soon) — please let me know what you think, and I hope my story supports your relationship with the truth — it’s so much better than a lie.

BUY THE TRUE HERE

Cover design by Maria Miu

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