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Ghost Book & A Manship Artist Residency Reimagined

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September 4, 2024

By Marc Zegans

Long before I arrived, I held in mind a captivating image of Gloucester instilled by poet Ed Dorn’s “From Gloucester Out.” Contact replaces conjecture and so it was for me. When I first drove north from Allston, in the winter of 1986, I walked the grounds of an old estate on which sat two houses held by the same family for generations and made my way to a point overlooking a granite pier knifing white capped waters. Beneath the spume and surface swell, I could feel the deeper movement of traveling currents from which life, since 1623, had been given and into which life had been taken. I felt equal parts fear and wonder, and very very small.

Later, in town, I was drawn along quiet streets, hearing in these empty winter corridors echoes of voices that seemed to rise from the past, conversations that I imagined would continue to eternity. Rambling on, I met an older man who walked with me for a while, then said, “Folks up here only go into Boston for births, weddings, and funerals, and sometimes not even that. You’re on the North Shore now son.”

In the twenty-five years that followed I came to know many towns North of Boston, but Gloucester was the one that called. No matter the distance, I could feel its pull, as I did when Jo-Ann Castano, Board Chair at the Manship Artists Residency, invited me to travel from my home in Santa Cruz to the Manship as a resident poet. This seemed the perfect bookend to a 2004 residency I had completed at Mesa Refuge, the former house of painter Sam Francis overlooking Tomales Bay in Point Reyes California. My son Max was graduating from Columbia in the spring and my latest collection of poems, The Snow Dead, was scheduled for release by Somerville Massachusetts’ Cervena Barva Press at about the same time. Then, abruptly, the world changed.

A Pandemic Enters and A Ghost Residency Begins

COVID hit and turned all plans upside down. Rebecca Reynolds, the Manship’s executive director, deferred out-of-state residencies till a future date; my readings were cancelled, and Columbia sent all students home. Contemplating these disruptions, I wondered if it might be possible to reimagine the basic idea of an artist’s residency. Did an artist’s residency have to be on site? Was physical attendance absolutely necessary?

Art historian Meyer Shapiro has described abstract art as “a confraternity of works of art cutting across the barriers of time and place,” highlighting this method’s power to form a community of expression removed from situational constraints.

Long interested in the question of presence and absence as they relate to creative community, the idea of crafting a virtual residency that transcended such barriers greatly appealed to me. Stark absence, I noted, tends to elicit deep presence. An empty room in a creaky house concentrates attention on the void, and on the tenuous nature of human connection and its resilience.

Why not then, in opposite direction to Shapiro’s abstractionists, playfully pursue a project rooted in place that erases social distance. What, for example, if a photographer were to start poking around the Manship and sense the presence of a poet on property, a feeling activated by small disturbances: rumpled sheets in a previously made bed, an open book on a table, a half-filled glass of water? I voiced with Rebecca and Jo the idea of creating a Ghost Residency. They responded, “Go for it!” and Jo quickly sent me a stack of local photographers’ and filmmakers’ portfolios.

Taking Pictures and Finding Ghosts

The portfolio that spoke to me belonged to Tsar Fedorsky, a Gloucester-based fine art photographer. In the opening line of her artist’s statement for the photo essay The Long Way Home Tsar said,

“Sometimes I feel like a ghost, wandering endlessly. I feel restless about my life and apprehensive about my future. I often dream about life’s possibilities.”

When I read that, I knew that I had found my creative partner.

Tsar, resonated with the project’s fictive premise, loved the idea of collaborating with a West Coast poet, lived on the same street as the Manship, though she had never spent time there, and was eager to explore. She met Rebecca, set up dates, began to shoot, and was soon sending me large files filled with images.

I reduced these in stages to a photographic poem whose tripartite visual structure— Stone, Ghost, Life—became the foundation for our book.

From the start Ghost Book was meant to invoke a layered sense presence. Its three sections reflect this purpose: Stone’s muted color images constellate eerie objects found in the Manship’s Studio Barn. Ghost’s pictures explore the liminal space between life and death, past and present, interior and exterior, the built and the natural. Life’s photographs consider light in darkness, the relentless play between chaos and order, and the road that leads from a haunted place to the larger world and new beginnings.

Though we felt that our photo-essay had met the ends we had set for it, we did not fully grasp the depths of our project’s conjuring until Samantha C. Harvey, a Harvard educated professor of English at Boise State, with a penchant for old houses, discovered “an actual ghost.” When she called to announce her findings, I was more than skeptical but Samantha has a sharp eye and knows how to read an image. She pointed to an eerie face, previously unrecognized, cloaked in a muslin mask resembling those worn in Cape Ann during the Spanish flu epidemic. Clearly, this visage was epiphenomenal, yet its appearance could not be denied. When Tsar looked at the photograph through Samantha’s eyes, she had the same Wow! response, exclaiming, “Now that I’ve seen this face, I can’t unsee it.”

Captivated, Samantha travelled to Gloucester, researched the history of Paul Manship’s estate, Starfield, explored parallels between the 1918 and present-day pandemics, stayed the night with her children at the Manship, and wrote eloquently in Ghost Book’s foreword,

The Ghost Project distills something essential about Starfield—even in the absence of its residents. The house remains a place where artists have brought things into form for many generations, integrating the elements of wood, stone, water, air, and light. It is a place where restless creative energy continually seeks an outlet in expression. Houses can be delicate yet durable envelopes for the human lives that have been contained there over time—through pandemics and World Wars—accreting stories and objects, perhaps even becoming thresholds.

Making A Book

*Ghost Book* front cover. Photo: Tsar Fedorsky, ©2024.

Having found with Samantha’s help some true ghosts in the machine, it was time to bring Ghost Book to life. To infuse it with vitality, we had to make a book rare in number whose materials spoke of craft and care, and whose small details, including Smythe binding with signatures stitched in black, photographs tipped onto the front and back covers, silver dust stamped spine lettering, and tangerine endpapers with handspun embossing, made it an extension of the art itself. The book we imagined would carry weight, feel good in the hand, have beautiful pages that readers, responding to their almost austere heft, would turn slowly. And it would have to last. This was to be a book that a reader might discover in a museum a hundred years hence, So, we needed a printer up to the task.

**Rebecca Reynolds, Executive Director of the Manship Artists Residency and Anne Olney, Senior Collections Manager at Harvard Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology have a peek at *Ghost Book*.**

Enter Bob Nangle and the good folks at Meridian, artisan printers who have created museum quality pieces for The Yale University Art Gallery, Pace Gallery, The New York Public Library, and renowned artists including Sally Mann, Lee Friedlander, Nick Brandt, Alma Thomas, John Baldesarri, and Chuck Close. Bringing printed work to this level demanded great patience and Meridian faithfully stayed with us through the intense two-year process, including crowdfunding, that it took to bring Ghost Book to fruition. On receiving his long-anticipated copy, patron and collector Robert Elwood wrote,

**Members of Samantha C. Harvey’s literary salon enjoy a first look.**

Within view at the moment are books featuring Stieglitz, Arbus, Mapplethorpe, Doisneau, and an especially grand monograph featuring the life works of George Tice. I find myself returning to the images that capture emotions—the summery optimism of Joel Meyerowitz, the insomnia fueled dreamscapes of Michael Massaia. In a similar manner, the images and words in Ghost Book by photographer Tsar Fedorsky and poet Marc Zegans draw you in. You discern that there is something mysterious, something ineffable just beneath the surface. Reading Marc's evocative prose and gazing at Tsar's unsettling images calls to mind the puzzles you find in a haunting story by Borges.

Erin Cressida Wilson Screenwriter of Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus attested,

“Francesca Woodman meets Gaston Bachelard. This book is my dream. And in fact, it IS a dream and a visitation - intertwined words with evocative images that slither off the page and haunt me.… Breathtaking.”

In early August we were thrilled to learn that the Boston Athenaeum, whose motto is “Calling All Curious,” had taken Ghost Book into its permanent collection. On behalf of everyone who made this adventure a reality, Tsar, Samantha, and I could not be happier to announce that Ghost Book is now traveling from Gloucester out.

Tsar Fedorsky is an American photographer. Her work centers on personal yet relatable narratives merging traditional and digital photographic techniques. The creator of The Light Under the Door a photo book published by Peperoni Books in 2017, her photographs have been published and exhibited worldwide. Ms. Fedorsky resides in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Marc Zegans is the author of seven collections of poems, most recently Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022) and The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020),and several immersive theater productions including, with D. Lowell Wilder, “Sirens, Dreams, and a Cat.” Films based on his poems appear regularly at festivals around the world. He lives by the coast in Northern California.

Samantha C. Harvey is a Professor of English at Boise State. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British poetry and prose, transatlantic romanticism, and environmental humanities. Professor Harvey holds a doctorate in English Literature from Cambridge University, and is the author of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature, Edinburgh University Press.

Purchase Ghost Book here.

If you wish to view a copy of Ghost Book please contact the Manship Artists Residency.

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