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Emily Tellwright

Author, Artist, Publisher

Tag: Ghost Train

  • Epiphany

    Tall pine trees with sun shining through them casting long shadows surrounded by blue sky and other smaller trees

    So, it is time to take the decorations down and go back to work. (Actually, we take ours down early these days, as no one visits after New Year’s Day and there is a lot more celebrating in the run up to Christmas than there was in the time of the twelve days’ festivities.) The process always reminds me of the Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows when he volunteers to repack the basket after his impromptu picnic with the Rat at the beginning of the book:

    ‘Packing the basket was not quite such pleasant work as unpacking the basket. It never is. But the Mole was bent on enjoying everything…’

    No, taking the decorations down is never such pleasant work as putting them up, but there are things to enjoy. In our small and rather full house, one is the sensation of space: for a couple of days there seems to be more room than there used to be. Another is the lengthening of the days and the distant vista of spring. You might have a holiday booked, or if, like me, you are lucky enough to enjoy your work, it can be exciting to go back to it refreshed after some rest and entertainment.

    This painting is some of my first work of 2025, and it will be available to buy as a greetings card from Castle Sefton Press very soon when the Press’ online art shop opens.

    Finding work that you enjoy and that integrates with the other facets of your life is something that many of the characters in my novel Ghost Train – now available to buy from Castle Sefton Press – are trying to do, not least the central figure Clyde Tranter. The suspenseful supernatural mystery that looms over him throughout the book is not the only problem he has to consider; after all, what we do with our lives and whom we spend them with are two of the greatest mysteries that we all have to solve, and many things about our society today make them harder to crack for many of us.

    Talking of society brings me to something else. This is the time for new resolutions of course, but I know that many people feel overwhelmed by the troubled state of humanity and the planet, and a tragically large number by the difficulties of day-to-day living; they feel powerless to make a difference. But we can. We all can, if we bring just a little more love into our lives this year.

    A lot of generalisations and stereotypes about English people are nonsense, but it does seem to me that most of them find it difficult to talk about love, and I can sense some of them groaning and rolling their eyes as they read my suggestion. Love for family, romantic partners and pets is now widely acknowledged, but what I have said may well seem to many here like embarrassing silliness.

    But it isn’t. If everyone alive on the planet felt enough love this year, most people’s suffering could be immediately eased. And it can start small. Not everyone has family, or a partner, or a pet, but it doesn’t mean that they can have no love in their lives: you could stop to love the song on the radio, or the daffodil shoot poking through the frozen soil, or that old lady who is keeping you waiting in the queue at the Post Office because she’s so slow. Just find something that you can open your heart to.

    It can be a friend. We’re obsessed with the idea of love between two adults meaning something sexual; that’s a great thing, of course, but it doesn’t have to be like that. I love all my friends deeply, and that’s a kind of relationship that was widely accepted until quite recently, from Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to David and Jonathan in the Old Testament.

    The best thing about opening up to a little love is that it is something everyone can do. No one is powerless because they are poor, unwell or judged as insiginificant. It is a practice that will support you in navigating life’s challenges and that can ultimately make a difference to the state of the world.

    You could give your love to a subject or activity for which you have a passion. If you’ve read Ghost Train – obviously I recommend that you do, but it really would make an entertaining, thought-provoking and uplifting start to your year if you haven’t – think of all the characters’ passions and interests. If more people truly loved birds, gardening, books, cookery, theatre, dancing, education, libraries, vintage trains and even true crime, would humanity be in the mess that it’s in?

    Of course it wouldn’t.

    Happy New Year, everyone and love to you all.

  • Ghost Train Publication Day: Pitching at the Hole in the Fiction Doughnut

    Ghost Train will officially be published today – and will be on its way to those of you who have pre-orders – just fifteen months after I began writing it. I’m excited that it is finally on offer to readers everywhere, because all those who read it as part of the production process found it to be enjoyable and entertaining, and I’m sure that most of you will too. So I thought I’d say a word about ‘enjoyable and entertaining’ fiction.

    J B Priestley, whom most in the UK will know as the author of the school examination set text An Inspector Calls, was a great defender of ‘middlebrow’ literature – he liked to call it ‘broadbrow’ – which in the twentieth century was seen as the intermediary between the ‘highbrow’ or intellectual works and the ‘lowbrow’ popular culture; it was a period of staggeringly vicious literary and social snobbery. I hope such nonsense is no more. A thing can, of course, only be judged as what it is: a circus clown may be good or bad depending on how successful he is at clowning, but whether he is practising a more valuable art-form than an actor giving his Hamlet is entirely a matter of personal taste and perspective.

    If we are no longer victims of judgemental social and literary theories, today authors are swaddled by categorisation. In order to promote our books to the world, we have to put predefined labels on them and liken them to the works of other authors. This is sensible and necessary up to a point – shops and platforms need to know where to shelve our work, and readers need to be able to find books that they want to read – but like all rigid systems, it can be restrictive; Ghost Train is officially ‘Contemporary Fantasy Fiction’, which has made perfect sense to some readers and astonished others. If you write a novel that does not really belong to one of the existing categories, you are stuck with ‘General Fiction’, and that will be the last anyone sees of that book, as no one types those two words into a search bar.

    And there does seem to me to be a great gaping hole in the middle ground of fiction categorisation, just where the books that Priestley described would be. Spread around the outer ring on one side are the ‘cosy’, romantic and trivial and on the other the tragic, terrible, dark, horrific and ‘literary’. These are all valuable and popular types of book across various genres – crime, fantasy etc. – and of course there is often some cross-over; but where are the books that have a little of all those things, what we might describe as the texture of life if we are lucky enough not be living in some traumatic, desperate situation? I’m sure they’re there, but it’s hard to find them because they don’t have a label; it’s time we found a name for them, one without the hierarchical implications of ‘middlebrow’.

    So, you will see Ghost Train quite righty categorised as ‘Contemporary Fantasy Fiction’, and ‘Literary Fiction’; in some classifications it may also be under ‘Magical Realism’, ‘Contemporary British Fiction’, ‘Small Town Fiction’, ‘Traditional British Mystery’ and a few others that I can’t remember without looking them up. It is a well-written book with a supernatural element; it is also a mystery – sometimes thrilling, sometimes funny – set in an unfashionable region of England and steeped in recent history that encompasses conundrums about home, work, relationships, how to organise one’s books and what to have for dinner.

    Just like life really.

    (There is more to J B Priestley than An Inspector Calls. If you are interested in discovering some of his other works, I recommend Lost Empires, Bright Day, The Other Place and this terrific BBC Radio Collection.)

  • What will you carry through to the New Year?

    It is once more the time of short, dark days, warm glows and twinkly lights, hearty meals and inward pleasures. Like Clyde in Ghost Train, I have prepared the dark, rich foods of the heart of winter: mincemeat, fruit cake and a round splodge of a Christmas pudding. The first mince pies, a delight enhanced by their long absence, have been baked and eaten, I have rooted out my plastic apron with the holly pattern, and the artwork for this year’s Christmas cards is completed. Outside, the garden has been subdued by the touch of frost and snow.

    The equinox seasons – autumn and spring – inspire work and energy, whilst the solstice ones – winter and summer – demand leisure and indulgence. There is no more welcome feeling I know than the anticipation of Christmas; there is no celebration that is, in our society, so widespread, and no better time than the shortest, darkest days to eat, drink and be merry with friends. Our shopping streets, like Ridgeley’s in Ghost Train, may be scrappy remnants of what they once were, and our excitement may be a mere shadow of that felt in the innocence of a childhood in simpler times, but there remains something life-affirming about that small flame of enthusiasm that flickers into being inside us in December at the thought of the occasion to come. Just a few months ago, the thought of it all stirred nothing except a slightly weary remembrance of all the work involved, and yet now the small spring of seasonal delight is bubbling away. It is a kind of magic.

    There is also the wonder of the stillness of Christmas morning. If you have excited children, visiting family, presents to open and dinner to cook you may find that fanciful, but all that energy and activity sits on top of the peace of a morning when more of us than at any other time have ceased our regular activities. If you have just the space of one breath to pause, you will feel that peace, the quiet as of a landscape muffled in fresh snow; it’s as if the Earth itself had stopped spinning before setting off in a new direction.

    I have no idea what this Christmas will bring to me or to the world. There are trials and suffering all around and I don’t know if more troubles or some relief are coming. But my question is, whatever is coming, what will you carry through it? What is so much a part of you that you will still feel or believe it whatever happens? As we pass through Christmas, the full stop of the year, what things about ourselves will still be with us for the start of 2025? The things that survive will be the things that form our identity, that make us who we are during our life on this planet.

    If you’re interested in how ideas change over time, what we believe and then leave behind and how society changes as a result, you will enjoy my new novel Ghost Train, which is coming out on 13th December. There are also spooky happenings to be explained, some comedy and delicious food along the way, and of course mysterious trains. What could be better entertainment for this time of year?

  • My new book Ghost Train is coming soon.

    My new book Ghost Train will be published in paperback and ebook in the next few weeks. Watch out for more news!

    Atmospheric abstract painting yellow and turquoise