Guest Editors’ Foreword
Welcome to the summer 2018 issue of Vice-Versa, an ezine produced at the University of Hawai‘i.
What you’ll find here is what we had hoped for: a variety of ghosts, phantoms, and spirits. For the most part, these entities are nothing paranormal; rather, they tend to be psychological or emotional manifestations of the past, inevitably intertwined with the present and modified by imagination. These spooks are in part of our own making as we view the diminishing past through an ever-changing lens.
The works in this issue of Vice-Versa are about hauntings, the way we are haunted by the places, people, and events that exist briefly before flickering into history—and perhaps even more so, the way we are haunted by the ectoplasmic versions of ourselves, the ghosts who always travel with us.
Steve Heller and Mark Spencer
Steve Heller is a two-time O. Henry Award winner and the author of numerous published short stories and essays. His books include a collection of short stories, The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers; two novels, The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman and Father’s Mechanical Universe; and a collection of narrative essays, What We Choose to Remember. He is currently working on Return of the Ghost Killer, the first of a trilogy of novels set on the Hawaiian island of Lāna‘i. He chairs the low-residency MFA in writing programs of Antioch University and is a former president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Mark Spencer is the author of ten books, including the nonfiction A Haunted Love Story: The Ghosts of the Allen House; the novels Ghost Walking, The Masked Demon, The Weary Motel, Love and Reruns in Adams County; and the short-story collections Wedlock and Trespassers. His work has received the Faulkner Society Faulkner Award for the Novel, the Omaha Prize for the Novel, The Bradshaw Book Award, the St. Andrews Press Short Fiction Award, and three special mentions in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He is dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.
Guest Artist
Alan Mawyer was born in Richmond, Virginia, and came to Charlottesville when he was three. He is a retired drywall hanger who enjoys photographing nature—mostly nature scenes in central Virginia and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. About the technical details, he says, “The really old pictures were taken with a Hanimex Praktica, and the film was developed and printed in my basement. Now I use a Pentax K100D digital camera mostly and occasionally an Olympus C-740.”
