Folklore scholar and writer Elizabeth Marley chats with Washington Square Review editor Melissa Ford Lucken. A University of Illinois Chicago PhD student who examines folklore and ghost stories, Marley finds the bright side of bad workshop experiences and the lessons a student can carry into their own teaching one day. She laughs about being haunted by unfinished manuscripts and untangles how to tell whether an idea is destined to be a novel or a short story.

Elizabeth Marley’s story, Ataxia, appears in the Summer 2026 issue of the Washington Square Review.

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Elizabeth's website

Elizabeth’s book, You Shouldn’t Worry About the Frogs

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Washington Square On-Air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review, Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing.

Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Lucken, editor for the Washington Square Review.

I'm here today with Eliza Marley, whose story Ataxia will be in our Summer 26 issue. Hey there, Eliza.

Hi. Thanks so much for having me, for sure.

Tell us a little bit about the story.

Ataxia takes place. It's sort of almost a one scene short story. There is a gentleman in a work meeting that is going on endlessly.

And as this meeting is going on, he's sort of zoning in and out, trying to keep focus, sort of unable to keep focus. And he notices in the back of the conference room, there's a ghost.

And this reminds him of growing up with his mother, who was big into spiritualism and traveled heavily to interact with the spirit world and ghosts and how he never really understood what that meant to her until this experience that he's having with a ghost.

How did you come to write that?

This story was different from my usual process.

I actually wrote it entirely in one sitting during a workshop that I was in a couple years ago where the workshop just raised my blood pressure exponential.

Oh,.

It was one of those things. You know, not every workshop is a perfect match. And I had some differences with the instructor and I found myself just constantly agitated. And so.

So in attempt to de stress during class time, I would just kind of zone out and write. And that was one of the things I wrote.

Okay. Do you think it gave you a catharsis?

I do. I really do.

The room where the meeting is taking place with like, its weird old whiteboard and the really, like, pallid yellow paint and everything is like, exactly the classroom that I was in.

For people who are unfamiliar with the workshop process back up a little bit and tell us what was unpleasant about it.

Yeah, you know, I've had like, I've been in many workshops and there's always something rewarding that I've gotten out of them. And that is also true for this workshop.

Like, at the end of my time there, I. I felt like I had gotten some good ideas on what to do next in the project, and that's really all you can hope for. But in the midst of it, there were. It was an instructor who really liked to talk about himself and that would sort of derail us.

And there was a lot of name dropping and there was a lot of, here's what you can do when You're a big shot writer and not a lot of like, here is what writing is and let's dig into each other's work. Which is sort of what I prefer, a more work oriented workshop.

That is why they call it workshop. Do you feel like you were able to pull out anything positive from the experience other than obviously our story, which we're thankful for.

So we're glad that you had such a rough time. But.

I absolutely did. I absolutely did. The instructor, even though I wouldn't say we got along the best, he was a brilliant writer.

And, you know, I got a lot out of reading his work.

And it definitely helped my teaching, I think, to understand hearing the feedback that he was giving and trying to figure out why it annoyed me and why I disagreed with it, forced me to be very articulate in my disagreements. And I think that was helpful because I also. I'm in a doctorate program right now, and so I teach undergraduate fiction workshop.

And those are a lot of young writers, you know, figuring out their voice, learning about all you can do in a creative writing medium. And so it really was helpful to figure out, like, okay, how can I give feedback in a way that is.

Understandable and how to maintain a productive environment that I can really relate to what you're describing, because I had somewhat similar experience. But what I ended up doing, which was similar to what you did, was making, like, writing in response to it.

And I wrote like five things that I would do differently eventually when I was the one that was in charge of the workshop. And I still have that, so.

Oh, I think that's amazing. Have you gotten to implement any of the things that were on that list?

Yep. Because I teach creative writing here at Lansing Community College, so I typically ask the students questions before we start workshopping.

How long have you been working on this piece? What are you hoping to do with it?

You know, because I think if someone has been working on a piece for two years, you know, you're gonna approach the conversation differently than if they had just written it two days ago. You know, it's in a very, you know, their attachment to it and their goals for it can be quite different.

And I think knowing someone's goals, if they don't have goals, that's helpful too. But what are you trying to do here? So, yeah, I guess this is all to say that bad workshop experiences can still be meaningful, you know?

Absolutely.

I don't know if it's worth the scars that it does cause some people,.

But I think there's. Yeah, there's Lots of different ways to do workshops and lots of different, you know. Yeah. Techniques people. People use to teach and some.

Some work for different writers and some,.

Some work for sure.

I. I also like asking my students questions about their piece before we start.

Mm. Yeah. Invites them in. Which is very different from the traditional old school. Be silent. Be silent and listen. For sure.

Definitely.

How does this story fit in with your other creative works?

I definitely have written a lot of like, magic realism or things that are, you know, reality adjacent with a little bit of fabulism in different ways, bringing in some different fable style stuff or, you know, different mythology things. Ghosts. So I think it definitely thematically fits in with the other stories just by virtue of there being a ghost.

But it's also, you know, the story isn't really about the ghost. It's about how that person in the conference room comes to make meaning of the ghost.

Mm. And also maybe get a new perspective on their relationship with their mother.

Definitely.

Yeah. Which I can relate to that with the, the ghost elements that sound like they kind of float in and out of your work.

What do you think they add to the creative process for you?

Oh, that is such a good question.

It's actually something I'm thinking about a lot right now because I'm gearing up to do my doctorate qualifying exams next spring and I'm doing a big research paper on ghosts, trying to sort of answer that question.

Okay, well, give us the preview.

So without, you know, delving into like hundreds of years of ghost story tradition, something that comes up a lot in ghost lore and ghost research is how ghosts fill narrative gaps or they sort of arise at the limits of narration that when you can't explain something or when there's a plot hole or there's a gap in reality in some way, like a ghost is what springs to mind to fill it.

And I think ghosts are super interesting because, you know, for something that maybe, or maybe not, but maybe fills a gap or springs forth when nothing else can fill it, it's a very distracting, attention grabbing, like, method of doing that. It's, you know, it's like, it's not a white out solution. It's like a tie dye solution.

And I just find that fascinating of like, for all that, some ghost scholars seem to view ghosts as this thing that just sort of smooth. Smooths things over in a narrative function. They seem to cause more problems when they show up.

And I like that they complicate the story because they have their own goals. Right. Their own motivations and their own story. But a lot of the story we don't know. We only know the ghost story as the ghost interacts with us.

You know what I mean?

Definitely, yeah. And I think, you know, ghosts, they're a nice, like, opening device. They open up a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity, imagination.

I specifically look at a lot of environmental stuff, how the queues of haunted places, like chills in the air and strange vapors and residues are really like climate crisis coded. In my other work on ghosts, in this story, the meaning made from. From ghosts or sort of like, oh, I've seen this thing that I never believed in it.

Does this monumentally change my experience of reality? And in that moment at the end of the story, not really. Everything just goes on. The meeting hasn't ended yet.

Everyone is still carrying on like normal, even our protagonist. And it's just sort of like the world continues even though this odd thing has happened.

You and I were talking before we started recording about your other work with ghosts, so tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I do research with some haunted tour guide books, like old sort of paranormal tourism things. Old, like blogs where people were chronicling paranormal encounters.

I also collect ghost stories from Chicago residents and when I travel, ghost stories from other places. Just sort of, you know, thinking through how people imagine ghosts fitting into the places they live.

And especially I'm interested in how ghost stories fit into places of ecological restoration or rewilding efforts. And ghost stories, tourism and ghost stories, all things that are super interesting to me.

Any stories that people have told you stand out?

Yeah. One story I got, the last time I was in Wales, I was in Porthmadog, which is up near the, like, Mount Snowden, Arufta, that national park area.

And this guy was telling me about ghosts that goes down this old road on his estate that travels by horseback down the river. And he gave me an account in great detail about this ghost coming through pretty regularly.

It's just so interesting because there are quite a few ghost stories kind of like that going down these old roads. There used to be inns and places where people would stop on long journeys to rest. And it's like, exactly one of those paths.

So it was super interesting how that one experience of a ghost fits into, like, a larger sort of history of ghost stories.

Did he attach a meaning to it?

Not really, no. He was just sort of like, oh, yeah, you know, now and then we see it. It's kind of like a joke around the family.

Okay. Do you ever talk to children about the ghost stories? Do they respond Differently?

I have sometimes. Yeah. Like, it's. Like it's come up sometimes. I used to work at a swim school, and we had a lot of young kids coming in for swim classes.

And, like, I would be chatting with the parents, and it would come up sometimes. I'm trying to think. This one kid did tell me once that she thought one of our pool toys was haunted.

Okay. For any reason in particular?

No.

What pool toy was it?

I wish. I want to say it was like a little plastic pig. We would have, like, little floaty animals that the kids could, like, pick up and play with.

I want to say it was the pig, which I am inclined to believe. Her, sure.

You also work with folklore. How do these two things intersect?

I do. Ghost stories fit into sort of the folk narrative tradition as well as the folk belief tradition.

I also work with ecological folklore stories about creatures or monsters that arise as stories to explain history or teach people to avoid certain dangerous things, like not getting swept out to sea during storms, not getting falling through dangerous parts on ice, things like that.

And so it's just super interesting to me how people come up with these forms of stories that really stick in the imagination and also serve sort of a larger logical function of, like, not putting oneself in danger.

So the folklores, if I'm hearing you right, serve more of a function than perhaps the ghost stories, which could just be like, the guy that sees the ghost on the road, you know, he's just there. But a folklore is more purposeful.

It seems that way with a lot of the stuff I've read. Some ghost stories, you know, do serve sort of a more clear function, really. It can be debated a lot of ancient ghost stories.

There's this fabulous medievalist, Eleanor Danega, talks a little bit about ghosts in public health, how, you know, these ancient Greek ghosts coming and haunting places that lead to, like, the removal of improperly buried bodies was more of a public health scare, that, you know, bodies decomposing too close to someone's home posed a real health risk to community. And, you know, similarly with these.

Some of these medieval ghosts who pop up in bath houses and the like, that there's sort of this connection between, like, real feelings around health, rather it's physical or moral or social health and, like, what ghosts look like and what ghosts do.

But I do think it's harder to pin down meanings and functions to ghost stories because so many of them are just, well, I was going about my business and a ghost showed up, and then it went away or I went away. And that's the end of the story. They're very anti climatic.

Not much structure there. Don't take that to workshop, it'll get torn apart. When you study the folklore, do you find yourself talking to people about their folklore?

I do. I love talking to people about their folklore.

It's one of my favorite things is just listening to stories other people have encountered or grew up with. Whether or not, you know, the what people like practice and believe is very important to some scholars. For me, I'm.

I go in it with just like a sort of amount of curiosity. Even if people don't really believe in ghosts, but they, you know, have ghost stories, I still love to hear those.

Do you get to travel with the folklore work?

Yeah, sometimes. A lot of it is just sort of my, my own endeavors choosing to go places.

I'm a big hiker, so Wales, I got to hike a lot and talk to people about ghosts. I went to, I'm going to Iceland for the International Society for Folk Narratives conference coming up this June.

And I'm excited to hopefully talk to some about ghost stories there.

Will you be presenting there?

I will be, yes. I'll be presenting on a project I'm working on about ghost stories involving the Chicago River.

Oh, do tell a little bit about that.

Yeah, it's looking at what I'm calling the ecological ghost form, which is what happens if we sort of rewrite or re narrate these historical ecological events, giving them sort of the same narrative weights as a ghost story. But instead of, you know, a ghost showing up, it's the Chicago flood or it's river pollution and river dredging as well.

So it's pairing some of those with like actual ghost stories collected from the area. And some already, you know, well documented and known like Seaweed Charlie, who's a local ghost to my neighborhood, Rogers park.

Or you know, there's many, many ghosts reported in Linkin park or there's one ghost reported walking around Goose is neighborhood, things like that.

So back up and tell us about Seaweed Charlie.

Oh yes, Seaweed Charlie. You can find Seaweed Charlie in quite a few old haunted Chicago handbooks. Especially like Prior up to the 90s.

I believe he's in a well known one written by Ursula Bielski, who's a folklorist among other things.

But Seaweed Charlie, the story goes that for a long time if you were to drive up the curve of Sheridan Road, which goes around Cavalry Cemetery, between that cemetery and the lake in the middle of the night, and that road is what turns Chicago into Evanston and vice versa.

You might see a man emerge from the water covered in algae, seaweed, stuff, and he would trudge through the waves, come up onto the rocks, and walk through the gates of Cavalry Cemetery and disappear.

And there were many reported sightings up until a time when, again, the legend goes, someone once left the gates of Calvary Cemetery open on accident. And then when Cwee Charlie walked through those gates again, he hasn't been seen, although people have claimed to see him after this incident.

That's sort of the main end to his story is after the gates were open, he was able to stay put. I guess he's traced back to a pilot who went down a few miles off of Northwestern Campus training for World War II.

Is there any speculation about what he wants or what he's seeking?

Not that I know of, no. He just showed up and covered in seaweed and trudged through the lake, up the rocks.

Okay. Are there any ghosts in Chicago that are seeking something that anyone knows about?

There's one of the most famous Chicago ghosts, Resurrection Mary is another one who always seems to be trying to go home. Although she also just sort of ends up usually back at the gates of Resurrection Cemetery.

But she was reported, you know, showing up in dance halls asking, you know, people for a dance, asking people for chaperone, for ride home, and would give them directions and then jump out or disappear on Archer Avenue. But she seems to be a ghost who wants to still participate in the sort of social world.

And she's greatly compared to this much older medieval legend of the devil in the dance hall, where the devil shows up in public, dances and woos young women and then disappears in a puff of smoke, leaving hoof prints on the ground. But our version is as gender swapped and marries the ghost.

Okay. She doesn't leave hoofprints, though?

No, not in any version I've heard.

Okay. That would be distressing. What do your family and friends think about your work?

I think they're quite entertained. I always have a story when we go out to dinner. I'm friends with many other creative people, a lot of artists.

And so I think there's a lot of understanding just into what goes into everything. My. My. My mother's an artist, and she was a. She was a prosecutor and now she's a librarian. But she's always been very creative. And so it's.

It's always fun talking about my work with her. I always say she's. She's my last reader for any new project because no matter what piece of work I put in front of her.

If it's a first draft or an eighth draft, she will always give me three new ideas that are so different from what I've been doing.

How do you know?

I always, though.

How do you know if there are ideas you want to kind of, like, sit with and incorporate or just set aside? Because I'm guessing there are probably some ideas that you do set aside.

That's the test. If she can tempt me on any of them, I know the story's not done.

Oh, are there any that she has? Suggestions she has given you that recently that you've acted on?

Yeah, there's actually one in my book. I wrote a story called Apophenia, and I showed it to her, and she said, oh, this is so much like Little Red Riding Hood.

You should put the girl in, you know, a red scarf or something. And I said, huh, okay. Yeah.

Okay. Tell us a little bit more about the book.

It's a collection of nine short stories, all sort of themed around folklore and disappearance.

These sort of aspects of ritual and routine, things that people turn to for comfort in everyday life, kind of taking on lives and desires of their own, twisting these sorts of sites of comfort against characters.

Are they set in different places? It sounds like they're thematically connected, but are they set in different places?

They are. They are set in different places. I think a lot of my story settings could be, like, pinned down as just sort of vaguely Midwestern.

I went through a phase where I was right. I loved writing, like, neighborhood stories, where I would kind of make up a neighborhood and do a series of vignettes.

I have a few pieces like that, and I loved doing that. I've had a few sets sort of in the American Southwest or the West Coast, East Coast. But I do write a lot of Midwestern fiction.

The stories that were set in the other places. I'm wondering, have you ever written a story set in a place that you haven't been to?

I have. I wrote one story that's. Oh, I guess I've been there now. I wasn't there when I wrote it.

I wrote a story set in New Mexico, and I had never been there.

When you finally went there, was it the way that you thought?

Not in the place that I was. I went to Albuquerque for a conference, and so I was sort of in the city, but I did take a tour out a bit, and I was like, okay, okay, we're good.

I wasn't so far off.

I can relate to that feeling.

Another funny thing that can happen is if you travel with someone and you're in a city where you did set a story or a book, you can be like, oh, that building over there, that's where my character did this and that. And that's where they did this and that.

Oh, yeah. I love having landmarks. I think it's fun, too, for people who are from the area who.

One of the greatest compliments I ever got on anything I've ever written was some guy from Northern California being like, wow. Reading your story, like, really reminded me of being back home. Just the way you described the nature. And I, like.

I think that's the greatest accomplishment.

That is pretty great. Especially, you know, if he's a native and he's like, yes, this is my place. Talk a little bit about your creative process.

How do you know when it's time to start something?

Oh, that's a great question. It comes in different ways.

Sometimes, you know, I just have a sort of image, and I run with that and try and think, what's the story to this image I'm seeing? Other times, you know, it's just a line of dialogue that comes into mind or something.

Someone says, I've had a few pieces where I've, like, seen something strange on social media, and I've kind of written a story. I'm also. I'm dyslexic, and so I misread things sometimes. And I've actually written quite a few stories.

Just started by my own misreading of something and deciding that I want to follow my version.

Does the original, like, literal version make it into the story at all or. Not necessarily.

Not. Not always. I'm trying to think of an example.

I wrote one story about mountain goats because I was, like, scrolling on Facebook and I totally misread an ad thinking that it was. I don't know what I thought it was for. It was for a product that was using a mountain goat as a mascot.

And I thought it was some, like, nature documentary, I think, describing the mountain goat. Okay, it was very confusing, but it turned into a story kind of about.

Mountain goats with the animals. Have you ever attached ghosts to animals and had a link there?

Oh, kind of, yeah. I have one story. It's called Buried in the Steep. Also in my book that has quite a lot of chickens and debatably, a ghost.

He.

Different people have different thoughts on what he is. Some people have told me zombie. Some people have told me, like, old school revenant. Some people have told me ghost.

Mm.

Because I was just wondering because you talked a lot about the environments and the ghosts in places, and when we started talking about animals, I just was starting to think, well, you could have, you know, ghosts that are attached to a particular animal. Why not? I mean, if they're attached to a house, why couldn't they also be, like, attached to an animal?

That is very tr. I'm sort of working on a project right now.

It's gonna be a novel, but I do have one character that is a ghost who shows up as a big, giant paddlefish.

Oh, nice. Okay. Are you in the point of view of the ghost paddlefish?

Sometimes, yes. I've been struggling with the voice of the fish.

I can see that.

As one might do.

Is this a short story or a novella?

It started as a short story, and now it's some kind of spun its way out into a novel. As can happen.

Yes. Yeah. How do you think, you know, if a short is good or if it needs to be longer?

I tell my.

This is how I describe it to my students in a way that sometimes makes them laugh, is I say that I personally just have, like, short ideas sometimes, and then sometimes I have long ideas.

They're all like, can you make that more practical?

They have their pens out. Like, not sure if they should take a note on that.

Is she serious? Are we really writing this part down?

But it's. You know, I think the more we do a lot of writing exercises, especially the first half the class. It's the way my university does.

The first fiction workshop is we learn about the fundamentals, and we read a lot. And then the back half is workshops. And so we're reading a lot of short fiction, which is actually how I found Washington Square.

Because I'm constantly looking for places that do short stories that I can show my students to be like, look, it's out there in the world. But the more they sort of see, like, okay, yeah. A short story has a different engine than a novel. There's different tensions sustaining it.

It's written differently. And they start to kind of put together, like, oh, yeah, you know, short ideas, long ideas.

I think you can get away with more experimental writing and tricky business on the page with a short piece than you can with a novel. Because a lot of times, to me, it's the difference between a meal and an appetizer.

An appetizer just comes by, and you'll Grab one off a plate and be like, okay, that was good. But if you're having a whole meal and it's all kind of confusing and experimental, sometimes you may not want to go in there and have that.

Oh, yeah. Or you've had a big night out.

Yeah. Right. I just need a small, little something. I don't need that whole thing.

It's like the weird dinners.

Yeah. Also, I'm not sure these explanations would be helpful to other people.

It's like the workshop thing. Like, it'll reach some people.

I think a lot of times it just ends up being intuition, and it's your own personal intuition. What. What works for one person. A short story for one person might be a novel for someone else. You know, it's part of the beauty of creativity.

It's your thing.

Definitely, definitely. I always try to encourage my students to write something that they can finish.

In our class periods, I encourage some short fiction just to start so they can see what it takes to come up with a beginning, middle, ending. That's all on the page that they can see.

But I do have a lot of students who are aspiring novelists and novelists with full manuscripts under their belts. And it's just amazing.

There's something really beautiful about having a completed piece when you're a student. Not just a bunch of ideas, but an actual completed piece. You might still be working on it, but it's there. It's whole.

I think that's really a great thing for a student writer because having too many little started pieces floating around can be overwhelming.

Definitely. That was some of the.

Save that for later. Yeah. Yes. Your whole creative life, you will have little unfinished pieces. Like little ghosts. Right. Haunting you.

Exactly. Like little ghosts.

You're just trying to pay attention to the one that makes the most noise. And the quieter ones just floating off in the distance.

That's so true. That's so funny. The document where I keep all my little ghosts, I actually do call them a graveyard giant Google Doc. That's full of all of it.

Yeah. Well, you know, I think that's an ongoing thing. When you're a creative person, that will be your whole life.

You will never have everything done the way that you want it to, because it just doesn't happen, so.

Oh, definitely. And you'll be surprised what, you know, stories, ideas just kind of emerge out of thin air. That was how a taxi was.

It just sort of came to me all at once.

Mm. Yep. Sometimes that's a great thing. And other times that you only get half the idea and then the other idea's, you know, floating.

You got, like, part of it floating here and the other part's just, like, over there. It's like, come on over and it doesn't happen. It will happen when it's time. Yeah. Well, it's been really great talking to you.

If people want to find you online or check out the book that you mentioned, where can they find you?

Yeah, I am on Instagram. I also have a website just with some stories that are online and other things in print. And some of my ghost work is up there.

And my book can be found through Quincy Press and some local bookstores. If you're around the Chicago area. I think I'm still in stock some other places.

Okay, well, we'll be sure to put all those links in the show notes so people can check you out there.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for having me. This is awesome.

Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been the Washington Square On-Air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc.edu/wsl. Writing is messy, but do it anyway.