As an adult, I have seen her struggle to find a “passion” and when I heard she may have found one, I sat down to talk to her about it.

Chelsea: What do you call what you do? Do you prefer “ghost hunting,” or what?

Brianne: We are “Paranormal Investigators.” So, what we do is we go into a place [that] people think might be haunted, and we try to rule out everything before we say that it’s haunted.

Chelsea: And this is a group you started?

Brianne: Right, I was one of the founding members.

Chelsea: Was I the first ghost you ever saw?

Brianne: YES. [laughing]

Chelsea: [more laughing] Why don’t you tell me about that?

Brianne: So, living at the end of the hallway, with my door open, being that I was only seven years old [interviewer's note: actually, she would have been ten], and seeing this shadowy figure in black walk by. And nobody believed me.

Chelsea: Sorry.

Brianne: And then, we’re sitting at dinner at Poncho’s and talking about ghost stories, and I come out with this. You start laughing hysterically, saying “That was totally me in my leather jacket, sneaking out every night!” Mom was like “You’re grounded,” at 21.

Chelsea: Which I totally was not.

Brianne: Right.

Chelsea: The first ghost you ever saw turned out to have a rational explanation. How do you think that has shaped you as a paranormal investigator?

Brianne: We want to believe that everything we hear is real and we want to assume there are ghosts, but we have to figure out scientifically if it’s true or not. I mean if there is no other rational explanation, then it’s possibly a ghost.

Chelsea: What makes up a good experience investigating?

Brianne: It’s always really interesting just to learn about the buildings and mine shafts and the places we’ve seen. But a really good investigation definitely, is evidence. Catching that evidence is very difficult, and it doesn’t happen every time. So, seeing something on video that you can’t quite explain, or hearing something on the audio that you know wasn’t there when you were there, is always very exciting.

Chelsea: When you told me that this is what you were doing you seemed preemptively defensive.

Brianne: You can’t tell everyone that you’re a ghost hunter because people will laugh at you and they’ll assume that you’re just going around with these crazy devices, I mean I’m not out there to say “hey something is in your window, a shadowy figure, you’re totally haunted!” you know? I want to know for sure, I want proof.

And all this equipment we have, it all has a function, a scientific method for reading energy, and it’s just sad when people are doubters. Even my husband is a huge skeptic. He thinks I’m crazy. [But] I’m doing this! Because it is something I believe and I want to know what’s out there. I know it’s not just us.

Chelsea: Maybe it’s a gothic teenager sneaking out to get high. [Both laughing.]

Brianne: You suck by the way for doing that when I was so young. Everybody fucking laughed at me at the dinner table. I swear to god, “Oh, there’s totally a ghost!” And you! Just start laughing!

Chelsea [unable to stop laughing]: …

Brianne: Like that! That’s when it started, I’m telling you. That’s why I’m defensive. YOU STARTED IT.

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I may be old-fashioned, but I prefer not to keep a day job when the winsome muse of words calls to me, so I will be seeking a patron for the next 6 months to 10 years, depending on how long it takes to birth this literary love child.

YOU:
are a wealthy man, over the age of 29, with many connections in the literary and arts community–ideally publishing. You should be comfortable with late night parties that stretch into morning, which are full of charming artsy types like me who talk engagingly and for hours about themselves and their tropes and who are prone to stubbing their cigarettes out on the carpet. You should be drug and disease free, though I am neither.

Your work should be engrossing and keep you out of our home for long stretches of time as I need space and solitude to write. A long life full of education and travel and the willingness to have it plundered for use in side-plots is essential. If your wealth came late in life, then stories of grit and giving a comeuppance to those who said you’d never make it will be considered. Above all, your life stories should be engaging but not more interesting than mine. If you have a large library full of indigenous artifacts, taxidermy, and globes, let’s talk.

I:
am indescribable. But many have tried with “5’4’’, sandy blond hair and [piercing] hazel eyes.” While it is not often noted, I am as lithe as the branches of a willow, and could have danced, if I had not been given this impetuous gift of wordsmithery.

My writing has been published in a handful of collegiate handouts and on Goodreads. Additionally, several poems have been under consideration by The Parisian Review, Granta, and Crab Orchard Press. I am on the brink of beginning my semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman story told through a series of sonnets; all in my native West Coast dialect. This work will balance issues of womanhood, urban sprawl, ecology, and macrobiotics. You should plan on contributing to many discussions of these themes over red wine, of which I will also need a regular and quality supply.

I have lived a very long and complicated life full of many lovers and hometowns. I am the eternal seeker, and have found and been found by love countless times. A conversation with me or about me is wonderful to hear.

My work is organic, like my diet, and I don’t like to be interrupted by pedestrian tasks like vacuuming, so I have a street-legal housekeeper to recommend if you don’t already have one.

While I will receive room and board and your devotion, you will be the true winner in this arrangement: you will have helped me to make art. Plus, my book will contain a brief and most likely vague thank you to you in the acknowledgements—but to protect the feelings of some of the more sensitive souls from my past, you will be referred to with a pseudonym (for example, “Carolyn Mangrove”).

WE:
will not be a business arrangement. You will become a part of my life. You will comfort me in my art-fueled rages and during the regular crying jags brought on by the rawness of my process. We will celebrate unpaid bylines with lavish dinners at fancy restaurants, accompanied by many of my other writerly friends. When my work is complete, we may part ways tearfully, but content in the knowledge that there is a season and reason for everything. (This paragraph is a small sample of my ability to weave in and out of poetry, prose, and prose-poetry.)

My work is sensual and confessional. You can plan on reliving our lovemaking again and again in the pages of my book. Like all artists, I am a fantastic lover—adventurous and energetic―but note that I will usually not want to be touched, as any rejection from publishers puts me into consuming and spiraling depressions lasting between 6-8 weeks. If you need to keep a lover, or better yet, a wife, we can work out those details pending an addendum that I’m entitled to write a Gothic revenge trilogy based on your actions.

If you are the man for whom my heart has been searching, please email me at goldcoastkundaliniqueen@aol.com. Namaste.

**

Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen AT therumpus dot net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.

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In Kristin Hersh’s memoir Rat Girl, we get a glimpse into the mind of a musician and songwriter who experiences the creative impulse in just this way: as a force that acts upon her and through her. For a fan (full disclosure: that’s me!), it’s as though nanny-cam footage from Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom suddenly turned up—many questions answered, but plenty left inscrutable.

Hersh has been releasing albums since 1985—first with Throwing Muses, then as a solo artist, and most recently with 50Foot Wave. Her first book-length work, Rat Girl, follows Hersh through one year of her life, starting in the spring of 1985. In that year, while turning 19 and spending much of her time “not living anywhere,” the band begins garnering major label attention, she finds out she’s pregnant, and she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Yet, somehow this manages not to be a book about bipolar disorder, teenage pregnancy, or “Throwing Muses: Behind the Music.” Through snippets of bandmate banter, advice from unlikely confidants, flashbacks to her nonconformist childhood, and snatches of  lyrics, we feel the supportive shape of Hersh’s external world, even as her internal landscape shifts and distorts. While I loved the ah-ha moments when little mysteries from her often enigmatic lyrics were solved, this book succeeds in being more than just the key to a map of a corner in the late ’80s indie rock scene.

In the preface to Rat Girl, Hersh describes the book as being “based on” her diary from that time. Yet, she eschews the tell-all format that coarsens many other rock ‘n’ roll memoirs. Readers will not find lurdid tales of sex, drugs, and band melodrama. Instead, we get front row seats on the ride that is her mind as it pitches from inspiration to desperation and beyond. This broadens the appeal of the book past the boundaries of Throwing Muses or Kristin Hersh fans, casting its net around anyone interested in the ways in which a creative process can manifest itself.

Kristin Hersh believes that the holes in the story—some small, while others, frustratingly large—allow light to shine through, illuminating the most important moments. What we are left with then is a story told by a poet of a young woman fighting to keep her mind amid the waking dreams of squalor, wild animals, ghosts, and music—terrible, beautiful, amazing music.

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