“Unlocking Secrets: How Heather Bartel’s ‘Exit the Body’ Transforms Lost Souls into Unforgettable Journeys”
Another essay (“Letters to a Living Ghost”) takes the form of a letter to a ghost sister. Yet another (“Self-Practice: Coven”) is a play with three women, one of them the ghost of Sylvia Plath. “Self Practice” is comprised solely of a long paragraph listing words, all beginning with the word “self” (i.e. self-abasement, self-absorption, self-denial).
Throughout these nine essays, one senses a fascination with the nature and physical, psychic, emotional boundaries of being, of earthly beingness, and by natural extension, of death, and where the liminal line between the two is drawn or to be found and if in fact, this is something concrete, factual and fixed or more fluid and ephemeral, ghost-like, shapeshifting and haunting in its possibilities and parameters.
