I love the term “Ghostwriter”. I want to be a ghost. Maybe I am a ghost! I’m definitely a writer. I didn’t ghostwrite Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s books and memoir, but I typed them. And as I typed, we talked, and as we talked I picked up the cadence of his words. He often doesn’t finish sentences, or he does but many paragraphs later. It was one of the biggest joys of my life to work on arranging those words and putting them onto paper. The first was What Makes You Not a Buddhist, then the Guru Drinks Bourbon, which was much more challenging. With WMYNAB, Rinpoche was on retreat for a whole year, and I stayed on site, bringing tea up to his hut every morning for work sessions. I spent the middle part of the day editing, and would bring another tea up in the afternoon to go over the edits. There was a flow. For Guru Drinks Bourbon, there were large gaps in time, sometimes I’d get 100 WeChat messages that I would transcribe. Or I’d be sent a ticket to Brazil or Bhutan and we’d pick up the thread. Years went by. So yes, that one was harder. My favorite, I think, was Mugwort Born, his web-based autobiographical series. I only worked on chapters 1-17. The very able Janine Shultz took over when my schedule got too crazy (starting a school and all that).
I’d like to explore writing people’s stories more. Listening, interviewing, sequencing, shaping the story. I feel like that would be good for my nervous system.
