The pieces in this series began by repeatedly scribbling in my off hand a short excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s poetry, then covering up most of the language with oil stick. Not really sure then, or now, why I took this approach. But after reading reading Mildred Faintly’s It Came From Amherst, where Dickinson is reconsidered as a sly, dark horror writer—”an amusing ghoul”—it now seems appropriate to place these works within the Absent Presence family. In ”One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—” Dickinson makes the case for the mind being more haunted than any haunted house.