A Spiritual Connection

Northern California poet Marc Zegans ’83 was preparing for the Manship Artists Residency, which would take him across the country to Starfield, a 15-acre estate in Gloucester, Mass. “I expected to spend a month there writing and doing some poetry readings. It seemed like the perfect opportunity,” says Zegans, who has published seven collections of poems.

Then COVID-19 turned things upside down.

The residency closed its doors to out-of-state visitors, allowing only brief, solo visits from local artists. Rather than treat the residency as a total loss, however, Zegans came up with a novel idea: a virtual residency and collaboration between himself and an on-site photographer. The result is the just-published fine art volume Ghost Book.

The premise is exactly what Zegans pitched back in 2020: “What if we imagined there was a poet on the property, and that a photographer with access to the grounds discovered and documented that presence?”

Once he received the greenlight for his so-called “Ghost Residency” project, Zegans pored through artist portfolios. When he saw the work of Gloucester photographer Tsar Fedorsky, he thought it was fantastic, and decided to give her a call.

“I explained the project and there was a gasp of delight,” he says. “She lives just down the street from [Starfield], had never been, and always wanted to. We agreed we’d go forward.”

Fedorsky shot over the summer of 2020 when no one else was on site. A few of her photos showed staged scenes—rumpled bedsheets, a glass of water, an open book—that gave the sense someone was there. But those interventions by Fedorsky were few and far between, and most photos in the book’s three sections—“Stone,” “Ghost,” and “Life”—focus on the house and grounds, and the interplay between dark and light.

Fedorsky and Zeagans winnowed hundreds of photos down to the curated collection found in the book, and shared them with a colleague, Samantha C. Harvey, professor of English at Boise State University. In an odd twist, Harvey called Zegans to tell him she’d found an apparition in one of the images: a face wearing a muslin mask worn during the 1918 flu pandemic.

“Samantha found the first ghost,” says Zegans, “and then we began finding more. From then on, the book took on a very different dimension.” Harvey wrote the book’s foreword.

“We started the project with a premise of noticing things that were there, and what changed was this whole epiphenomenal quality,” Zegans says. “If you look carefully, one starts to see things that one wouldn’t anticipate in a photograph.”

There are just 100 copies of Ghost Book, including a standard edition (Haverford Libraries is home to one) and a muslin edition, which are targeted at museums and library special collections. 

“It’s a book that’s very rare in its attention to detail,” says Zegans. Both editions feature museum-quality prints for both the front and rear cover images, and each copy is hand-bound and hand-stitched. The end papers are tangerine-colored and embossed with a handspun pattern so the reader feels the texture of the page, and the rest of the book is printed on heavy archival paper. A handmade muslin bag hemmed with red vintage thread holds the muslin edition, which is housed in a stamped, clamshell box.

For Zegans, the residency that wasn’t became a cross-country collaboration that redefined what a residency can be. “It turned into a really intense, intimate, and evolving collaboration which ultimately involved dozens of people, through funding, writing, and editing. It has created a community, including a variety of fellow Fords, and life around it.”

— Anne Stein