LAHORE: American author and Man Booker Prize finalist Karen Joy Fowler says she does not believe in the supernatural yet she had had supernatural encounters and it was a difficult place for her to be. She had seen a ghost on a sidewalk once who, in her words, was doing nothing extraordinary and disappeared suddenly.

`I came home completely shaken and my husband`s response was hilarious. He was opening the door and stepping behind it to ask if he had completely disappeared now.

Fowler said despite her experience, she would continue not to believe in ghosts.

She was speaking in a session on `Parallel Universes: Perspectives on writing sci-fi and fantasy fiction` on the final day of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF). The session was moderated by Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, a member of the Salam Award team. Robert V.S. Redick was the other panelist.

Redick said he struggled with the question of the supernatural in his private musings until his wife-to-be who was raised a Hindu in Bombay. She told him she believed in thesupernatural and she did not believe in it simultaneously. He said this led him to find an answer as he was religious himself who did not believe in the supernatural but one exception as he had an affection-driven supernatural relationship with ghosts and story-telling and there was a part of him that always believed that other real people were reaching to him through books.

Karen said she thought of literature as a great conversation and that conversation was clearer in science fiction and fantasy than in more literary genres thatthereis a sense ofa seminal text that we all haveread and critique that we see in each other`s works and respond to it.

She said she began writing with short stories and when she began marketing her stories the science fiction magazines would take them but literary would not and she was suddenly a sci-fi writer without it meant in terms of her career or having interest in it. She referred to a constant argument within herself whether she belonged to the genre or did not as a lot of her stories were weird and sci-fi community and market had tolerance for the weird that she did not find in the literary world and it was a generous welcom-ing place for her.

Redick said that he was indoctrinated into reading and writing in the world that called itself literary and he did reject that label but it had a lot of problems as the MFA programmes had an academic capture of writing technique in the US. He said when he moved to the genre of sci-fi, he was overwhelmed with the openness and mutual sense of support and solidarity.

ART OF PLAY: In a session, the Art of the Play, Meher Jaffri, the director of recently held play the White Plague, said she always liked the form of theatre and she wanted to break the fourth wall and involve the audience in the action. She said she selected the theme of the play as she wanted to be relevant to the current times as much as possible.

To a question about choice of musical theatre, Fatima Amjad, the author of play Kaur, said she made the choice as she wanted to connect to the people and was inspired by Arfa Sayeda Zehra who once commented that she found the singing girl very beautiful. She said music and dance had always been an integral part of life in South Asia and they would remain so.

She said music was close to her heart and she felt connectedwith life through it. `When I sit in the audience, I understand music and dance most and through my art, I wanted the people to be exposed to good music and good dance.` She said she did not know making any other kind of theatre.

Lucy Fricke said a novel adapted into a movie had so much more and so much less and there is production design, music editing and constumes which were not her choice but these things could change the story in a way that was never meant before. She said it was an interesting experience for her to visit the set of the movie that was based on her novel with 6m USD budget and there was a realization that all that was happening because she had spent two years on writing the story.

Austrian writer Clemens Berger said there was a director in a play and sometimes he changed the narrative so much that you won`t recognise your own work. He referred to his experience when he went to see the production of his play and was shocked to see that all the nuances of his writing were gone. He said he was much more comfortable with writing prose and most of his plays had been commissioned that he wrote for money.