Create: A Guest Post by Heba Al-Wasity

Leena thought that seeing the dead was the worst of her problems, but with her freedom is at stake, she’s forced into hiding in this Gothic, slow-burn tale. Read on for an exclusive essay from Heba Al-Wasity on writing Weavingshaw.

The desire to finally begin writing Weavingshaw came to me when I going through a time of turmoil.

I was 23 and newly graduated as a doctor at the frontlines of Covid, in a ceaseless waltz between patient-beds and deathbeds. This was also when I was introduced to the world of insomniacs. I would return from a 12-hour shift, exhausted and unable to sleep, my body and mind craving a recovery that alluded me entirely.

The phantom sounds of crash calls, of rhesus bleeps, of whispered groans created an alchemy in my mind that refused to leave me. What do insomniacs do best? We distract ourselves from our problems.

I began to write.  

It never even occurred to me that I would one day see this book being sold in bookstores—it was simply a way to pass the time when I should’ve been sleeping. Equally because I was not the kind of person to publish novels—I came to Canada, and then the UK, when I was very young, I’m dyslexic, and I’ve never taken university-level English classes. Although I’ve always been a voracious reader, in my heart I was science minded.

But I can tell you what I have learned from the science of medicine: that there is a ceaseless cacophony of poetry, human stories and a thousand ways to describe grief and longing.

The earliest drafts of Weavingshaw were the most harrowing to write, nearly salvaged from destruction by my eldest sister, Mays—brilliant, detailed, and still my first reader. She was also the one who planted the original seed years earlier, on a snowy afternoon in Canada when I was still in high school. Inspired by Byron and Shelley, she gave my middle sister and I a prompt: write about a building that feels alive.

My middle sister, Roua, wrote about a school that consumed itself with monsters.
I wrote about Weavingshaw.

I combined all my love and affection for the Gothic literature of the past—Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein—while also paying tribute to my own heritage.

Heritage, and the search for a homeland, plays a significant role in Weavingshaw. The main character, Leena, is caught between two worlds in more ways than one. She is a refugee, who is unable to find belonging in either her native land or this new country she’s grown-up in. She also can see ghosts, and is forced to navigate between the dead and the living. This mirrors my own struggles with diaspora, and my longing to find a place to settle.

In the end, Weavingshaw is more than the just words on pages, it is, for me, proof that even in the direst of circumstances, humans never lose the ability to create.