Ghost Cities is titled partly for the often-eerie experiences of living through a pandemic. As the streets of Western Sydney shut down in wave after wave, a small band of local writers came together and began to navigate the times. Across 2021 as our screens delivered new variants of fear directly into our homes, the twelve writers who joined The Writing Zone—a mentoring program run by the Writing and Society Research Centre and the Sydney Review of Books—met via video calls, group chats, email and phone. In a period of intense stress and intermittent isolation, they became each other’s first readers, editors and friends. Ghost Cities is a testimony to the solidarity and literary flair of its writers. These stellar essayists, poets, dramatists and fiction writers share a sharpened interest in the uncanny, in grief and loss, and in energies that come directly from the earth, binding us to place. Ghost Cities was launched in September 2022 and brings together the portfolio works of the 2021 TWZ cohort.