What can I live without? As a resident of the Texas Gulf Coast area, I have contemplated that question more and more in recent years. Of course, part of my musing is inspired by my growing older, adjusting to an empty nest, facing—and appreciating—the fragile and transitory nature of all life. Then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina, followed shortly by Hurricane Rita, set the modern standard for a coastal disaster in the United States. Strangers to me along with friends of mine lost their worldly goods. Even worse, some lost loved ones, some lost heart. Many have coped and are still coping with a mutable landscape, amid the ruined mementos of their personal histories. Preparing my home for Hurricane Ike’s recent sweep across Houston, I tried also to prepare for the possibility of losses. And that preparation brought the flood of questions: What can I do without for a few days? For a week or two? What can I give up? Live without from now on? What is worth saving?
Meteorologists and newscasters, county and city officials spread the word of Ike’s path and strength, urging and engineering evacuations. As a result, few lives were lost compared to the number lost during Katrina, though land and property of Galveston Island, Kemah, and other coastal communities have been devastated. Ike followed a course eerily similar to that of the Great Storm of 1900 (back in the days before hurricanes had given-names and categories of ferocity). During the 1900 storm, the Gulf of Mexico met Galveston Bay over Galveston Island, inundating the island city, which, at that time, was a major port and the most populous, cosmopolitan city in Texas. Over 6,000 lives were lost. Then, in the years following the Great Storm, Galveston completed a grade raising, rebuilt, and gradually re-invented itself as a small island town, welcoming beachcombers, vacationers, and history-lovers. I am one of those—a history-lover, who has enjoyed touring Galveston’s 19th century homes that withstood the Great Storm, celebrating the holidays at the island’s Dickens on the Strand festival, and watching great performances at the 1894 Opera House. The resilient spirit of 1900 is worth reviving, worth never letting go.
On the night that Ike howled through my neighborhood, bringing twisters torrents of rain, and falling trees, I shuddered—but I also took notes. The writer in me is a constant companion, even, or especially, in dire times. How can I use the experiences of my lived-life in my writing-life? Within the structure of a novel or play, how can I make the overwhelming particular and make the particular universal? In the days following the storm, I have paid attention to my own responses, knowing they are not unique but shared with neighbors and strangers and those long-ago residents of Galveston, whose lives I have researched for writing projects.
Like so many others, I have been sleepless with worry, anxious for news, weary with making adjustments. Compared to many others, my problems have been minor—stretching a dwindling food supply kept in an ice chest, reading and writing by a flickering flashlight, hoping the roots of the trees leaning into the roof hold on a little longer. And I have found renewed pleasure in the ordinary—calls from friends saying they are okay, fine weather in the week after the hurricane, a cooked meal and fresh hot coffee. While storms and upheavals shift whole landscapes, they also alter our perceptions, intensifying our life-long process of sifting through excess and confusion to find the essential. We make choices between luxuries and necessities, recognize the difference between inconvenience and danger, and discover what we can live without and what makes life worth living.
If given only a moment to save something from disaster, I would choose my imagination over my manuscripts, and I would choose my loved ones over my life. Oaks and pines that once towered above my house are cut down, tangled branches and sectioned trunks are heaped in the yard. In a changed landscape, I start the day with what matters—feeding my pets and the backyard wildlife, sharing smiles with my neighbors, rejoining them in the community that sustains us. Across the lawn and through the windows, the sunlight, no longer filtered through as many leaves, shines more brightly now.
Rosemary Poole-Carter
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
Writing Our Fears
For readers, fiction offers ways to stare down fear from the safety of an armchair. Fear loneliness, and find love between the covers of a romance. Fear crime, and find criminals caught and justice served in a mystery. Fear conspiracies and disasters, and find them exposed and conquered in a thriller. A reader’s fictional roller coaster ride—inching up the precipice of taut suspense, plummeting over the edge of catastrophe, spinning in loops of danger and desire—is as timeless as it is satisfying. But what of the writers who construct the roller coasters? To engage readers’ emotions, to delight, mystify, and thrill an audience, writers must test the rides they design and very possibly face their own fears.
For novelists, writing our fears offers us ways to explore, understand, and articulate the disturbing and horrific, to bring pattern to chaos and language to the unspeakable. Sometimes we write from the dark personal center of ourselves, sometimes from our perception of sweeping events, finding in both approaches the inextricable link between the specific and the universal.
One of my fears—that of madness robbing us of who we are—and my outrage at those who abuse their positions of authority combined in Women of Magdalene, a novel exploring misogyny and racism in a post-Civil War women’s asylum. Through my publisher, Kunati Inc., I have met other writers who keep faith with Kunati’s commitment to “provocative, bold, controversial” books and face an array of fearful topics: war, corruption, paranoia, disease, abuse, kidnapping, suicide, and murder. One of those writers, Karen Harrington, focuses her debut novel Janeology on the aftermath of a mother’s murdering of her own child. Murder is murder, perhaps—yet cases of mothers killing their own children have an overwhelming power to shock. The person, whom we believe should be most trusted with and devoted to a child, destroys the child, a crime that stirs the most primal of fears.
At Houston’s Murder by the Book, an independent bookstore, I moderated a panel entitled “From Mothering to Madness” to explore that primal fear. Joining me were Karen Harrington and Dr. Debra Osterman, a staff psychiatrist at the Harris County Jail. Dr. Osterman treated Andrea Yates shortly after Yates was arrested for the June 2001 drowning deaths of her five children. And the Yates case was certainly an influence on Karen’s work.
I asked Karen what drew her, a mother of young children, herself, to write a fictional account of such disturbing events. Her reply echoed that of many writers who write through their fears: by creating a fictional situation and exploring the motives and actions of her characters, Karen strove for and found a clearer understanding of human nature’s dark side. She asked herself how this terrible thing could have happened. How might it have been prevented? How does the relationship between nature and nurture affect us, particularly in regard to aberrant behavior?
When a novelist writes about difficult subject matter, how he or she approaches the story has a powerful influence on the reader's perception and willingness to take the fictional journey. In Janeology, Karen Harrington reveals the aftermath of Jane's actions from her husband Tom's point of view, giving readers someone to care about and follow as he tries to make sense of tragedy. In Women of Magdalene, I look at the mistreatment of patients through the eyes of an idealistic physician, who challenges the asylum director. And while Karen and I wander the labyrinth of fear and danger in our imaginations, Dr. Debra Osterman addresses mad and criminal behavior daily in her line of work. At the end of our panel discussion, after some lively give-and-take with the audience, Dr. Osterman explained how she copes with the grim aspects of her profession. She renews herself through positive connections with family and friends, good advice for writers, too—and she reads novels, especially mystery and suspense.
For both readers and writers, imagination and realty form not a dichotomy but a symbiosis. Experience creates narrative, and a narrative enlivened with characters, dialogue, and plot becomes a novel, which becomes a roller coaster ride that sends us plunging, spinning, and soaring. Then, we return to our armchairs, a little shaken and a little more emboldened to read and write our fears again.
For novelists, writing our fears offers us ways to explore, understand, and articulate the disturbing and horrific, to bring pattern to chaos and language to the unspeakable. Sometimes we write from the dark personal center of ourselves, sometimes from our perception of sweeping events, finding in both approaches the inextricable link between the specific and the universal.
One of my fears—that of madness robbing us of who we are—and my outrage at those who abuse their positions of authority combined in Women of Magdalene, a novel exploring misogyny and racism in a post-Civil War women’s asylum. Through my publisher, Kunati Inc., I have met other writers who keep faith with Kunati’s commitment to “provocative, bold, controversial” books and face an array of fearful topics: war, corruption, paranoia, disease, abuse, kidnapping, suicide, and murder. One of those writers, Karen Harrington, focuses her debut novel Janeology on the aftermath of a mother’s murdering of her own child. Murder is murder, perhaps—yet cases of mothers killing their own children have an overwhelming power to shock. The person, whom we believe should be most trusted with and devoted to a child, destroys the child, a crime that stirs the most primal of fears.
At Houston’s Murder by the Book, an independent bookstore, I moderated a panel entitled “From Mothering to Madness” to explore that primal fear. Joining me were Karen Harrington and Dr. Debra Osterman, a staff psychiatrist at the Harris County Jail. Dr. Osterman treated Andrea Yates shortly after Yates was arrested for the June 2001 drowning deaths of her five children. And the Yates case was certainly an influence on Karen’s work.
I asked Karen what drew her, a mother of young children, herself, to write a fictional account of such disturbing events. Her reply echoed that of many writers who write through their fears: by creating a fictional situation and exploring the motives and actions of her characters, Karen strove for and found a clearer understanding of human nature’s dark side. She asked herself how this terrible thing could have happened. How might it have been prevented? How does the relationship between nature and nurture affect us, particularly in regard to aberrant behavior?
When a novelist writes about difficult subject matter, how he or she approaches the story has a powerful influence on the reader's perception and willingness to take the fictional journey. In Janeology, Karen Harrington reveals the aftermath of Jane's actions from her husband Tom's point of view, giving readers someone to care about and follow as he tries to make sense of tragedy. In Women of Magdalene, I look at the mistreatment of patients through the eyes of an idealistic physician, who challenges the asylum director. And while Karen and I wander the labyrinth of fear and danger in our imaginations, Dr. Debra Osterman addresses mad and criminal behavior daily in her line of work. At the end of our panel discussion, after some lively give-and-take with the audience, Dr. Osterman explained how she copes with the grim aspects of her profession. She renews herself through positive connections with family and friends, good advice for writers, too—and she reads novels, especially mystery and suspense.
For both readers and writers, imagination and realty form not a dichotomy but a symbiosis. Experience creates narrative, and a narrative enlivened with characters, dialogue, and plot becomes a novel, which becomes a roller coaster ride that sends us plunging, spinning, and soaring. Then, we return to our armchairs, a little shaken and a little more emboldened to read and write our fears again.
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