Southern Gothic Writings

Familiar Haunts

2011-05-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

Where does a ghost story begin? For my new ghost story play, the answer is in familiar haunts—a coffee shop in Seattle, my bedroom in Houston, and a house with a past in New Orleans. One cloudy afternoon a couple of years ago, over coffee, artistic director Rik Deskin and I began toying with the idea of my writing a ghost story for Eclectic Theater Company. That was the beginning of The Familiar, premiering May 26, 2011, at the Odd Duck Studio in Seattle as an Equity Members Project Code presentation.

Returning to Houston, I began jotting ideas, sketching out characters and scenes, and whispering bits of dialogue to myself late at night in my bedroom—but only after I had whisked my feet off the floor and safely into bed, clear of the reach of whatever might be under the bed. So, I started the play with what scares me—the fear we all share of the unknown monster hiding under the bed or in the closet or lurking in the chambers of memory.

The Familiar grew and took on a life of its own. Yet, the final scene eluded me until a particular night in New Orleans. My friend Sarah and I were attending the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and staying in Marigny Manor, a house built around 1845 and now operated as a B&B by our friends Gil & John. Late on the last night of our stay, it dawned on me how to end the play. In our room, I acted out my concept of the play's final ghostly scene for Sarah. Then, just as she said that’s it—that’s the ending, the lights flickered and went out all over Faubourg Marigny. What timing! Of course, as we were in New Orleans, we and the neighbors all made good use of the dark, gathering on Gil and John's verandah to visit over drinks by moonlight for an hour or so until the house lights came up again.

Equity Member Project Code Presentation
Seattle, WA

http://eclectictheatercompany.org

The Familiar by Rosemary Poole-Carter
Directed by: Rik Deskin
Opening: May 26, 2011
Closing: June 18, 2011

Two sisters haunted by the past, one man haunted by passion, in a house possessed by The Familiar . . .

There’s something unsettling under the bed. Elinor wants it out, Cissie wants it hidden, and Sean would rather concentrate on possibilities on top of the bed. As Elinor pulls old possessions and dusty objects from under the bed, these become props for improvisations among Elinor, Cissie, and Sean as the three of them maneuver around one another—provoking or tantalizing, wary of touch and entanglements—playing ever closer to what haunts them.

Novel in the Cards

2009-10-03T21:16:00.000-07:00

In the process of researching and writing historical fiction, novelists imaginatively inhabit other times and other lives and may also try out other belief systems. My current novel-in-progress challenges me to see post-Civil War New Orleans from various perspectives. While a firm believer in egalitarianism, I am endeavoring to understand the viewpoints and motivations of characters who range from humanitarian and fair-minded to racist and misogynistic and from highly rational to deeply superstitious.

On a couple of research and pleasure trips to New Orleans, I have been very affected by Tarot card readings from a particular reader in Jackson Square. My emotional response happened despite my usual skepticism and has led me closer to an understanding of an important character in my manuscript. She moves through her everyday 19th century life, mindful of her duties and responsibilities, but she is also open to sensory experience and receptive to the extrasensory. Writing about her, I sometimes feel like her spirit medium, revealing her story—and that brings me back to the Tarot.

Recently, I treated myself to a deck of my own and keep it close to my writing desk. I acquired Touchstone Tarot, a boxed set of cards and book describing the cards’ meanings and the sources of the cards’ images. For each card, artist Kat Black has digitally combined elements from Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces—from paintings by Gentileschi, Tintoretto, Bosch, Rubens, and many more—into a lush and evocative collage, whose significance seems to speak for itself.

In the book that accompanies the deck, Kat Black suggests a newcomer to the Tarot try shuffling and drawing a card a day, becoming familiar with its meaning and contemplating how it may pertain to one’s life. Thus, the single card serves as something like a thought-for-the-day on which to ponder. Over the past week or so, the ritual has already brought me fresh insights, personally and professionally. The first card I drew, the Eight of Coins, reminds me that “Talent is nothing without application”—wisdom for all writers. In the Three of Swords, I see my novel’s character, who endures heartbreak and grows stronger for it. The Hermit card signifies for me the reflection and solitude I need to finish a book. A novelist, in common with a card reader or a fortune teller, reads human nature and puts it into context, into a story that leads the audience to say—“Yes, that’s me. That’s what I feel, what I fear, what I have survived, what I long for, what I love.” Now I'm a believer in Kat Black’s suggestion of using the Tarot as a meditation to free creativity and discover my novel in the cards.

Reflections on RAW

2009-09-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

RAW
Doug Cason
Mark Greenwalt
Lisa Qualls

O’Kane Gallery
University of Houston – Downtown
August 27 – September 25, 2009

RAW is both exhibition title and theme, uniting the work of artists Lisa Qualls, Doug Cason, and Mark Greenwalt. As a writer, not an art critic, I offer a personal impression of the exhibit, not a review of technique. Although if provoking thought and stirring emotion in a viewer are some measure of an artist’s technique, Qualls, Cason, and Greenwalt each convince me of their mastery. Entering the O’Kane Gallery, I immediately find my prior knowledge and experiences challenged, my expectations played upon. The three artists meld ancient, historical, and modern concepts into images ranging from the beautiful to the grotesque, each one capturing a moment amid the mutability of body and mind.

The connection between artists and medical students in their studies of the human body has been much on my mind after reading Dr. Christine Montross’s medical school memoir. In Body of Work, Mediations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, Montross combines the story of her education as a physician with her expressive gift as a poet. I am fascinated by her descriptions of the structures and workings of the human body, of the cadaver dismantled in the laboratory, and moved by the author’s unfailing reverence for life amid death. Similarly, I am inspired by RAW’s unflinching depictions of the body, in whole and in part, in beauty and decay.

On a membrane of vellum, Lisa Qualls draws nudes, classical in line, perfectly formed. Each figure is alone in its frame. In some drawings, while the body is exposed, the face is covered by an exotic mask. In others, only the torso is covered by a rough garment that would rub soft skin raw. In fact, my first impression of “Wicker Jacket” is of a lovely woman whose torso and arms have been skinned, until I realize the ruddy color belongs to the woven wicker that encases her upper body. The translucent quality of the figures’ skin, their flawlessness juxtaposed by rough textures or ritualized scarification, their very smoothness heightens my perception of the raw.

In his work, Doug Cason presents a strange curriculum with painted book covers for censored copies of Magnificent Obsession, his florid and romantic images linked to underpinnings of organic decay. Echoing the chaos of revolution and civil war, Cason’s battlefield paintings twist history lessons of the heroic standard of brave warriors, swords drawn, charging into the fight. He depicts the soldier’s eye view—the smoke and confusion of the battlefield, images and events distorted as bodies are distorted and destroyed. I see, as if in funhouse mirrors, reflections of the carnival of violence. With swirling shapes and fluid colors, a scrap of uniform, a glint of metal, Cason simultaneously creates a clash of armies and reveals what is left when the battle ends—bloated corpses, tangled entrails. Raw, indeed.

Mark Greenwalt’s meticulous anatomical drawings also suggest duality—the past of Leonardo sketching the interplay among muscles, tendons, and bones and a future in the uncanny results of genetic tampering. Over yellowed and sepia-toned panels, some spattered with rusty-red drops, as if the subjects’ blood mingles with the artist’s ink, deformed shapes emerge: a peculiarly plump old baby with a bird’s head for a foot, a creature part chicken and part twig, a man with madness in his eyes and a depiction of madness growing out of his head. I think of Leonardo’s prescient advice to artists: “dispel from your mind the thought that an understanding of the human body in every aspect of its structure can be given in words.”

For artists seeking to represent human experience, as for physicians seeking to understand the human body and mind to cure disease and repair wounds, the body must be seen, observed in motion, exposed, laid open, and touched—taken in by the senses, even as it defies them, seduces and repels them. Christine Montross, reflecting on her time in the anatomy lab, wrote: “The human body harbors mysteries that are not solved by textbooks or studying, and, as I have been confronted with them, I have found myself amazed, humbled, and unnerved.” Beauty abraded, magnificence destroyed, mutability caught in a moment—all part of the amazing, humbling, and unnerving images rendered by the artists of RAW.

Face Beneath the Face

2009-08-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

While viewing work of digital photographer and artist Nan Stombaugh at the Kingwood College Art Gallery, I did a double-take. In her exhibition, The Healing Collection, Stombaugh combines and juxtaposes her digital photographs with repurposed images to create evocative pictures that are more than the sum of their parts. The image that stopped me in my tracks and pulled me back for a second, closer look was of an angel carved in stone, the sort one finds in old cemeteries.

Years ago in New Orleans a young street performer dressed as a cemetery angel caught my attention and inspired an idea that grew into my young adult novel, Juliette Ascending. That book’s cover design depicts a white marble statue of an angel with a hint of color in her cheeks. Stombaugh’s photograph also hints at life. In it, I first saw a carved angel beneath a tree, light sifted through leaves, dappled shadows cast over mottled stone. Then, with a second look, I glimpsed something more in the forward tilt of the head, the downcast eyes, the individualistic shape of the nose, and the compressed lips caught in a secretive smile.

The street performer transformed herself with make-up and costume into a statue. My novel’s cover artist, Robin Carter, used color and design elements to suggest a statue might be flesh, not stone. How had Stombaugh merged the animate with the inanimate? Had she superimposed a living woman’s features upon the angel’s chiseled ones? Or was it the reverse? However she achieved it, the result appears to be a human face surfacing from beneath a cool stone one. Now I am struck by the contrast to another face I have just seen, one that passes for a woman’s face upon a woman’s form, yet sometimes the human features slip a little in conversation or slide away under duress, revealing a face beneath the face, one that belies the pretense of tender feelings, human or angelic. I cannot really call the face beneath inhuman, for calculation and cruelty are part of human nature. And both genuineness and deception have their place in art and fiction, in the images and characters they inspire.

Creating Characters Workshop

2009-08-17T18:39:00.000-07:00

Creating Characters Who Sell
September 15, 22, 29, and October 6, 2009 7:00 - 8:30 PM
Lone Star College - Kingwood, 20000 Kingwood Drive, Kingwood, TX, The United States
http://www.lonestar.edu
In deciding which manuscripts to publish, many fiction editors say voice and character trump plot. Presenter Rosemary Poole-Carter, author of three published novels and four produced plays, will guide writers through the secrets a novelist can learn from playwrights and actors to captivate agents, editors, and readers. Please call 281-312-1660 to register.

Mount Pleasant

2009-07-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

On Friday, July 31, I am scheduled for an interview in Tyler, Texas, on KETV and to sign my novel, Women of Magdalene, that afternoon at the Tyler Broadway Pavilion Barnes & Noble. Tyler is not so very far from the town of Mount Pleasant, where my grandmother was born in 1882. My mother, who will travel with me, and I have decided we to visit Mount Pleasant the day before going to Tyler, looking on the journey as our own Trip to Bountiful. My octogenarian mother has not revisited the city since the 1950s, and I have never been there. Now, I look forward to giving copies of my novels to the Mount Pleasant Public Library. My love of books, reading, and writing traces back to my mother and grandmother, and I would be thrilled to know my books are in the public library of my grandmother's home town.

After growing up in Mount Pleasant, my grandmother left to study nursing at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and later became head nurse at a hospital in Vicksburg. There, she met a young intern, who wooed her, in part, with books. During their courtship, they often read aloud to one another, and I have included a photograph of them reading together, taken in Vicksburg, 1910.

My mother raised me on stories of family in East Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, fostering my love of writing about the 19th century South. With a doctor and nurse as grandparents, I also became fascinated with medical history. And while I never met my great-aunt Addie of Mount Pleasant, who, following my grandmother’s lead, she became a nurse, herself. I feel a special affinity for her part in the family story. Addie treated women in a mental institution, tucked away in the piney woods of East Texas, and snippets of stories about her career influenced me in my writing of the Magdalene Ladies' Lunatic Asylum.

Gothic, North and South

2009-05-13T05:30:00.000-07:00

Gothic, North and South
by Rosemary Poole-Carter, author of Women of Magdalene

As a writer, I focus my work on the Southern gothic. Depicting human nature’s darker side, I set my characters in conflict in settings such as the Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum, housed in a plantation mansion, surrounded by live oaks hung with Spanish moss. Still, I acknowledge that the North has its gothic atmosphere, too, in settings such as an isolated farm or rambling old house, where reserved inhabitants conceal brooding inner lives. I am drawn to haunted souls and recently encountered two of them on trips north and south, meeting Lizzie Borden in Providence, Rhode Island, and Tennessee Williams in New Orleans, Louisiana.

In both cities, I thrilled to the mesmerizing performances, first of Jill Dalton in Lizzie Borden Live and then of Doug Tompos in Bent to the Flame: A Night with Tennessee Williams. Dalton and Tompos each wrote their solo plays and portrayed their title characters in small venues, speaking directly to their audiences. Each recreated a single day in the life of the person each became on stage: Jill Dalton offered Lizzie Borden’s reflections on life after the hatchet murders that made Borden infamous, while Doug Tompos offered Tennessee Williams’s musings on creativity and insecurity following the opening of The Glass Menagerie, the play that made Williams famous. In the most intimate of theatrical forms, both writer/performers exposed tormented lives with poignancy and power.

Jill Dalton performed Lizzie Borden Live at the Columbus Theatre in Providence, not so very far from the Borden home and murder scene in Fall River, Massachusetts. Her Northern gothic play is set in 1905 at Maplecroft, where Lizzie welcomes the audience into her garden and her parlor. There, Lizzie Borden reveals glimpses of her feelings—and lack of feeling—for her father and stepmother, of the seemingly ordinary details on the extraordinary day of the murders, and of her trial and acquittal. How could a well-bred lady have done such a thing? Impossible. She hints at her later affair with Nance O’Neill, an actress noted for a sensational portrayal of Lady Macbeth. Indeed, Lizzie Borden tells her listeners that she has lived out her days in the shadow of scandal, hearing her name chanted in a jump-rope rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

In fact, as Dalton’s Lizzie explains to the audience, her stepmother received eighteen blows and her father eleven, though she stops short of saying exactly who wielded the hatchet.

Doug Tompos as Tennessee Williams invites the audience to share an evening with him in New York on April 26, 1945. He charms his guests with witty observations and with insights about his creative affinity for poet Hart Crane. Then, even as Williams revels in the success of The Glass Menagerie, he begins to agonize over love and loss and whether or not he will ever again write anything good. In the Southern gothic traditon, Tompos’s play becomes a dark night of the soul, one in which Williams confides his idea for a scene he calls “Blanche in a chair in the moonlight.” How fitting that Tompos performed Bent to the Flame at Le Petit Theatre in New Orleans, the setting of A Streetcar Named Desire, and where Williams’s work continues to be honored and celebrated each year at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival.

Through their brilliant scripts and performances, Dalton as Lizzie Borden and Tompos as Tennessee Williams illuminate corners in the dark chamber of the secret self. And, after the lights went down in a pair of theatres, North and South, I continue to be haunted by what one woman refused to confess and by what one man struggled to conceal.

For more information about the plays and performers:

Lizzie Borden Live
Written and Performed by Jill Dalton
http://www.lizziebordenlive.com

Bent to the Flame: A Night with Tennessee Williams
Written and Performed by Doug Tompos
http://www.dougtompos.com/index.html

Lure of the Southern Gothic

2009-04-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

As a child growing up in Texas, I devoured my grandparents’ tales of Louisiana and Mississippi along with the biscuits and grits. I also swallowed the bitter taste of family conflicts and homegrown dramatic tensions. Escaping into storytelling, like so many future writers, I dreamed of one day holding my published novels and of witnessing my plays on stage, but thought myself handicapped by not being from somewhere exciting such as New York or Paris. Still, I persevered, and some of my writing dreams have since come true—though not by my turning away from my uneasy beginnings. When I turned back, found the courage to peer into the dark corners and let myself be lured into them by the Southern Gothic, then I discovered my voice and my audience.

Gothic literature earned its name, in part, because of the settings it favors—the gothic architecture of labyrinthine castles and crumbling manor houses—enclosing worlds haunted by madness and monstrosity. How easily traditional gothic atmosphere moves, like a restless spirit over marshland, into the Southern Gothic settings of decaying plantation mansions and ravaged landscapes. The antebellum social order echoes the feudal order, and the Lost Cause becomes the protest of power thwarted. Traditional gothic characters such as the patriarchal tyrant and demonic female become the plantation master and the eccentric lady, who cover their respective cruelty and perversion with a sense of entitlement or a genteel veneer.

The sin under the surface, the subtext of evil, is an inextricable part of all gothic tales. In Victorian gothic stories, the conflict between the good and the wicked might be enacted between stock characters—heroes and villains—or dramatized with “doubles” or revealed within a single tormented soul, most famously, by Dr. Jekyll and his other self, Mr. Hyde. While some traditional gothic literature may turn to strange science or the supernatural to raise anxiety in its audience, the Southern Gothic creates a mounting sense of unease by exploring the grotesque in the natural world and exposing the horror beneath the ordinary, revealing the sin and perhaps the saving grace. In my historical novel, Women of Magdalene, the plantation mansion is transformed into the Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum, which, as an idealist young doctor discovers, is run by a madman. In my writing, I find the monster in the closet is rascism and the monster under the bed is misogyny. Doubles, indeed, lurking in shadow and hiding behind custom. Even so, I lift my guttering candle and follow the Southern gothic down another dark corridor.

Paraplex: A Treat for the Six Senses

2009-04-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Research for a novel brought me this spring to New Orleans, and research for particularly gothic aspects of that novel brought me to the city’s new “attraction for all six senses”: the Paraplex. The name, short for “paranormal complex”, designates a 19th century mansion, once a private residence, later a mortuary, and now an uncanny museum and ghostly observatory. Behind its white-columned façade, the Paraplex houses displays of haunted art and personal possessions, as well as educational exhibits on psychic secrets, Ouija boards, and the Tarot. Visitors are invited to roam the mansion to explore facets of parapsychology, experience the séance chamber, and participate in the Fear Experiment in the haunted basement.

The port city of New Orleans, whose beginnings date back to 1718, possesses an eventful past of battles among men and against deadly diseases such as yellow fever and cholera; of trafficking in human beings through the slave trade and prostitution; of disasters, natural and man-made, brought on by floods, hurricanes, and broken levees. With its convoluted history of suffering, of wild Mardi Gras revelry, and of restless spirits, New Orleans provides the perfect setting for the mysteries of the Paraplex. And the city calls to me as the setting for my next Southern gothic novel.

While the plot of my work-in-progress does not exactly hinge on the supernatural, the characters do possess varying degrees of familiarity with the unseen and the inexplicable.
Hoping to better understand what haunts my particular New Orleanian characters, I entered the Paraplex séance chamber, took my seat at the round table, and clasped hands with other visitors, whom I assumed were as corporeal as I. Writers rely on their five senses to create vivid prose, but sometimes they need a little help from the sixth. I came away from the Paraplex more knowledgeable about the paranormal, more inspired by the spirit world. And, in the Louisiana tradition of the lagniappe, I received something extra: in the haunted basement, I enjoyed a great, blood-curdling scream.

For more information about the Paraplex, please visit:

http://www.paraplex.net/

A Room of Her Own and Ideas to Fill It

2009-04-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

A Room of Her Own Foundation offers many opportunities to creative women who long for the time and space to pursue their arts, most notably “The Gift of Freedom”, a $50,000 grant awarded to one woman to support her in the completion of a writing project. Along with approximately 750 other women writers, I applied for the grant and, along with all but one of them, was not the recipient. Tracey Cravens-Gras, Associate Director of AROHO Foundation, softened my disappointment with her statement that made me feel part of something much larger than my individual ambition; she said that the myriad grant application submissions were “striking testaments to courage and brilliance, and part of a ground-swelling rise among women to reach their creative potential in the world.” The personal process of applying for the “The Gift of Freedom” is a revelation for each woman—and the collective result of that process creates a force-field of literary energy. To the winner, Barbara Johnson of New Orleans, I offer my heartfelt congratulations. In addition to being a dedicated writer, Ms. Johnson is an experienced carpenter, who volunteers with Rebuilding Together. How beautifully fitting it is that Barbara Johnson, who builds spaces for others, has now been awarded a room of her own.

For more information about AROHO, please visit: www.aroomofherownfoundation.org

Drawing Inspiration

2009-01-25T14:51:00.000-08:00

Each weekday morning on the way to the office of my day-job at a community college, I have the pleasure of passing the small, glassed-in campus art gallery. Then, each evening I catch another glimpse of visual inspiration on the way out, which often sparks ideas to mull over on the commute home and later apply to my night-job as a writer. The January exhibit of works by Lisa Qualls has captured my imagination and begun the New Year and the new semester with a remarkable blend of the timely and the timeless.

Imagine hoop skirts covered with diaphanous silks in the colors of ivory, saffron, cocoa, and cayenne, all floating in the space between floor and ceiling, seemingly waltzing on light and air. This is the vision that stopped me in my tracks, then compelled me into the gallery for a closer look and to hear the artist’s commentary on her creations. Since my work as a novelist focuses on the mid to late 19th century American South, I immediately thought of plantation mistresses in their restrictive crinolines. But these skirts suspended in the gallery are so much more than costumes from a bygone era.

The series Lisa Qualls has entitled “Paris is Burning” combines the artist’s research into the complicated relationship between Europe and Africa with her own experiences of meeting African immigrants in Europe. Qualls states she is “interested in how cultures absorb and share garment forms, patterns, body markings, and ritual objects.” Her artwork reveals aspects of cultural identity, issues of immigration, and influences of colonialism that have shaped history and continue to affect current events. Some of Qualls’s drawings incorporate period European textile and wallpaper patterns with African ritual masks or body markings. One especially arresting pencil drawing on vellum presents the image of an African man dressed in a stylish 19th century European suit and displaying ritual scarification on his face. Another depicts a hauntingly lovely African woman dressed in white, the hem of her gown blending into the intricate pattern at her feet, the design pigmented with coffee and beeswax.

And then there are the skirts of silk organza over cotton and boning, echoing the past and the caging and concealing of women’s bodies, but offering, as well, other compelling layers of meaning. The artist calls her grouping of skirts “Surveillance Maritime”, explaining it “is about Africans leaving in boats from the Canary Islands and trying to reach the coast of France.” Qualls has applied text in English, French, and Spanish to the dyed silk, describing the European reaction to illegal African immigration. European surveillance of the coastal waters leads to the apprehension and return of Africans trying to enter Europe illegally and sometimes leads to the rescue of people in danger of dying in the boats. In the context of the exhibit, the hoop skirts become vessels, ribbed boats covered over with a skin of fabric that tells a story of a modern quest for freedom. Yet, they are reminders, too, of long-ago ships that carried Africans into slavery.

With “Paris is Burning”, through layers of line, color, texture, and text, Lisa Qualls captures layers of complexity found in the enmeshed histories of Africans and Europeans. From her work I gratefully draw new inspiration for my historical fiction, a deeper sense of the ways cultures exploit and engage each other, and a greater appreciation for the interplay between the visual and literary arts.

Rosemary Poole-Carter, author of Women of Magdalene

For more about artist Lisa Qualls:

www.lisaqualls.com

http://lisaqualls.blogspot.com/

Frost on the Mirror

2009-01-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

Recently, two brief newspaper mentions of deaths caught my eye—not on the obituary page, where deceased individuals are named and their lives honored. These mentions appeared on a back page of the news section and are of particular interest to me because they offer glimpses into 19th century American history. The first article describes a hiker’s discovery of human bone fragments and a metal button lying in a Sharpsburg cornfield, which had once served as a Civil War battlefield in 1862. Examining the remains, experts concluded the bones belonged to a young soldier from New York State, who was perhaps between 19 and 20 years old when he fell in combat. The second article describes the discovery of more anonymous dead, 957 individuals buried in unmarked graves between the years 1889 and 1957 in what had been a Nebraska psychiatric hospital cemetery. Both articles resonate with me as I continue researching Civil War and post-Civil War history for my novel-in-progress and as I reflect on research done for my novel Women of Magdalene, set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum.

In Nebraska, a historical society is fighting for the release of the identity of the long-dead patients, many of whom were committed against their will for a variety of health conditions and reasons, including poverty, and whose very existence was erased with burial. A chilling thought—and similar to one that ran through my imagination years ago when I created my fictional asylum for “inconvenient women”, who never went home again. Like other writers of historical fiction, I hold a mirror up to the past and, in doing so, frame that past, limit it, and bring a particular aspect of it into focus. I look back at the sweep of history or catch a glimpse of it in a newspaper article—reminders of the haunting stories of those who actually lived and died in the real, not the fictional, world. Then I turn again to my story-mirror and, for a moment, find a whisper of frost on the glass.

Writer's Panic

2008-12-19T10:27:00.000-08:00

While for everything there may be a season, late December is the season for many things: celebrating holiday cheer and lamenting over-indulgence, gathering with loved ones and missing absent friends, reflecting on accomplishments and mulling over regrets. Cold and flu season is also upon us, along with other aliments peculiar to writers—the dreaded Writer’s Block and the far more virulent Writer’s Panic.

So far, I have managed to fend off colds and the Block with vitamin C and caffeine, reliable remedies for keeping breathing and ideas in free-flow. However, while eluding the flu, I have succumbed to the Panic. The novel I began writing with such passion months ago, promising myself to complete by year’s end, is not half done. Ghosts of Literature Courses Past hover and haunt me. Shakespeare’s Richard II whispers in my ear: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me . . .”

What happened? Where did the year go? In part and in whole, it was consumed by the trivial and the profound, by chores and errands, by pleasures and obligations, by the day-job, and by labors of love for loved ones. My thanks to Tennyson’s Ulysses for providing some comfort: “I am a part of all that I have met”, and all experience is material when writers are in pursuit of that gleaming “untravell’d world, whose margin fades /For ever and for ever when I move.”

On the threshold of a new year, I force myself to pause amid agitation and glance backward at the ways writing has shaped my past and present. My writing life is the familiar of my lived life. Again and again, I have been deeply affected by the circumstances of characters. While a heroine was slowly poisoned, I drooped and languished in the library. After typing up the evil deeds I had goaded an antagonist to perform, I washed my hands with the scalding ferocity of Lady Macbeth. Choosing writing over housework, wandering through the dusty rooms cluttered with books and manuscripts and visited by imaginary figures, I have become Dickens’s Miss Havisham, complete with her cob-webbed gown and moldering cake. Yet, through the doorway, past the gatekeepers of doubt and fear, new festivities and adventures await. If only I can harness the Writer’s Panic and give it to my characters, to send them dashing in pursuit of their obsessions.

To writers everywhere, I wish you health, freedom from blocks and panics, and a season of creativity that never ends.
Rosemary Poole-Carter

Director's Notes on The Little Death

2008-10-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

On October 10, 2008, Eclectic Theater Company of Seattle opened a new production of my drama The Little Death under the direction of L. Nicol Cabe. Over a decade ago, Gypsy Theatre Company gave the play its first production in Houston, and in the years between these stagings, life has spun me around more than once. I have pursued numerous other projects, including novel writing, casting my work out into the world and hoping it will find receptive readers and audiences. In Seattle for the play’s opening, I enjoyed hearing the actors’ interpretations of and speculations about their characters and gained new perspective on my writing of years gone by. Then, the promising young director, who earned her theatre degree just two years ago, showed evidence of an old soul in her Director’s Notes for the playbill:

“While talking up this play to friends, I’ve referred to the show as a ‘bodice-ripper,’ ‘exactly what the title makes it sound like,’ and a ‘Southern Gothic dark romance.’ The show’s title, a delightful French euphemism, leads naturally to these assumptions of the play’s content.

As assumptions go, this one isn’t wrong. The show is indeed about sex and orgasm. Of course, to say the show is only about sex and orgasm is to do it a great disservice. Though steamy as night on the Louisiana bayou, or as wild as a Mardi Gras party, this play is not a superficial spectacle of lust and avarice. It is an exploration of what lust, jealousy, avarice, possessiveness, and insecurity can lead to in our relationships. It is the tragedy of lovers who will not, indeed cannot, communicate with each other outside of physical passion. It is an intrigue of alliances forged, and false assumptions believed, and human justice imposed. Ultimately, no one can survive without confrontation, and that confrontation comes far too late.

In a way, I suppose, it is a morality play, showing us on the mirror stage what can happen if we are too selfish or too timid. But more than that, it is a tragedy that we have all experienced at least once in our lives—meaningful relationships destroyed because of our carelessness. It is a tale of hubris and fallen heroes, through which we are not merely instructed—we experience catharsis because of these characters’ sacrifice." ~ L. Nicol Cabe

A Shifting Landscape

2008-09-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

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

Writing Our Fears

2008-09-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Publishing, Marketing, Writing--Not Necessarily in that Order

2008-06-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Today, while preparing notes for an upcoming presentation, “Publishing and Marketing Your Fiction”, I reflected on past experiences as both an attendee and a speaker at workshops and conferences. So often the topics that draw an audience of writers pertain to finding an agent, signing with a publisher, marketing to the masses, achieving literary stardom, etc. Presentations on improving writing technique just don’t offer the same glamour or promise of fame and fortune. Next week I plan to give my audience at Lone Star College practical information on the business of getting published—tips on query letters, loglines and pitches, press kits, online promotions, and in-store signings. Glamour and fortune I can only talk about theoretically. A slight pressure is also on me to deliver my information succinctly at the outset of the talk, which will be filmed for the college TV station. Then I hope to open up discussion with the other writers and aspiring writers on the passions that compel us.

Before the immeasurable thrill of receiving a publishing contract—followed by the careful work of reviewing edits, rewriting, and proofing—and before the joy of holding the finished book in your hands—followed by the endless job of book promotion, comes the writing, itself. In the years leading up to my first productions and publications as a playwright and novelist, I asked myself: “If you knew for certain that your work would never, ever sell, would you still write?” “Yes,” I answered. (Even without hope, I hope.) While elated by publication, production, recognition, and reviews, I find the deepest satisfaction in the act of creating a fictional world.

Still, writing is hard for me and time-consuming, and the success of it, however that success may be measured, is uncertain. For those who hope to be published, I can share from experience that it is important to study craft, behave with professionalism, adapt to changing technologies and markets, and be very patient with yourself and others. Agents may or may not make dreams come true—sometimes they shop a manuscript to the few big houses and, if it doesn’t sell to one of those, lose interest in it. Editors may love books, but they may also change publishing houses or leave the business, and the books they love are sometimes left orphaned and unpublished. Rejection letters arrive, and you may find it hard to keep saying yes to your writing while others say no. But writers persevere, and sometimes something wonderful happens. For me, that something turned out to be a contract with Kunati Inc., a young, innovative independent publisher, who matches creative writing with creative marketing. How we reach readers and audiences keeps changing, while storytelling and hope endure.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Bigotry Revisited

2008-06-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago in Jasper, Texas, before dawn on June 7, 1998, three white men chained a black man to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him three miles to his death. This morning, the Houston Chronicle revisited the murder of James Byrd Jr. in a front-page story. The victim’s killers have been tried and sentenced, two assigned to death row and one to life in prison. Bloodstained evidence of the crime—the truck’s tires and rims and the heavy chain—is locked away in a security vault. The gray pickup rusts in an impound lot. Byrd’s family continues mourning his loss and cherishing his memory.

It horrifies me to type the words describing the murder, let alone to imagine the cruelty and agony of that night. Today I remember the shock I felt ten years ago when learning of this vicious killing in East Texas. As a writer of historical novels and plays set in the 19th century South, I have read and researched heartbreaking accounts of bondage and violence. I wanted to believe it was history. Then came this gruesome reminder of how bigotry persists, like an endemic disease.

Not long ago, I viewed a Civil War battle re-enactment in the piney woods of East Texas, an event interesting from a researcher’s and writer’s point of view. For many onlookers, it was a brief glimpse of history, of the camp life and battlefields of long ago. But the number of whites wearing t-shirts and caps emblazoned with the Confederate stars and bars and the volume of their cheers when gray trampled blue gave me pause.

I strive to keep an open mind, to keep prejudices in check, to understand that we are all shaped in various ways by our upbringing, always stopping short of condoning violence. Then, occasionally a new acquaintance, learning that I write, falls into a little pre-judging of me, assuming the imagination of a soft-spoken Southern white woman must run to romanticized tales of plantation mansions. But I refuse to forget who lived in the quarters. For that reason, I am drawn to the Southern gothic, to exploring that contradictory world of graciousness and greed, of compassion and suffering.

Included in Leslie Casimir’s Chronicle story about Jasper, Texas, are descriptions of the community today, of an alliance between black and white ministers, of interracial couples and offspring, of small-town poverty and glimmers of hope. In a way, it is a hopeful sign that ten years after the murder of James Byrd Jr., the crime retains its power to shock, and the murder weapon—a chain—is labeled infamous. Maya Angelou said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” It is heartening to hear of courage in Jasper.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Soup and Stories: Post Mother's Day Thoughts

2008-05-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

My mother raised me on soup and stories. I was finicky about the former, preferring tomato with so much milk in it that we called it “pink soup”, but insatiable for the latter. In her melodious reading voice, Mama first whet my appetite with Golden Books, later following them with a delectable selection of chapter books: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, and then Rosemary and the Princess by Josephine Lawrence. How thrilled I was to share a first name with a character in a novel.

Each noon, I entered the kitchen with a stack of favorite books, climbed onto the yellow plastic seat of the kitchen stool, and tucked into a bowl of pink soup, while Mama read story after story. I would make that meal last and linger over dessert, a scoop of vanilla ice cream covered with chocolate Bosco syrup. I’m still not sure when or whether Mama ever ate her lunch.

That diet of soup and stories nourished my dream of becoming a published writer. In secret, before learning to read and write, I turned the pages of books, making up the story and playing at being the author. More than once, I also scribbled in the margins of books, pretending to write.

Years later, while teaching remedial reading and writing classes at a community college, I tried to impart the passion for books that my mother gave me. Of course, my students were not at such an impressionable age as I had been during soup and story time. Still, students with a hunger for knowledge, who developed a taste for books—sampling, savoring, and devouring—and tried new recipes for combining reading and writing skills often delighted me. “Read to your children,” I said to every class, “now if you have children or in the future when you do.” All the cool and ever-changing devices for transmitting ideas may speed and augment communication and perhaps entertain us, but they cannot replace the warm and nourishing experience of reading aloud with loved ones.

In the month of May, reflecting on the loving reading lunchtimes shared with my mother, I recall our special favorite, The Little Mailman of Bayberry Lane, a Rand McNally Book-Elf Book by Ian Munn. This little book is a timeless celebration of the art of communication and of the importance of writing—of issuing invitations to share “apple tarts and little lemon cakes all covered with hickory nuts” and of sending thank-you notes, of communicating our concern and affection for others. The Little Mailman, a chipmunk who leads a cast of charming animal characters, is a messenger of hope. I've never forgotten his greeting to Mrs. Duck: "a yellow letter for you today. Yellow means good news, you know!" Just this spring, my mother sent me a birthday card in a yellow envelope—she has not forgotten either. Bon appetit!

Embrace the Mess

2008-04-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

The following is not a review of Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman’s book A PERFECT MESS: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder—How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the Word a Better Place. The following is a testimonial. Commuting to work, I listened to the audio version of A PERFECT MESS and, with every mile, found myself more relaxed with my own clutter and my own life.

Abrahamson and Freedman offer fascinating examples and insights into disorder—from personal to professional to political mess—and explode many clichés about the virtues of extreme organization and the vices of messiness. The authors do not advocate utter chaos, but they do speak up for creative clutter and on-the-fly flexibility. They illustrate how those obsessed with organizing tasks can actually waste time that could be use for accomplishing projects. Life is far from perfectly predictable, and people who cope with disorder and unexpected changes and are not guilt-ridden by their own mess may actually hold, in some circumstances, an advantage over the rigidly neat and tightly scheduled.

As a writer, I have long lived with a certain amount of clutter—notebooks and tablets, pens and pencils, multiple drafts of various projects, research books and magazines, index cards, sticky notes, and scraps of paper. The tactile and the visual are essential to my creative process, and technology has not reduced the mess on and around my desks, which now include computers and printers and memory devices. I am far more delighted by creating a story structure and seeing once randomly conceived plot and character elements fall into a compelling design than I am by tidying up my workspace.

After listening to A PERFECT MESS, I have resolved to put aside any remaining twinges of guilt and embarrassment over messiness and embrace the mess as part of the creative process. Of course, there are limits to how many thoughts I can juggle at once in my head, and occasionally I misplace a book or a page of notes. Still, in a search among the clutter, I have often made serendipitous discoveries that benefited the work at hand or sparked a new project. I shudder to imagine what a “professional organizer” might do to my library by imposing the appearance of neatness without regard to my clusterings of ideas and inspirations.

When someone asks how I go about writing a novel or a play, I answer that my method harkens back to ancient augury. In a cardboard box, I collect ideas scribbled on scraps of paper—notes on setting and theme, plot twists and characters, along with fragments of dialogue. The collecting process may last for months or years. Then, when the time feels right, I open the box and spill its contents across the floor, like a diviner splitting the sacrificial beast. From the entrails—all those bits of paper—I read the portents that foretell the story. I discover the pattern that would not have formed without the freedom of random associations and the energy sparked by a perfect mess.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Mister Rogers, Happy Birthday to You!

2008-03-05T13:21:00.000-08:00

When a friend told me that March 20th is Sweater Day in honor of Fred Rogers, a cozy, sweater-warm feeling enveloped me. For many years—now many years ago—Mister Rogers sang his daily welcome to the neighborhood to my children as I settled them with a snack in front of the television before dashing off to my nearby computer. I wrote my first published novel in 90-minute increments during Mister Rogers and Sesame Street. That was my allotted creative time, though truly all the time caring for my children was creative. And Fred Rogers (1928 – 2003), who would have been eighty years old this March 20th, contributed so much to the imaginative energy in my household, to making each day “a beautiful day in this neighborhood.”

Fred Rogers, wearing his familiar sweater and sneakers, did not overwhelm little children with splashy special effects and blasts of noise. He invited and shared and reassured. Looking them straight in the eye, he told them he liked them just the way they were and that they would never go down the bathtub drain. He introduced children to opera and showed them how crayons were made in a factory and explained that the bad and the sad things—such as divorce and death and war—were not their fault. Then, Mister Rogers led the children (and sometimes the parents, as well) to the Land of Make-Believe, where he encouraged them to use their own imaginations.

While choosing a sweater to wear on Fred Rogers’ birthday, I’m reminded of another special someone’s birthday. A little over twenty years ago, when my middle child turned three, it just so happened that on that day, Mister Rogers came out of his kitchen carrying a birthday cake with a lighted candle on top. Through the television screen, he looked into my daughter’s eyes and sang “Happy Birthday to my Friend.” She glowed with joy. And I’m still sweater-warm with gratitude to our beloved neighbor.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

For more information about Fred Rogers and Sweater Day, please visit Family Communications, Inc. at http://www.fci.org/

Atonement: Novel to Film

2008-02-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

Years ago, while wandering a bookstore, I was drawn to a trade paperback of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, displayed face-out on the shelf. At the time, I was grappling with the very theme of atonement in my own work-in-progress. Then, there was the cover art, like a snapshot from my childhood—a black and white picture of a forlorn barefoot girl, lost in thought. Opening the book, I found a quote from Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s tale of a girl with a vividly gothic imagination and Ian McEwan’s promise to his readers about the tale he would unfold. Turning the page, I met his imaginative young character, Briony Tallis, and blushed as if I were reading an episode of my own life story—the budding playwright in pre-adolescence, believing she has created serious drama, presenting her manuscript to her mother, and cherishing her mother’s praise. Embarrassed and enthralled, I fell into the story.

Of course, when a reader admires a novel as much as I do Atonement, that reader may hesitate, as I did, to see the movie version. But now that I have seen it, my advice to hesitant booklovers is: buy a ticket, settle back in a darkened theater, and savor director Joe Wright’s lush film depiction of the novel’s time, place, and shattering emotions.

The story of Atonement begins in 1935 at a lavish country manor in England. Young Briony witnesses and misinterprets a few moments shared between her older sister Cecilia and a servant’s son, Robbie, setting in motion the tragic consequences for which Briony atones. Or does she? When someone asks me what the book is about, I find no easy, jacket-blurb sort of answer. McEwan’s writing offers layer upon layer of nuance and meaning. Shifting points of view reveal the shifting nature of truth. A film version of such a complex novel necessarily omits some layers and compresses some events. Still, screenwriter Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Atonement, Wright’s direction, and the cast’s superb performances capture the haunting beauty of the novel in a film that is a work of art in its own right. Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy portray Cecilia and Robbie, the lovers caught in the amber of Briony’s imagination as she, herself, ages from a privileged child (Saoirse Ronon) to a troubled young woman (Romola Garai) serving as a nurse in World War II, and, finally, to an aging novelist (Vanessa Redgrave) reflecting on her career.

In one segment of the novel omitted from the film, aspiring-writer Briony receives her first rejection letter. Like the book’s opening paragraph, that letter touched my writer’s nerve with a shock of recognition. Hadn’t I once received that letter, too? Among the fictitious editor’s comments to Briony is a recommendation to go beyond the “crystalline present moment” and set her characters in motion with “an underlying pull of simple narrative.” As a far from simple, multi-faceted story of concealment and revelation, Atonement, both in book and film, honors the editor’s advice, moving beyond the cowardice of stylish evasions and bravely laying bare the characters’ hearts.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Sweet & Ironic--Away from Her

2008-02-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

Perhaps Sarah Polley has an old soul. In her late twenties, she has written and directed a film based on Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, depicting passion and longing within a 40-year marriage. In Polley’s film AWAY FROM HER, graceful Fiona (Julie Christie) succumbs to Alzheimer’s, while her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) watches her disappear into the disease. Polley’s fidelity to the spirit of Munro’s poignant tale is evident in every aspect of the film—in casting, direction, cinematography, editing, and especially in the script. Grant’s memories and musings come to life on the screen in images and lines that echo the short story: “I never wanted to be away from her,” he says. “She had the spark of life.”

Polley began acting as a child, staring in the Ramona series, then the Avonlea series for television. As a young adult she has added writing and filmmaking to her list of accomplishments and has often chosen acting roles in independent films, including THE SWEET HEREAFTER, THE CLAIM, and THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS. Filming NO SUCH THING, Polley worked with Christie and envisioned her in the role of Fiona. In Christie’s youth, she won an Academy Award for her role in DARLING; now in her maturity, she is nominated for her role in AWAY FROM HER. Indeed, Christie’s performance shines deservingly within Polley’s well-crafted film, as the actor captures all the ages her character ever was, giving the audience a glimpse of timeless beauty, guided by a director who is wise beyond her years.

In her script, Polley embellishes the subtle humor of the short story, the moments that fleetingly lift us from the heartache. Through flashbacks we see Grant was not always such a devoted husband, and he suspects Fiona’s selective memory of their shared past may be her way of punishing him. At the Meadowlake facility, Fiona forms an attachment to another patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy), and one odd pairing leads to another when Grant seeks help from Aubrey’s pragmatic wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis). Polley’s added character development of other visiting family members and patients, particularly the addition of the demented former sportscaster who keeps up a running commentary of goings-on at Meadowlake, are inspired.

Reading “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and viewing AWAY FROM HER, I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116—“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . .” As Fiona and Grant prepare to leave their house, he to take her to Meadowlake and come home alone, he thinks she looks “just like herself on this day”, and in the film he tells her just how she has always looked to him: “Direct and vague. Sweet and ironic.” The camera is on Christie’s face, each spoken word evident in her expression. Grant longs to call Fiona back to him but, instead, attempts to give her what she needs. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “the way to love something is to realize that it could be lost.” So, a young filmmaker gives us a story of mature love—sweet and ironic.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Girlfriends Celebrate Books

2008-01-25T18:38:00.000-08:00

January 17 -19, 2008, I joined other writers and readers in Jefferson, a small town in the piney woods of East Texas. There, Kathy Patrick, dressed in her trademark hot-pink and leopard print, hosts her annual bash, The Girlfriend Weekend, a celebration of books and big hair. Patrick, an avid reader and a former publisher’s rep, operates Beauty and the Book (www.beautyandthebook.com), a combination bookstore and beauty salon. She is also the founder of the Pulpwood Queens’ Book Clubs (www.pulpwoodqueen.com) and author of THE PULPWOOD QUEEN’S TIARA-WEARING, BOOK-SHARING GUIDE TO LIFE, in which she shares her passions for literacy and living.

The weekend was a loosely organized collection of book talks, panel discussions, and parties, attracting a variety of authors, booklovers, and Pulpwood Queens in sparkling tiaras. This is a festival more for readers to socialize with writers than for aspiring writers to learn about craft. It’s also a chance for the guest authors to leave the keyboard, talk about their books, and connect with book-loving, fun-loving girlfriends—and a few guy friends, too.

When time came for me to present my novel, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum in Louisiana, I looked out at an audience of intelligent, curious women, enjoying their community and reveling in their individuality. I thought of the women of my fictional asylum, locked away as many real women were, because they had not conformed to the dictates of the men in charge, the men who held power over the women’s lives—fathers, husbands, doctors, judges, ministers, and politicians. When those men set the standard for what was sane female behavior, they sometimes got it wrong, and asylums could become catchalls for inconvenient women. It was not unusual for 19th century American men to view women’s book clubs with suspicion—all those women gathering without male supervision, reading and exchanging ideas, asserting their own opinions, challenging authority. How marvelous now that book clubs, such as the Pulpwood Queens’ and Timber Guys, continue to flourish, provoking thought, unafraid of being a little outrageous.

Rosemary Poole-Carter, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, ISBN-13: 978-1-60164-014-7

THANK-YOU NOTES

2008-01-08T16:29:00.000-08:00

Before early January becomes late, I hope to finish up sending notes to family, friends, and acquaintances, thanking them for their many kindnesses in the past year and wishing them well in the New Year. To them, I’ll send my thanks by letter or e-mail or speak it over the phone or face-to-face. My thanks to others—kind strangers with generous spirits—must travel in this posting to people I don’t know by name.

Thank you to those in the many service professions—in restaurants and hotels, in retail and transportation, in offices and hospitals—who offered friendliness, helpfulness, and compassion along with competence. Thank you to the drivers who let me merge in traffic, and to the residents who gave me directions when I was a stranger in your town. Thank you to the young man in a New York subway station, who saw me struggling with my suitcase and carried it for me up the stairs. I appreciate all of you, who nodded or smiled and acknowledged the cliché that is true, that we are all in this together, all travelers on the same planet.

My circle of friends and acquaintances continues to expand, and to those newly met Internet folk, who share favorite quotes, books, and provocative ideas or post fascinating information on myriad websites—thank you all. This past year, I joined the publishing family of Kunati Inc., and my world grew larger and richer with more reading and writing friends and associates. Some I can thank by name. Here my gratitude also goes out, as well, to those I have not met—booksellers and librarians and readers, who took the time to support my work or post a review or send me an e-mail.

There is a particular group of strangers I wish to thank with all my heart. On November 3, 2007, my younger daughter and her friend were badly injured when their motorcycle was struck by a car. Thank you to the strangers who stopped traffic and rendered aid. After my daughter sailed off the bike and struck the pavement, she was so afraid that she’d be run over, but you made sure she was safe. An off-duty nurse held my daughter’s head to prevent her thrashing. Someone called for emergency medical help, and many watched over my daughter and her friend until the life-flight helicopter arrived.

Thank you to the doctors, nurses, physical therapists, respiratory specialists, and many other medical care workers at the hospital, whose skills and compassion make such a difference in traumatic times. A special thanks to those nurses who moved a bed across the hall, so my daughter and her friend could see for themselves that they had both survived the accident. Your act of kindness, which allowed them to talk over their ordeal and console one another, helped begin the healing of their spirits as well as their bodies. When you care for a patient, you comfort a whole family.

Like Blanche DuBois, I often depend on the kindness of strangers, and to kind strangers everywhere, this is my thank-you note to you. Gratefully, Rosemary Poole-Carter

HAUNTED BY THE PAST

2007-12-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

A pair of old boots with horseshoe nails embedded in the soles started me on the journey to WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, my novel from Kunati Inc., set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum. As I stared at the boots in a glass case at the Museum of Southern History, the docent explained that the nails served as cleats. She said Civil War soldiers wore such boots to keep from slipping in the mud, and the surgeons wore them to keep from slipping in the blood. In that moment, Dr. Robert Mallory, a young Civil War surgeon from Louisiana, was born in my mind to fill those cracked leather boots. He wears them first in the bloody battlefield surgery tent and later on the muddy trek to the asylum, where he assumes the post of physician to the inmates.

On his way, Mallory thinks: “Attending to the ills of madwomen would make a change from my duties during what my genteel mother referred to as the ‘late unpleasantness.’ Indeed, it had been unpleasant, amputating limbs of the wounded, dismantling whole cartloads of men.” At Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum, Mallory finds himself treating patients who are missing pieces, not of their bodies, but of their lives. And gradually, he discovers that Dr. Kingston, the director of the asylum who has labeled the women insane, is himself a madman.

Labeling my writing, I choose the term Southern gothic, gathering the elements of my fiction—historical, suspenseful, mysterious, romantic, theatrical, and grotesque—under that dark canopy. When beginning WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I jotted a note to myself, words to write by: “create a growing sense of unease.” Even though I’ve not yet written about the supernatural, my writing is haunted, if not by ghosts, then by shadows of the past—cast by ancient demons, which are still with us: greed, racism, misogyny, cruelty, indifference. These are the demons an uneasy Robert Mallory faces when he confronts Dr. Kingston and struggles to he keep his footing once again in those special boots.

My mother believes the whole world is haunted, and I share writer Gloria Wade-Gayles notion that some places are more haunted than others. Years ago, while attending a Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, I heard Wade-Gayles tell her audience that spirituality is most palpable where there has been great suffering. No wonder I have found the shades of my characters in the secluded courtyards of the French Quarter and along the streets of New Orleans, a city where human beings were once sold at the slave market; where sorrow followed in the wake of yellow fever, cholera, and malaria; where lives were torn apart by war; where devastation has swept in from the Gulf.

It seems only right that a novel sparked by a pair of boots keeps its protagonist on the move, ever restless. Robert Mallory travels first to Magdalene Asylum, then to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, with an enigmatic young patient, who takes him on an inner journey of her own. Returning to the madhouse, Mallory finds his way through deception, layered like mud and silt on the delta, thick as fog along the bayou. In those cleated boots, through mire and blood, he dares to approach insanity to find his reason.

RECKLESSLY ROMANTIC IN GRAND CENTRAL STATION

2007-12-14T13:21:00.000-08:00

In early December, I traveled from balmy Houston to brisk New York and Connecticut for some book signings. Several times my schedule took me from subways to trains and back again in Grand Central Station, where I joined other travelers bundled in drab black and gray to be dazzled by the glittering wares of holiday vendors and by a kaleidoscopic display of holiday images projected on the soaring walls of the main concourse. Then, one afternoon, I was swept away, not by a train, nor by light and color, but by music. Beneath the archway of a corridor, a violinist played the most achingly tender rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” that I have ever heard.

Drawn toward the sound, I watched the musician cradle his violin, dance with it, let it sing to the audience. As he finished with a flourish of his bow, I wiped away my tears and came forward to purchase a compact disk, aptly named “Recklessly Romantic Holidays”. I made no secret of my admiration for this concert hall talent performing in Grand Central, and as the violinist handed me the CD, he also gave me a kiss on the cheek. In the South, we call that little something extra a lagniappe.

I walked away smiling, then returned to give him a copy of my novel, which he then asked me to inscribe. I walked away again, and he came after me, giving me another compact disk and another peck. How could he have known that on this particular CD, “Recklessly Romantic”, he had recorded all my favorite music to write by? “Meditation”, “Dance of the Spirits”, “Moonlight Sonata”, “Canon in D”, “Serenade”, “Largo”, “Romanza”, and more.

That brief, lovely exchange with the violinist reminded me of how grateful I am for the inspiration of the wordless art forms—painting and sculpture, dance, and instrumental music. The patterns and relationships in these forms are revelations, which I attempt to translate into storylines and characters. While musicians have the same range of notes and writers the same store of words with which to create, some artists find ways to move beyond the technically accurate or grammatically correct. James Graseck (http://www.recklesslyromantic.com/) is that sort of artist, who gives something extra and special with each performance. His breathtaking talent is gift to all travelers. And my dearest souvenir from New York is a memory of music and a kiss on the cheek from a master violinist with a generous heart.

Rosemary Poole-Carter, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, 978-1-60164-014-7

ART & PAIN

2007-11-26T06:52:00.000-08:00

When my younger daughter began a college drawing class this fall, the instructor, who is also a brilliant painter, told the students that he believes artists should be discouraged at all costs. Even so, noting my daughter’s passion for art, he began helping her refine her raw talent—before discouragement came to her in a nearly fatal form.

A few weeks ago, on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, my daughter enjoyed flying over a country highway, the wind in her face. Then, she and her friend were struck by a car, and suddenly they were both sailing through the air in quite a different way. Both survived, each with a broken right leg. My daughter, the right-handed artist, also broke her right arm and shoulder. Months of physical and occupational therapy lie ahead. Breaking a sweat while swirling a brush at the easel is a distant goal.

During the weeks I’ve spent with my daughter in the hospital, my motherly self wished to draw her pain away into my own body, to spare her all suffering. But my writer/artist self watched in awe as she moved beyond the agony of her injuries into the early stages of recovery. I know the terror of the accident will outlast the cuts and bruises and the broken bones, and I can’t spare her the awful memories and nightmares. I can only reassure her that her feelings belong to her—they are her material, as real as pencil and paper, paint and canvas. Through the nights she and I have talked of that terror, I’ve glimpsed what she may do with it, make from it. Though aching and discouraged, she is still compelled by art.

Some people say things happen for a reason. Maybe things happen, and we find a reason, create a pattern from chaos. I live in hope of experiencing what this wounded, wonderful young woman will create.

Rosemary Poole-Carter
http://poole-carter.info/

DIRTY LAUNDRY

2007-11-02T06:52:00.000-07:00

“In 19th century United States, Ireland, Scotland, and England, asylums for ‘fallen women’ opened that were named for Mary Magdalene: a saint that many remember as a sinner. Though administrators and clergy proposed to offer reform and rehabilitation, the asylums often became de facto prisons. So too the fictional Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum, as the protagonist of Rosemary Poole-Carter’s Women of Magdalene discovers.”

The paragraph above opens Amiee Houser’s review of my novel for FOREWORD. Although, while writing WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I knew nothing of the Magdalene asylums Houser mentions, I’m grateful to her for drawing the comparison. In such asylums, girls labeled by authority figures as wayward were incarcerated and forced to work in laundries under the harsh supervision of nuns. When I finished writing my novel in late 2001, still ignorant of the asylum laundries, I sent the manuscript to an agent, and started another project to take my mind off the long wait for a response. Then, in 2002, a Houston publicist sent me an invitation to a screening at the Museum of Fine Arts for Peter Mullan’s powerful film, THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, which depicts the sadistic treatment of girls and women in asylum laundries. That publicist had found the connections I’d not known existed between the film she was promoting and my ficitonal world: Mary Magdalene and dirty laundry.

Searching the Internet for Houstonians to invite to Mullan’s film, the publicist must have seen the mention on my website of my ficitonal Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum. My novel was still a long way from publication, but my short play INCONVENIENT WOMEN, which shares the Deep South asylum setting, was already described on the site. While researching WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I found Jeffrey L. Geller & Maxine Harris’s wonderful book entitled WOMEN OF THE ASYLUM: VOICES FROM BEHIND THE WALLS, 1840 – 1945. Inspired and chilled by the first-person accounts of inmates collected in this book, I began my novel, taking a little time out to write the short play, produced in Houston and Albany, in which four women from different times come out of the woodwork to compare notes on who committed them and why. Whether applied to an actual or fictional asylum, Mary Magdalene’s name does, indeed, remind us of the saint labeled a sinner, the woman misjudged by those with the power to make and enforce their rules.

As dramatized in Peter Mullan’s THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, the inmates of historic asylum laundries, laboring like slaves, were forced to take in washing from communities, while their keepers collected the fees. In my novel, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, a particular patient, Effie Rampling, takes refuge in washing all the dirty laundry she can find. Though, as Lady Macbeth might attest, there are stains of experience that cannot be washed away.

Yes, all that washing becomes a metaphor, certainly for shame and guilt, but also for the duties and obligations and obstacles that keep us from ourselves and our dreams. Perhaps, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE might have been polished and published sooner if I hadn’t been so tangled up with my laundry. Yet, I know the book could not have found a better publishing home than Kunati Inc., where writers and their characters are appreciated for challenging authority, provoking thought, and hanging out the dirty laundry.

Aimee Houser writes: “WOMEN OF MAGDALENE is a brilliant example of the best historical fiction can do: illuminate the past not as it really, truly was, but as we imagine it to be, in order to better understand our own motives, desires, and prejudices.” Reading the reviewer’s words, I thought of the Zen saying “after ecstasy, the laundry” and of a wise young woman’s reminder to her mother: “the phrase could also be after laundry, the ecstasy.”

Women of Magalene, ISBN 978-1-60164-014-7

Louisiana Book Fesitval 2007

2007-10-30T15:54:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, November 3, 2007, Louisiana celebrates its 5th annual State Book Festival in Baton Rouge at the Capitol. At this year's event I'm looking forward to presenting my new novel, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, set in post-Civil War Louisiana, and to visiting with the marvelous state librarians, who organize the festival. I'm hoping to see friends Laura Joh Rowland (author of a thriller series set in feudal Japan) and Barbara Colley (author of the Charlotte LaRue mysteries) and meet writers Barbara Hambly and David Madden and many more.

Five years ago, when my first novel was published, Barbara Colley included me in the panel discussion she moderated at the first-ever Louisiana Book Festival. Since that time, Barbara has created many more adventures for her series character, Charlotte LaRue, who runs a housecleaning business in New Orleans--and cleans up crimes, too. Since that first LBF, Charlotte's been faced with the clean-up after Katrina, as well.

At that first festival, I was honored to share, along with the Louisiana State Librarians and many writers and readers, a warm feeling of success. Five years later, I'm still glowing and ready to celebrate again the joy of books. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

PERSON/PERSONA

2007-10-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

Novelists learn early in their careers to create characters and reveal aspects of personality through what the characters say, do, think, and feel. Moreover, what characters say about each other reveals as much about speaker as subject. In the creative process, novelists draw on the experiences we all share in getting to know ourselves and others. We play a variety of roles—offspring, sibling, spouse, parent, friend, lover, worker, and so on, highlighting or downplaying aspects of ourselves to fit a variety of circumstances. Each of us is multi-faceted, and when novelists translate the multi-faceted aspect of human nature to fictional characters, they bring those characters to life.

Later on in their writing careers, novelists discover that each has created a character who is not confined in a book or in a body. Beyond a novelist’s person is his or her persona. In THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A NOVEL, Jane Smiley writes that a literary persona “is equally the possession of the author and the reader; both create it and both respond to it, since it is made by the act of reading and remembering novels.” A writer’s persona begins with his or her experiences and choices of material and style; then, like a character in a novel, the persona is further shaped by readers’ expectations and reactions.

Though a person writes a book, often the persona sells it to a readership. Derek Lee Armstrong and Kam Wai Yu tell us in THE PERSONA PRINCIPLE, How to Succeed in Business with Image-Marketing: “Once your persona is born, you must develop, expand, and elaborate, until the persona can function on its own . . . Allow your persona to live independently of its creators . . . Let your personified venture grow equity in its identity that is not dependent on your personal interference.”

How does a writer reconcile person with persona? Recently, I posed that question to Kathy Patrick, founder of the Pulpwood Queen Book Clubs and author of THE PULPWOOD QUEEN’S TIARA-WEARING, BOOK-SHARING GUIDE TO LIFE. Asked if her public persona differs much from her private self, Kathy replies: “My public persona is much different from myself. People perceive me as this outgoing big-haired, tiara wearing girlie girl. First I don't actually have big hair . . . I clip my big hair on and call it my ‘Go to Town’ hair.” Kathy, who owns Beauty and the Book, a hair salon/bookstore, believes “the public expects me to have my hair done and be dressed a certain way in public. At home, it's hair pulled back in a ponytail, ball cap, no makeup, t-shirt and pull on pants. At work I'm a big talker because I have a lot to say about beauty and books. At home I don't talk at all because I'm either writing or I'm reading. Which persona is more me, I think I am both. I love to dress up and I love to dress down. Other times I like to dress in costumes and do theater, or story hours. I believe that we can be more than one thing in life. Some people call that schizophrenia, to me I call it my life in books.”

Truly, Kathy Patrick has found a beautiful balance between what Jane Smiley calls “a reading and writing life, and a lived life.” Kathy hosts the annual Girlfriend Weekend in East Texas, a celebration for Pulpwood Queens, readers, and writers. And while promoting literacy, Kathy is also willing to add a little color and curl to her guest authors’ personae.
Rosemary Poole-Carter

LITERACY FOR LIFE

2007-10-19T08:23:00.001-07:00

Being part of the reading and writing online community through forums and sites such as Goodreads.com, AuthorsDen, and Amazon Profiles, I find continuing inspiration. Getting to know others who share my passion for literacy, I often find others for whom reading is not only a pastime but also a salvation.

Kathy Patrick, founder of the Pulpwood Queens Book Clubs, grew up in Kansas with two younger sisters and a pair of warring parents. She spent much of her childhood in fear, but in books, Kathy found her escape and her calling. She says: “I tell everybody that will listen, books saved me. . . I was scared most of my childhood but by reading books I could escape into the pages and become those characters who were brave, bold, something I was too scared to be as a child. Because of reading and books, I have become brave, bold and now it is my mission in life to bring reading to others. I also feel that if my book touches one person like the book that turned me on to reading, I have accomplished my goal. Reading has saved my life and given me a purpose, my mission to promote literacy.” Kathy’s book The Pulpwood Queens' Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life will be released in January.

Like Kathy, I grew up afraid—in my case, of my alcoholic father’s rages—and I found comfort and courage in books. My happiest childhood memories are of my mother reading to me while I ate lunch. We called the time Soup and Stories—I’d bring her a stack of Golden Books, and I still don’t know when Mama ever got a chance to eat her lunch. These lines from “The Reading Mother” by Strickland Gillilan could have been written for my mother: “You may have tangible wealth untold: Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be—I had a Mother who read to me.”

I hope to write more about this lifelong love of literacy and would be delighted to hear from others for whom books have been a salvation. If you’d like to share your thoughts, please do (contact: http://poole-carter.info). Rosemary Poole-Carter

TIMELESS HISTORY

2007-10-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I joined the Historical Novel Society, a community of writers and readers who share enjoyment of the many forms of historical fiction: novels based on the lives of historic personages, novels using history as a backdrop, mysteries, romances, adventures, speculations, and more. While I enjoy reading novels that incorporate history in a variety of ways, in my own writing, I tend to use history as not so much a backdrop as a mask. Versions of the personalities that fascinate me, ideas that move me, issues that anger me today existed in the past and come to life again in historical fiction.

J.P. Hartley opens his novel THE GO-BETWEEN with these words: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Yes, they do—and yet, they don’t. Doing things differently is the mask, but the needs and passions that drive those actions have changed very little over time. As I turn from a history book on the American Civil War and Reconstruction to the morning paper, I find far too many parallels. When I see a soldier missing a limb or talk with a veteran missing friends, present and past blend together—the physical and emotional damages of war have not changed.

Yesterday at a bookstore signing, I asked my friend Wava Everton to perform the Civil War song, "Somebody's Darling", mentioned in my novel. The chorus is this: “Somebody’s darling, somebody’s pride, who’ll tell his mother where her boy died.” One of the customers listening to Wava’s glorious voice was a weather-beaten middle-aged man, whose eyes began to fill. After she finished the song, the three of us talked a little about the man's son, whom the man had not seen in years and who had just shipped out for Iraq. The father's sadness and sense of loss was as timeless and moving as Marie Revenal de la Coste's haunting lyric. In a bookstore in the 21st century, three people—all of us parents—wished what parents have always wished: May our children outlive us.

Rosemary Poole-Carter, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, 978-1-60164-014-7

Ladies in Waiting or Women in Action

2007-10-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

On the radio I heard Susan Faludi discussing her new book, THE TERROR DREAM: FEAR AND FANTASY IN POST-9/11 AMERICA. Among her many provocative points, Faludi described an historic pattern of behavior in times of crisis: following the shock and terror comes the mythmaking in which certain persons are designated heroes and others are the victims to be rescued. Not too surprisingly, hero and victim status is generally assigned along gender lines by both mythmakers and media. Faludi cited the news media’s fixation on the widows of 9/11, although both men and women lost spouses and other family members; the survivors who must carry on in the face of loss were painted as the victims. Then, when some widows rejected the victim role and asked hard questions of the government, the media ostracized them. When the myth in the making is one of specifically male heroism, Faludi commented that it requires bolstering by specifically female weakness and helplessness. She traced this pattern in American history back to the settlement of the nation.

I deeply appreciate the bravery and sacrifice both men and women have made for the good of one another and the good of all. In my comments here, I have no wish to denigrate their contributions to human society. And I recognize that what each individual can contribute to society can very well be determined partly by physical strength, intelligence, talent, willingness, or resourcefulness. Still, Faludi’s radio interview sparked my thinking: though we might welcome rescue and protection, sometimes they come with a price.

I remember my mother’s descriptions of how independent many women were during WWII, managing life on the home front and assisting with the war effort. When the crisis was over, the women were expected by society and often by themselves to go home, to resume their proper domestic roles. So, those who had become women of action for the good of the country in wartime transformed themselves once again in peacetime to ladies in waiting.

For my novels and plays, I often research and write about the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras. And the course of history often fills me with frustration and outrage. In the first half of the 19th century, women’s rights activists had been busy with their agenda, but they willingly or grudgingly put their issues on the shelf with the outbreak of war. Women’s rights activists were among the most vocal advocates for the emancipation of slaves, but the fight to preserve the Union, which grew to encompass the fight to free blacks from bondage, did not expand to encompass true equality among races or genders. Particularly in the South, the kind of mythmaking Faludi writes about was evident in the new order: white males became white knights, silencing women who might speak for themselves and rescuing the white ladies from attack by men of other races by keeping the women in the bondage of dependency. Sometimes the price of protection is too high.

Rosemary Poole-Carter