Writer's Panic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!