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.
Showing posts with label women of magdalene. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women of magdalene. Show all posts
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Mount Pleasant
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.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Gothic, North and South
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
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
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Drawing Inspiration
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/
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/
Friday, January 16, 2009
Frost on the Mirror
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.
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.
Friday, December 19, 2008
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
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
Monday, September 1, 2008
Writing Our Fears
For readers, fiction offers ways to stare down fear from the safety of an armchair. Fear loneliness, and find love between the covers of a romance. Fear crime, and find criminals caught and justice served in a mystery. Fear conspiracies and disasters, and find them exposed and conquered in a thriller. A reader’s fictional roller coaster ride—inching up the precipice of taut suspense, plummeting over the edge of catastrophe, spinning in loops of danger and desire—is as timeless as it is satisfying. But what of the writers who construct the roller coasters? To engage readers’ emotions, to delight, mystify, and thrill an audience, writers must test the rides they design and very possibly face their own fears.
For novelists, writing our fears offers us ways to explore, understand, and articulate the disturbing and horrific, to bring pattern to chaos and language to the unspeakable. Sometimes we write from the dark personal center of ourselves, sometimes from our perception of sweeping events, finding in both approaches the inextricable link between the specific and the universal.
One of my fears—that of madness robbing us of who we are—and my outrage at those who abuse their positions of authority combined in Women of Magdalene, a novel exploring misogyny and racism in a post-Civil War women’s asylum. Through my publisher, Kunati Inc., I have met other writers who keep faith with Kunati’s commitment to “provocative, bold, controversial” books and face an array of fearful topics: war, corruption, paranoia, disease, abuse, kidnapping, suicide, and murder. One of those writers, Karen Harrington, focuses her debut novel Janeology on the aftermath of a mother’s murdering of her own child. Murder is murder, perhaps—yet cases of mothers killing their own children have an overwhelming power to shock. The person, whom we believe should be most trusted with and devoted to a child, destroys the child, a crime that stirs the most primal of fears.
At Houston’s Murder by the Book, an independent bookstore, I moderated a panel entitled “From Mothering to Madness” to explore that primal fear. Joining me were Karen Harrington and Dr. Debra Osterman, a staff psychiatrist at the Harris County Jail. Dr. Osterman treated Andrea Yates shortly after Yates was arrested for the June 2001 drowning deaths of her five children. And the Yates case was certainly an influence on Karen’s work.
I asked Karen what drew her, a mother of young children, herself, to write a fictional account of such disturbing events. Her reply echoed that of many writers who write through their fears: by creating a fictional situation and exploring the motives and actions of her characters, Karen strove for and found a clearer understanding of human nature’s dark side. She asked herself how this terrible thing could have happened. How might it have been prevented? How does the relationship between nature and nurture affect us, particularly in regard to aberrant behavior?
When a novelist writes about difficult subject matter, how he or she approaches the story has a powerful influence on the reader's perception and willingness to take the fictional journey. In Janeology, Karen Harrington reveals the aftermath of Jane's actions from her husband Tom's point of view, giving readers someone to care about and follow as he tries to make sense of tragedy. In Women of Magdalene, I look at the mistreatment of patients through the eyes of an idealistic physician, who challenges the asylum director. And while Karen and I wander the labyrinth of fear and danger in our imaginations, Dr. Debra Osterman addresses mad and criminal behavior daily in her line of work. At the end of our panel discussion, after some lively give-and-take with the audience, Dr. Osterman explained how she copes with the grim aspects of her profession. She renews herself through positive connections with family and friends, good advice for writers, too—and she reads novels, especially mystery and suspense.
For both readers and writers, imagination and realty form not a dichotomy but a symbiosis. Experience creates narrative, and a narrative enlivened with characters, dialogue, and plot becomes a novel, which becomes a roller coaster ride that sends us plunging, spinning, and soaring. Then, we return to our armchairs, a little shaken and a little more emboldened to read and write our fears again.
For novelists, writing our fears offers us ways to explore, understand, and articulate the disturbing and horrific, to bring pattern to chaos and language to the unspeakable. Sometimes we write from the dark personal center of ourselves, sometimes from our perception of sweeping events, finding in both approaches the inextricable link between the specific and the universal.
One of my fears—that of madness robbing us of who we are—and my outrage at those who abuse their positions of authority combined in Women of Magdalene, a novel exploring misogyny and racism in a post-Civil War women’s asylum. Through my publisher, Kunati Inc., I have met other writers who keep faith with Kunati’s commitment to “provocative, bold, controversial” books and face an array of fearful topics: war, corruption, paranoia, disease, abuse, kidnapping, suicide, and murder. One of those writers, Karen Harrington, focuses her debut novel Janeology on the aftermath of a mother’s murdering of her own child. Murder is murder, perhaps—yet cases of mothers killing their own children have an overwhelming power to shock. The person, whom we believe should be most trusted with and devoted to a child, destroys the child, a crime that stirs the most primal of fears.
At Houston’s Murder by the Book, an independent bookstore, I moderated a panel entitled “From Mothering to Madness” to explore that primal fear. Joining me were Karen Harrington and Dr. Debra Osterman, a staff psychiatrist at the Harris County Jail. Dr. Osterman treated Andrea Yates shortly after Yates was arrested for the June 2001 drowning deaths of her five children. And the Yates case was certainly an influence on Karen’s work.
I asked Karen what drew her, a mother of young children, herself, to write a fictional account of such disturbing events. Her reply echoed that of many writers who write through their fears: by creating a fictional situation and exploring the motives and actions of her characters, Karen strove for and found a clearer understanding of human nature’s dark side. She asked herself how this terrible thing could have happened. How might it have been prevented? How does the relationship between nature and nurture affect us, particularly in regard to aberrant behavior?
When a novelist writes about difficult subject matter, how he or she approaches the story has a powerful influence on the reader's perception and willingness to take the fictional journey. In Janeology, Karen Harrington reveals the aftermath of Jane's actions from her husband Tom's point of view, giving readers someone to care about and follow as he tries to make sense of tragedy. In Women of Magdalene, I look at the mistreatment of patients through the eyes of an idealistic physician, who challenges the asylum director. And while Karen and I wander the labyrinth of fear and danger in our imaginations, Dr. Debra Osterman addresses mad and criminal behavior daily in her line of work. At the end of our panel discussion, after some lively give-and-take with the audience, Dr. Osterman explained how she copes with the grim aspects of her profession. She renews herself through positive connections with family and friends, good advice for writers, too—and she reads novels, especially mystery and suspense.
For both readers and writers, imagination and realty form not a dichotomy but a symbiosis. Experience creates narrative, and a narrative enlivened with characters, dialogue, and plot becomes a novel, which becomes a roller coaster ride that sends us plunging, spinning, and soaring. Then, we return to our armchairs, a little shaken and a little more emboldened to read and write our fears again.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
HAUNTED BY THE PAST
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.
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.
Friday, December 14, 2007
RECKLESSLY ROMANTIC IN GRAND CENTRAL STATION
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
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
Friday, November 2, 2007
DIRTY LAUNDRY
“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
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
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Louisiana Book Fesitval 2007
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!
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!
Monday, October 15, 2007
TIMELESS HISTORY
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
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
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