The first of ten things I’d like my readers to know about me is that readers are dear to my heart. I deeply appreciate those who read and teach and encourage others to read, who read to children, and who support literacy. My gratitude includes librarians everywhere, booksellers who make their bookshops gathering places for people in their communities, and Lucy Walton Lange of the fascinating and eclectic Female First!
Only Charlotte
I tend to shy from autobiographical revelations and memoir, so Lucy’s assignment of ten things is a challenge for me. In setting my novels, including Only Charlotte, in the post-Civil War American South, I feel free to mask my own experiences of people, actions, and emotions behind the gauzy veil of history. Also, I find that history can be a lens through which to focus on issues that still have the power to appall in present day: misogyny, racism, abuse of power, and exploitation of the vulnerable.
Stories are my way of coping. Narratives make sense of the waking world and the dreaming one. When we relate our dreams to another person, don’t we shape those jumbled events and peculiar images into a beginning, middle, and end? Comprehending a story is both real and magical, however the act is accomplished—deciphering letters on a page or a screen, listening to a story read aloud in person or in a recording, touching a textured page of words, watching hands signing a tale.
I had a Southern Gothic upbringing, which became an abiding influence on my writing. This, I understand in retrospect. As a feral child observing adults and an older sister who were variously damaged, brooding, angry, or tormented, I simply tried to dodge the blows, whether physical or emotional, aimed in my direction.
Novel writing is the long game that I’ve played since early childhood. Before knowing how to write, I scribbled between the lines in some of my parents’ books, pretending I was the author. I made up stories and plays as a child and wrote angst-ridden poems as a teenager and college student. Some duller years of numbing jobs followed. Then a new surge of mental creativity swept over me with the biological creativity of motherhood. While attending to the myriad needs of my lively, imaginative children, I found new stories and ambitions stirring in my brain.
Things that interest and fascinate me also influence my characters, especially the protagonists. The visual and performing arts, literature, nature, science and medical history all slip in somewhere among my manuscript pages. Lenore James, the narrator of Only Charlotte, is so inspired by seeing a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that she takes on a Paulina-like role in unraveling the amorous and murderous entanglements swirling around her in 1880’s New Orleans.
It’s all material, and I’m intrigued by human nature and how it manifests itself in story. What drives the characters to behave the way they do? What secrets are they keeping? Can they gain insight? Will they change? I have a little trouble with Authority when it is misused and am drawn to writing about characters who try to be decent human beings while confronted by characters who try to use them in selfish and indecent ways.
My favorite part of research is delving into how my characters know what they know. How are they educated and shaped by their environments and circumstances? If they are readers, what do they read? Backstory, whether or not it is woven into the narrative, informs the story, for what characters believe leads them to action. My high school history teachers emphasized who won battles and elections, but university professors opened my eyes to the nuances and intricacies of social histories and biographies, which I continue to relish. I smiled on reading Mark Twain’s opinion that Sir Walter Scott had “run the people mad” in the American South “with his medieval romances” and then applied the notion to some less-than-sympathetic characters in Only Charlotte.
Similarities and difference between traditional European Gothic tales and Southern Gothic intrigue me. Windswept moors become swamps and bayous lined with cypress trees dripping with Spanish moss. Castles become plantation mansions. The Supernatural becomes the Grotesque. And other-worldly beings—such as vampires, werewolves, and ghosts—become bizarre personalities, haunted or deformed by racism and misogyny and, possibly, ghosts.
I wrote my first novel in long-hand while in the 6th grade, and it was surely a precursor to my love affair with Southern Gothic. It was a medieval adventure tale, full of vile murders and chaste romance. I had read one thick history book from the school library on life in the Middle Ages before plunging into writing with unfettered imagination, naming the chapters as I went, no re-writing required. I may never again create with such abandon. But I live in hope.
Rosemary Poole-Carter explores aspects of an uneasy past in her novels Only Charlotte, Women of Magdalene, What Remains, and Juliette Ascending, all set in the post-Civil War South. Her plays include The Familiar, a ghost story, and The Little Death, a Southern gothic drama. Fascinated by history, mystery, and the performing and visual arts, she is a member of the Historical Novel Society, Mystery Writers of America, and the Dramatists Guild of America. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, she was a long-time resident of Houston, where she practiced her devotion to reading and writing with students of the Lone Star College System. She now lives and writes by the Eno River in Durham, North Carolina.