Rosemary Poole-Carter's Blog - Posts tagged "new"
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/
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/
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
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 moved 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 cards as a meditation to free creativity and discover my novel in the cards.
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 cards as a meditation to free creativity and discover my novel in the cards.
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Published on October 03, 2009 21:55
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black, cards, kat, new, novels, orleans, tarot, touchstone
