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they may also change publishing houses or leave the business, and the books they love are sometimes left orphaned and unpublished.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.
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A pair of old boots with horseshoe nails embedded in the soles started me on the journey to Women of Magdalene, my new 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.
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