Christa Carmen

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and two-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, and How to Fake a Haunting, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror), and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australiasian Shadow Award-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.

When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens; uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle; and sets out on adventures with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.

My Q&A with Carmen:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title is very much the premise of the novel. My main character, Lainey, is married to a man named Callum who is an alcoholic but not on paper. He’s ruining her life and their daughter’s life with his drinking. She feels that if she were to take him to a judge to try to divorce him and get full custody of their daughter, she’s not going to have a lot to go on, and that’s heightened by the fact that he has a very influential family. So Lainey’s wild and crazy best friend comes up with a wild and crazy plan to stage a haunting in the house so realistic that it drives her husband out of the house for good.

What's in a name?

I do occasionally give my characters names that are symbolic (Saoirse White and Emmit Powell as having the same initials as Sarah Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe in Beneath the Poet’s House, for example), but in the case of How to Fake a Haunting, I just went with whatever I felt in the moment (with a small shout-out to Lainey Wilson, whom Lainey Taylor is named for, but only because my daughter loves her music).

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I have been writing in one capacity or another for as long as I can remember—painstakingly bound and hilariously illustrated short stories as a child, emo journal entries as an adolescent and when I was in treatment for substance abuse, impassioned nonfiction essays and decidedly weak attempts at memoir—but I didn’t start writing fiction seriously until about 2014, so I think my teenaged reader self would be surprised…and maybe a little impressed!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’d say the hardest scenes for me to write are both the first and the last, or, maybe not the last, per se, but the climax. The first scene I have to get right before I can move on, even on a first draft, because the tone and content of that scene will set the stage for me for the rest of the novel in terms of my headspace and how I’m approaching the characters and narrative. I’ll go back over it thirty-six times if I have to, and once I feel like it’s “right,” I’ll allow myself to write the next chapter. And I feel like climax scenes are hard for any writer, no matter how skilled or experienced. It’s the place where you have to put everything together, where you have to prove to the reader that they’ve made the right choice by following you as far as they have.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Every character I write is the result of small elements of my own personality or experience, which I then force through the blender of edits, beta reader observations, rewrites, cuts, late-night analyses, and (sometimes impulsive) additions. For me, emotionally satisfying characters are a matter of examining them over and over again from all different angles. Is this character believable? Relatable? Driven by clear motivations? Neither all good nor all bad? And onward through the editing process until they resemble both “real” people and “real” players within the drama of the story’s narrative.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Place inspires a lot of my writing. I’d say 95% of what I write takes place somewhere in my home state of Rhode Island; How to Fake a Haunting is set in Newport, RI, my last novel, Beneath the Poet’s House, is set in Providence, my debut, The Daughters of Block Island, was set on Block Island, and many of my short stories take place in Mysticism, a fictional town that exists somewhere between Westerly and Charlestown, and borrows a portion of its name from Mystic, Connecticut.

I think the consistent use of Rhode Island as setting can be attributed to a combination of two factors. First, there is absolutely something haunted and horrific about the smallest state in the United States. Especially in the beach communities at the southern part of the state, there’s such a sense of isolation in the winter, of things lurking in the cold and waiting to awaken. Additionally, while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the oft-repeated ‘write what you know’ adage, I find that in terms of place, setting a work of fiction in a locale with which you are intimately familiar makes for fiction that’s more dynamic to read, and more enjoyable to write.

Visit Christa Carmen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beneath the Poet's House.

--Marshal Zeringue