Interview with Frank Carden, author of The Prostitutes of Post Office Street.
The following thread is a question-and-answer session with Frank Carden, whose forth-coming novel, The Prostitutes of Post Office Street, was a SOL Books Prose Series selection.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:29 am
Frank, finally . . .
Between our vacations and the general business of summer, this interview has been a long time in the works. Thanks for agreeing to join us on our blog, and congratulations on having The Prostitutes of Post Office Street selected for our 2006 Prose Series.
Elements that made your book stand out as the judging got heated was its strong sense of place and the believability of its characters. Your story painted a sorrowful piece of Galveston’s landscape and the characters were very human in their pain. It all felt real. Where did you draw your inspiration from for such a vivid story?
August 1st, 2007 at 1:52 am
The women. All had an interesting story to tell, all were on the edge of society,
as were the other main characters. Writing about people with flaws, yet with a certain dignity has always intrigued me. Fortunately in my life, I have known many such people who considered me a good friend. Many a hot muggy night in Galveston, after I got off a job, I sat at a bar in one of the houses when most of the action was over, and knocked back a cold brew while listening to one of the women talk about something important, or maybe not, in her life.
I tried to tell the story with authenticity creatively. I wanted to do that, particularly the authenticity part. Regardless of whether an event occurred or not, and a number certainly did, all scenes had to have believability. Sometimes, it was almost reportage. Let me add, however, about the characters, any resemblance to any person on this earth, or in heaven or hell, in purely coincidental.
Comments from a reviewer on some of my early work concerning Post Office Street summed up my effort in writing this material: The story of Post Office Street is a complex, memorable introduction to a place where people live on terms that are strange to us, at first, and then less “strange†and, finally marvelously compelling.
August 1st, 2007 at 2:19 am
Speaking of authenticity, after the judging was complete and your manuscript had been selected, one of the judges asked, “The author, so who is she?” When I dug through the files and said “Frank Carden,” people were stunned. Because of how well you wrote the female characters in your story, and most of the main characters are women, the judges just assumed you yourself were one.
Now, I hope you see that as a complement. I’ve read plenty of writing by male authors in which their female characters lack authenticity, feel stiff and unreal, and vice versa when it comes to women writers and male characters. What’s your secret? How did you pull off this feat of being able to write stories about the opposite gender so well?
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:43 pm
I’ll be gender specific.
I’ve never met an uninteresting woman.
So when a woman talks, I listen, especially in a one-on-one situation. Consciously now, probably subconsciously at one time, I try to decode the verbal comment. (Not successfully many times.) What does she really mean by what she is saying, and more importantly, what is she feeling, vulnerability, sadness, anger, joy, and so on, and maybe some of the time, why is she saying what she is saying. The key is listening. For anyone who wants to get into the head of a woman and write credible dialogue with built in tension, then listening is all important.
August 2nd, 2007 at 3:15 pm
The way in which you breathe life into your characters is ample proof of your listening skills and ability to decipher people’s thoughts and feelings. And in the end, isn’t that what writers do, observe the world and people around them. What ends up on the written page is their interpretation of events as they see and feel them.
Do you ever let people know that you are mentally saving their stories? Or Ever show them the end results of your “reportage” about their environment? I don’t know what Galveston was like in the 1950s, let alone the section of town you write about in Post Street, but what do you think its inhabitants would feel about the authenticty of your protrayal of this part of town?
August 3rd, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I don’t. I’m listening because I’m interested in what is being said, with no plans to convert it into a story. Yet, I know that, as you stated early, that is where stories come from. So maybe some place deep down inside me, a plan is being born to use the material, but not consciously. Anyway for me, now, the seeds of the story must have time, years perhaps, to germinate and that is the way it has been.
And I haven’t shown any of my invented characters to people that may have been used in modeling. I do believe that they would like the characters. After all these people were my friends and I did not deprive them of their dignity. All filtered back into society in one form or another, many married. All had or have their separate private lives, but I think they would be neither angry nor disappointed at my portrayal or the authenticity.
About reportage. Two examples of pure reportage: The dance in the strip club by the woman with phosphorescent hands painted on her body. The complete strip by the woman in the small beer joint. I don’t have the creativity to have thought up those two scenes. The emotional responses to these two events were just too basic, too primal.
August 4th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Another interesting element in Post Office is that nearly every chapter break signaled a switch to a different character’s perspective, so in essence you were relating several different, yet connected, stories in one. Why did you choose this narrative device?
August 5th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
I chose this narrative device for the reader and myself.
I felt that readers would get a truer perspective of the scene, a better understanding of the emotions involved, a gut feeling in fact, if they saw it through the eyes of each protagonist, rather than through the eyes of a single individual.
For me as a writer, I wanted to explore how each of these characters handled a situation, mentally and emotionally. Being an indigenous writer, I seem to get into the head of a character better and figure out how she will respond when I’m writing from her point of view.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:42 am
From a writing standpoint, you’ve mentioned that one of the advantages to this narritive device is it allows you to get into the heads of each of the characters and tell their stories. Are their other advantages you see, or disadvantages? Post Office is a linear story in the sense of its chronology, but with jumping around in perspective, does it change how you, as a writer, approach the overall story?
August 7th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Another advantage for me in changing the point of view, perhaps it is the same one mentioned earlier, is that the moment and action seems to intensify. A disadvantage, for me the writer, is that I really have to take care in that each character doesn’t have the same personality, doesn’t react in the same way, and doesn’t talk with the same cadence.
For the reader, maybe, a disadvantage is that it could be slightly jarring, jumping from one POV to another. For the reader, changing POV requires him to accept the character as believable in a short space. This is an additional burden on the writer.
My approach in writing the overall story just happened. As the story developed and I added characters, changing POV occurred naturally. Because there were connected, but separate stories involved, each one could have been written independently, then interleaved, but for me, because the novella is linearly laid out, writing along in time, letting the characters interact chronologically, seemed the natural thing for me to do, too. Occasionally, I did have to go back and tidy up dates.
Since you’ve asked that question, did changing POVs alter the way I wrote the story, I have thought about how it would have been to write the story from one character’s viewpoint. I haven’t gotten very far along in answering that question, but it is an interesting thought.
August 9th, 2007 at 12:00 am
With the depth you go into describing and breathing life into your characters, I wonder if there is one that is most dear to you? I know that may be close to asking which of your children is your favorite, but is there one character’s story that you felt you delivered better than the rest? A character whom you continue to think and write about?
August 9th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
The two characters that I believe I delivered the best were Billy and Colby. And I like these two the best. They were a product of the times, the place, and the system. Billy and Colby went their on way as I was writing; they were independent and really made it easy for me. Both had attitude. It’s hard to pick my favorite from these two. I’ve written more about Billy since I finished PO Street.
August 10th, 2007 at 11:03 am
I really liked Colby’s story, how her struggles, being a black woman dating a white man, as you said, “were a product of the times, the place, and the system.”
You’ve mentioned writing further about Billy and having had written other pieces about Galveston. Have you published other stories about these people and the area, or do you have something else in the works that readers, who enjoy Post Office, would be interested in hearing about?
August 10th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
I have just completed a short story about Billy, fifteen years old, the early years. My plans are to send it to several magazines. Depending, I may expand it into a novella.
I, too, liked Colby, a lot.
I’ve written other short stories, about people on the margin, that were published, Rambler Magazine, Chapel Hill North Carolina, Sulphur River Literary Review, Austin and others, but nothing about the Post Office Street people.
The image in the newsletter of the cover for the Post Office Street publication is eye-catching and stunning. The woman is untouchably attractive, beguiling, and mysterious, someone no one will ever know in a major way, a description that fits many of the woman who worked in the houses on Post Office Street. Your artist did a masterful job in creating the image. My congratulations to the artist.
August 11th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Frank, glad you like the cover for Post Office. I know the designer struggled coming up with an image that showed both the beauty and the pain of the people you wrote about.
So any plans to head back to Galveston for more research? Any other piece of prose that you have in the works?
August 11th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Yes, I’ll be going back to Galveston shortly to visit friends and I always ask questions about the city. I also plan to get back there sometime in October when my Post Office book comes out. I plan to visit the book stores along the Strand where thousands of tourist pass through. I believe that there will be a sharp interest in the Post Office book.
I do have prose projects going. Seven or eight years back, I wrote my first novel, unpublished and rightly so, about Post Office Street. I’ve revised it numerous times, but since it was written when I was just starting to write fiction, it needs to be revised again. The characters are certainly different from the ones in my novella, still all were associated with the red light district in one way or another. The characters are more introspective, and more sensibilities are involved. I plan to rework this book sometime in the near future. I have a number of short stories submitted, and I’ll just have to wait and see how that goes.
Prostitutes of Post Office Street is the work I find the most compelling. I tried to make the dialogue and action show the emotional state of the characters. I believe it moves quickly from one scene to the next. It was certainly the most fun writing, if the term fun can be applied to blood, sweat and tears.
August 13th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Frank, once again, thanks for joining us on our blog, and congrats on having your piece selected for our 2006 Prose Series. I hope your future writing about the characters of Post Office Street is just as successful.
Click on the following link to read a sample of “The Prostitutes of Post Office Street.”