By: Charles Porter
My name is Charles Porter. I write main stream fiction. I’m talking about my series today. This is the first time I’ve ever blogged, so I hope I get it right.
Half a love story from the twentieth century, its foot on the gas of American existentialism.
If you like novels about Florida, film, music, fallen away Catholics, love, humor, history, religion, crime, country, horses, surfing, and if you read Rolling Stone and have some background in liberal arts, then you might like these books. And if you like novels about American psyche and its mid to late 20th century terrain . . . well?
The three novels in the series are nostalgic for some, a history lesson for others. Flame Vine: His Voices – 1949 to 1986. Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral – 1986 to 1994. Shallcross: Animal Slippers: 1994 to 1996.
The Flame Vine story
The South Florida life of Aubrey Shallcross – car dealer / saloon singer / rodeo rider / poet, with his anthology of friends called the Blue Goose Bunch.
Born predisposed to a split mind or what medicine calls schizophrenia, he is nevertheless high functioning and appears normal like many people with hallucinations. Through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Aubrey walks over the music, drugs, love life, impressionism, and upsurges of gorgeous accompanied by occasional hellish founders, when a figure called the Slim Hand raids his mind.
Follow him from the Belle Glade cane fields to the Indian River on the coast, where he goes under his wing with the spoonbills to dream.
Experience his ontic struggle with Catholicism and atheism trying to understand who he is, tutored as a child by the voice in his head he mistakes for a Catholic angel, but then is transitioned into a separate non-religious phenomenon he is able to see.
At the edge of town is his older friend, Sonny, adamantly protective of Aubrey and the Blue Goose Bunch; Sonny is a secretive man, who lives a life addicted to huffing Freon and vigilante murder.
About the author
I grew up in Stuart, Florida on the St. Lucie River. The family home was the same old wooden house my father was born in. I went to public school, then Catholic school, and graduated from Belmont Abbey College.
After traveling for two years around the U.S. in a camper pickup truck, I went to work in my father’s lumber yard in 1968, following my father’s untimely death. In 1988, I sold the lumber company and became interested in the sport of dressage, an Olympic equestrian discipline. I now devote much of my time to schooling, coaching, and the buying and selling of horses.
I always wrote poetry and music, but in 2010, turned to prose. I live in Loxahatchee, Florida, and South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. I have one son, who is a well-known circus performer and lives in Las Vegas.
Themes and the Hearing Voices Network
Spoilers. Revelations. Twists. My trademarks: I do fill my books with more illustrations than most fiction writers. Just another example of my attraction to pictures and film.
Twists? One is this – the reader has to figure out in the end who actually wrote each of the books. What it is, is an author and his two main characters that even in real life, inhabit and lapse into each other like alchemy.
I dedicate the books to an organization called H.V.N., or the Hearing Voices Network. The Network is not fictional; there are chapters all over the world like Alcoholics Anonymous so people who hear another voice, can go to regular meetings and get solace and friendship from others like them. A great number of these people act normal.
When I was twelve years old, someone turned a radio on in my head and never came back to turn it off. Even when things quiet down and my air puck goes to sleep, I can still, slightly hear that radio playing in the apartment next door, the apartment where the un-locatable location of things thought about must be.
A lot of people who hear voices, are, and appear normal. In Africa and Haiti they would be considered gifted and divine.
Another topic in my stories: There is a huge movement from religious to secular life in our society as seen by the growth of organizations like The Humanist. This same transition is the main character’s dilemma all through the books in the series.
Writing advice
I don’t think creative fiction writing can be taught in school – non-fiction and reportage certainly can and school can’t hurt any of all kinds of writing. When it comes to creative fiction, I liked what Martin Amis told Charlie Rose in an interview once. Amis said, “If it sounds good to you, it probably is good.”
Ups and downs? Don’t force it when you can’t, but you better show up when you can.
Favorite reads
I’m old. I’ve already read a lot. I like essays. I like the American magazine. When I am writing and reading all day, I am amused by the standard interview question, “What books are on you nightstand?” I always answer, “Netflix.” I love film, and don’t want to see another written word that day. Maybe some subtitles.
Excerpt from the third book, Shallcross: Animal Slippers
I’ve been thinking about Aubrey – the hold of his history – the stratigraphy of his life. How years ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey had a huge effect on his free dance – that rising monolith, those apes, the music, the jawbone weapon.
In the beginning for all of us, there was no jawbone, no carnival, no books, no film, no roads, just tracks on the ground – mastodon, ape, cow, human. Later came paths, ruts, piled rocks, blacktops, interstates, tire tracks, soundtracks, contrails, bronze plaques, and destroyed guard rails next to station after station of roadkill cross. That’s what Aubrey Shallcross saw in his seen dreams, those crosses that say someone’s name and “Drive Safely” at the top instead of “Jesus, King of the Jews.” He saw them when his friend died from a snake bite, when another was crushed by a machine, and as an altar boy when he carried the Solar Monstrance
for the priest through clouds of incense. He saw them when Bette Middler’s song, “The Rose,” came through the radio of his truck and he hit a light pole.
And I’ve been thinking about Aubrey’s other voice, Triple Suiter – the talks they’ve had – Aubrey’s strange house, the taxidermy and mannequins in his living room, his views and opinions of people, and his fascination with the bumper sticker, “JESUS PAID FOR OUR SINS, NOW LET’S GET OUR MONEY’S WORTH.”
I think about the irony of his last name: Shallcross – his interest in crossroads, cruciforms, four-way stop signs, and his constant struggle to leave Catholicism for some other state of grace. I think about his comatose visions after the man called Carlos shot him, and he found himself talking to people on Roman kill trees out in the wetlands before he went under the wing of a spoonbill to dream.
Thank you and remember – don’t think twice, it’s all write.
Charles Porter
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