Christa Carmen: Enjoying the Process Is Important to Me

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the author of The Daughters of Block Island, winner of the Bram Stoker Award and a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated “Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell” (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror). 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. Follow her on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

In this interview, Christa discusses the brief but intense real relationship that inspired her new thriller novel, Beneath the Poet’s House, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Christa Carmen
Literary agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
Book title: Beneath the Poet’s House
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Expected release date: December 10, 2024
Genre/category: Thriller
Previous titles: The Daughters of Block Island (Bram Stoker Award Winner for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, Shirley Jackson Award nominee)
Elevator pitch: After the death of her husband, Saoirse White moves to 88 Benefit Street in Providence, where the poet Sarah Helen Whitman was once courted by Edgar Allan Poe. Saoirse hopes to find inspiration for her own writing, but a new relationship with charismatic author Emmit Powell—strangely Poe-like himself—causes Saoirse to suspect all is not as it seems, and a secret she’s tried to bury may not be the only thing that’s coming back to haunt her.

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What prompted you to write this book?

The novel is based in part on the real-life romance between Sarah Helen Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe and set in the actual house at which Poe first spotted Whitman tending her rose garden under a midnight moon in 1845. The novel sees protagonist Saoirse White navigate both a personal haunting and the lingering ghosts of much-revered public figures, as well as the ramifications of men who treat women as stepping-stones on their way to artistic greatness.

Sarah Helen Whitman was an accomplished poet, but she was also an essayist and literary critic known throughout Providence—and wider literary circles—for her keen intellect and, eventually, her thoughtfully penned defenses of Edgar Allan Poe after his death in 1849. Her passion for science, mesmerism, and the occult as described in Beneath the Poet’s House are unfabricated, and while she typically dressed in black, wore a coffin-shaped pendant around her neck, and held séances in her home, her belief in the afterlife was scientific. Whitman was a fascinating, multifaceted, and purposeful individual, a woman who knew her own mind, and surrounded herself with similarly idea-driven friends . . . and romantic interests.

Whitman and Poe met at 88 Benefit Street in September of 1848, after which they began corresponding with one another, culminating in plans for a Christmas wedding that same year. Her one prerequisite for marriage was that Poe remain sober, so when she discovered he’d been drinking two days before Christmas, she broke off the engagement, an event that, despite the betrayal she felt at Poe’s relapse, distressed Whitman to the point where she fled the Athenæum for home, collapsing on a settee with an ether-soaked handkerchief held to her face.

The whirlwind intensity of this courtship always intrigued me, and on a visit to Providence in early 2022, I started musing on the potential reverberations of their relationship. A modern-day romance inspired by their brief but passionate infatuation with one another seemed the logical next step, and because my novels always trend darker, that romance tipped into madness, obsession, and horror.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Beneath the Poet’s House was part of a two-book deal with my publisher, along with my debut, The Daughters of Block Island, so the idea was with me as early as the beginning of 2022. Honestly, it didn’t change much from conception to execution, and out of all the books I’ve written, published, or “trunked,” it’s probably the one that’s changed the least over the course of writing it. There was something about the idea that instantly intrigued me, the concept of a “residual haunting” at 88 Benefit Street stemming from the brief but intense relationship between Sarah Helen Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. The characters came to me quickly after that, many of them inspired by the transcendentalists, spiritualists, poets, and activists Whitman surrounded herself with throughout her life. As for the horror and thriller trappings that round out the plot, those aspects came about naturally as the story progressed from one draft to the next.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The most surprising moment in the publishing process for this title was how important poetry would come to be to the narrative. Perhaps that seems obvious now, in a book about poets and entitled Beneath the Poet’s House, but I didn’t realize just how enjoyable—and essential—it would be to thread the story with lines from Poe’s and Whitman’s respective works (all cited in the novel’s afterword, of course). Excerpts include one of Whitman’s sonnets, published in the collection Hours of Life, and Other Poems (and commonly believed to be from a series relating to Edgar Allan Poe), Whitman’s poem “To – ”, and a satirical essay Whitman composed for recitation at a suffragist banquet in Providence in 1871, as well as a line from one of Poe’s letters to Whitman, Poe’s “To Helen,” and Whitman’s 1859 poem, “A Pansy from the Grave of Keats.”

There’s also an original poem included in the novel, which is unveiled by Saoirse during a momentous evening at an open mic night. It’s just two or three stanzas, but it drops quite a few clues related to Saoirse’s past, prior to her triumphant return to writing after a bout of writer’s block brought on by the death of her husband. It was incredibly rewarding to challenge myself to mix up the suspense and mystery of the novel with poetic interludes, and I hope readers find them as entertaining as I do!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Both The Daughters of Block Island and Beneath the Poet’s House have connections to historical people, settings, and events in Rhode Island, where I live, and I conducted a fair amount of research while writing them. I find that writing novels with some sort of connection to the past or to an actual place fulfills me in a way that writing more free-floating stories ever could. The challenge of this, of course, is balancing that research with the actual writing.

While researching aspects of Sarah Helen Whitman’s life for Beneath the Poet’s House, I learned several surprising things, one in particular with regards to the heart condition Whitman treated with ether. While these heart troubles were well-documented, particularly within anecdotes surrounding the dissolution of her and Poe’s relationship, there are no formal medical records diagnosing her with any actual heart abnormality; it’s believed by some that the chest tightness and shortness of breath she experienced may have been an anxiety disorder. Even still, Whitman rarely went anywhere without her ether, and this perceived heart condition is likely why she never had children.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope upon finishing Beneath the Poet’s House, readers feel as if they embarked upon a satisfying literary journey through a more mysterious side of Providence, full of twists, turns, and unexpected tunnels, but I also hope they take away a genuine admiration for Sarah Helen Whitman. Whitman was as hauntingly intriguing as the lines of her delicate, decadent poetry, and the house she once inhabited infuses mystery from every Federal-style window molding—bone white against its striking shade of red—as it sits, sentry-like, above Saint John’s Cathedral and the adjacent cemetery. And though no one can discount the macabre genius of Edgar Allan Poe, the woman who commanded his attention—and his love—is just as deserving of contemplation, admiration, and stories inspired by her life and work.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

My best advice for other writers is to write what you truly love. It might sound cliché, but I think it can get tough in today’s publishing landscape to avoid getting wrapped up in trends or trying to write to place something in the market. I’ve always found that if I try to write even a short story, let alone a novel, that’s not directly related to a greater interest of mine, or a greater truth, something I want to explore or probe, something I’m frightened of and want to examine, the writing process grows convoluted to the point of being unenjoyable. If you write to please yourself, about a topic, setting, issue, historical figure, etc. that you adore or can obsess over, you’ll always get something out of the experience, and readers can absolutely sense that joy and appreciation for the themes or storylines in a writer’s work. Enjoying the process is important to me, so I aim to choose characters, topics, and/or settings for which I’m utterly stoked to fall down the rabbit hole while writing. Penning a novel is no small feat, and if you’ve got to stay down among the mushrooms and Mad Hatters while you complete it, it’s essential to enjoy the scenery!