Remember this: "Terror made me cruel." ~Emily Bronte~
I went to the local Southern Gothic Festival in Camden, South Carolina over the weekend. I am side questing. The weather was showing out with its dismal dreary rain that overcast the Historic Camden Revolutionary War Park. I am out looking for scary moments and ghosts in old wartime haunts. This is a free literature festival with several names so next year pen it down and come out.
I met Kassidy Plyler of the Catawba Cultural Center. Her talk, Catawba Stories & The Trickster Spirit-History, Folklore, and the Unseen, is an overview of Catawban folklore and storytelling traditions centered around the trickster. Miss Plyler reflected on oral histories, mythologies and cultural resilience and how it shapes indigenous identity. She is an absolutely wonderful person to talk to.
I tried to use my time wisely due to the overlap in different speakers giving their talks in different buildings on the campus.
The next panel I sat down for is Folklore, Fear and the Family, Crafting the Modern Southern Gothic. The authors speaking are Allison Gunn and Emily Carpenter. Their talk is centered around how inherited myths, haunted landscapes, and family legacies continue to shape Southern Gothic. Allison Gunn drew from Appalachian and Deep South folklore. Both authors were referencing generational and regional storytelling through the lens of trauma and how it creates a framework for writing on the line between fear and inheritance and how it is evolving with each new generation of Southern Gothic writer.
Allison Gunn is debuting her novel, Nowhere. Emily Carpenter has been tapped to have her novel, Gothictown, turned into an AMC television show, so that is in the works. Their panel talk is very informative and encouraging to the new writer to Southern Gothic. Great questions were asked in reference to how each went about their process for developing the driver of the stories.
I did sit in for the panel, Spirits of the South-Religion, Ritual, and the Southern Gothic Imagination. Dr. Jeffrey E. Anderson, Professor of History at University of Louisiana-Monroe, did bring a lot of clarification to the different questions that were asked. His book, Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook, focuses on black southern communities, resistance traditions and African American spiritual practices.
The practitioner, Tayannah Lee McQuillar, on the panel wasn't helpful due to lack of verbal content. Her input would have been better if she would have separated her sacred practice and spoke more on the use of impostor Hoodoo and other cultural practices to develop story and ambiance without sacrificing personal practices. If she would have spoken from that perspective she would have been more engaging for the audience. Her tarot card deck is, The Hoodoo Tarot and The Sibyls Oraculum. Her stance as I was hearing her talk in short sentences is one of a person that believes different races have a separate supernatural world and we are all divided up based on race when we die but then maybe not but that is how it came across. I don't subscribe to that train of thought. I respect her point of view as it pertains to her.
There was a third speaker on this panel, Dr. Heather Freeman, who is a Professor of Communications and Media Studies and creator of the podcast, Magic in the United States. She explores esoteric and spiritual traditions across American history through media, storytelling, and scholarship. She didn't speak much either but some of the questions were not address to her. I guess everyone is into Voodoo?
 |
| Image by Yulia Gapeenko |
The best of all the speakers was Dr. Abigail Lundelius Smith. She current serves as instructor of Rhetoric and Literature at New Aberdeen College in Charlotte. Dr. Lundelius's talk is Flannery O' Connor-See the Sacred In the Grotesque. Flannery O'Connor used the grotesque to uncover that point between the sacred and the profane where redemption is hiding around every page, or corner.
She talks about O'Connor picking up the baton of gothic horror by Edgar Allen Poe, who was a walking embellishment of all things descriptive that could happen to a character in the gothic genre.
Even though Flannery O'Connor had lupus she went on to live to 39 before she exited the world. One of her best quotes is, "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." She has several works to read from such as, "The Complete Stories" and "The Habit of Being."
The final speaker of the day is Dick Harpootlian, the prosecutor of Pee Wee Gaskins. Harpootlian's talk is on his release of his book "Dig Me A Grave." Pee Wee Gaskins was a notorious serial killer from South Carolina. I remember he once pulled up to the gas pump at my grandfather's store and he was driving his hearse. People would always ask him what was in the coffin in the back. Terribly enough, it was probably a victim of his. Harpootlian spoke of how charismatic Pee Wee was and how he somehow could talk people into doing things for him such as blowing up a law office with C4, and reaching out to Harpootlian himself to speak to him and subsequently try and plan the kidnap, ransom, and murder of his daughter by having his son do the reaching from jail for Pee Wee. Pee Wee was a hot mess. He would burn down his father's tobacco barns and lurk around hunting victims. There was one moment where Harpootlian stated that Pee Wee Gaskins had took the officers out to a location to lead them to the body. When they got there, the officers found a group of men waiting. They felt like somehow Pee Wee had communicated to the outside and those men were there to help him escape. This made me ponder, if those men were willing to help him escape, then it wouldn't be to far of a jump that those same men, who were privy of his killings, were probably in on it with him, or at least were complicent in his dastardly deeds.
If you would like to ready more about this case try Harpootlian's book. There are other books you can reference for this period in South Carolina history.
Overall, it was a great time. I ended it with a seafood boil and hit the road back home.
Wonder what else I can get into?
