Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Beth Gilstrap writes about Deadheading and Other Stories from Red Hen Press.
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Deadheading is a book of fiction; however, it is also intensely personal. Its scaffolding comes from my complicated psychology but it is also filled with real places populated by fictional people from the ghost porches of my childhood in North and South Carolina during the 1980s and early 1990s. This photo is from a yearbook put out by the textile mill where the majority of my mother’s family worked. I grew up listening to stories these folks (many of whom didn’t finish elementary school and my grandfather, best storyteller of them all, who never learned to read) told on my grandparents’ front porch while we all shucked corn or snapped beans, where they smoked and drank, gossiped and prayed. You will find the mill (multiple times) and this house in the book. If I could recreate the pea green glider, the AstroTurf covering, the wrought iron and azaleas and the stump of a hundred-year willow oak felled by a storm, transformed into a garden bed of pear cacti, I would do it in a heartbeat.
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This photo was taken around 1980 and it’s always made me want to protect my sibling and I. My best coping mechanism with the multiple traumas which occurred in this period is to write. You will see this trauma in different shapes and sizes throughout Deadheading. The hard truth is my sibling and I witnessed and experienced quite a lot of emotional and physical abuse. I wrote this book for us in that moment as a way to give us agency, to give all women like my mother who find themselves without a voice more of one. This book is about how to keep living when you’re deeply haunted; all my stories are.
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Another way I coped with the chaos we lived in was learning to cook. Family lore says I’ve been cooking since I had to stand on a chair. My grandma loved to tell people I’d been making biscuits since I could walk good. A friend and I joke that the alternate title to Deadheading is “Dirt, Okra, and Sadness” and it cracks me up every time. I notice food and it shows in my writing.
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Between October 2016 and April 2019, I took care of my mother-in-law who had metastatic stage four cancer. She took seven different chemo drugs, one of which was part of a trial. It was rare that I had a day to myself but I wrote in waiting rooms, outside at picnic tables, in my old Jeep Cherokee with spotty air conditioning. Her psychology (which predated her cancer) caused her to behave in a manipulative and abusive manner for most of her life. Personality disorders do not go away with cancer diagnoses. I loved her fiercely and the hurt she caused her son and me is immeasurable. My therapist calls this “trauma bonding.” Two years after her death I’ve barely untangled one thread; it will be the rest of my life’s work to make some sense of it. In truth, I felt trapped and abandoned during this period. I could not see a future but again, I wrote and in the stories, I controlled the outcomes. I gave trapped women agency because I had none. Two months before she died I sent the manuscript out from her hospital room.
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I took this photo in July 2017, not even a year into caring for my mother-in-law. A few months later, I would self-harm for the first time since my early twenties. There are gaps in my memory during these years. Chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and the many co-occurring conditions can cause dissociation. Between that, the self-medicating I was doing with alcohol, and eventually, the misdiagnosis which led to an antipsychotic drug prescription that essentially wiped out four months of my existence, I think it’s important to share how some of the stories emerged from shadow. I tried to capture this feeling in the story, “For A Blaze of Sight.”
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Around 2015, a friend of mine who had moved away to New York for many years returned to Charlotte. Since I didn’t have full-time employment and my husband and I were supporting his parents through multiple job losses, a foreclosed home, cancer, emotional crises, and medical debt, I agreed to walk her dog. She paid me well, I love the dog, and walking feeds my creativity so it seemed like a no brainer. I didn’t anticipate how walking through my grandparents’ old neighborhood would feel. She bought a home less than a mile from where they lived. So, I had a lot of feelings to work out about gentrification as I watched houses being torn down right and left and replaced with McMansions. Charlotte will break your heart that way. You’ll see me reckoning with this throughout the book, but particularly in “Sinking and Swaddled” and “Like Air, Or Breath, Or Hard Apple Candy.”
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Remember what I said earlier about dirt? Before they went to work in the mill, my grandparents grew up on farms. I come from a long line of working poor and even when they moved into the factories, gardens were a necessity. I even learned a few years ago that my grandfather’s people were sharecroppers on a famous religious family’s land — an empire which is still operational. I was a teenager with a garden in the early 1990s. Classmates thought I was weird, but I didn’t care because I found peace in nature. In Deadheading, there’s hardly a story without flora and fauna in everything. The book’s title is a gardening term which means cutting spent blooms off a plant so it blossoms more fully (no, it’s not about following The Grateful Dead). While writing, I wanted the whole thing to feel lush, alive, and overwhelming in a Joy Williams’ The Changeling or Lauren Groff’s Florida way. Deadheading is my perception and experience of the Carolinas from my chronic post-traumatic stress disorder lens. I’m not sure I could have avoided the southern gothic if I’d wanted to.
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