One Woman's Writing Retreat: About Mort Castle

About Mort Castle

By Mort Castle

2001 Bram Stoker award nominee for the short story "I Am Your Need," appearing in Brainbox II, Son of Brainbox, edited by Steve Eller, Irrational Press. Moon on the Water, fiction collection, mass market paperback, Leisure Books. Nations of The Living, Nations of the Dead, fiction collection, Prime Books; Buckeye Jim in Egypt: An American Audio Journey (Spoken word and music CD), Lone Wolf Audio Publications. Forthcoming in "Author's Preferred Editions" from Overlook Connection Press/Infinity: Cursed Be the Child, with an introduction by Gary Braunbeck; The Strangers, with an afterword by Marc Paoletti.

56 years old but look considerably younger, thanks to the set screw I had implanted above the nape of my neck; every six months, I give it one turn and my extra chins disappear.

Married to Jane for 31 years. Lived in the town of Crete, Illinois for a few years longer than that. At various times I've been a working musician, a standup comic, a stage hypnotist, a high school English teacher (that little stint lasted a mere 11 years), a magazine and comic book editor, and today and a whole lot of yesterdays, for want of a better term, I am a "freelance language arts consultant," meaning I'll work with anyone who wants to write. In that capacity, I'm writer in residence for three high schools, and teaching "Researching and Writing Historical Fiction" AND "Critical Reading and Writing: First Novels" at Chicago's Columbia College (which is exactly what an arts school should be: artists teaching aspiring artists).

Oh, yeah, I've been writing for a while. I published my first novel in 1967, have seen all sorts of shorter things in all sorts of places, everything from lit mags like Oyez Review to bare tushy magazines like Dapper and Sir!, women's mags like True Secrets, anthologies like Adventures of the Batman and all five in the Masques series (I'm the only living author to have that distinction), comic books, everything except book-length romances and hardcore raunch.

I've been nominated for a lot of awards and even won some of 'em: the Pulitzer Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker award, the DeMarco, the Emerson Fiction Award, Leaders in the Arts for Chicago. I am ranked #5 for the story "If You Take My Hand, My Son," in the "Top Terror Tales of All Time" poll sponsored by the Galaxia Cthulhu Forum of Argentina's elaleph.com; Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, and E.A. Poe (twice) have the first four slots.

Read the Interview

Relevant Links:

Author's official Web site.

Cursed Be the Child at Amazon.com.
Moon on the Water at Amazon.com.
Writing Horror at Amazon.com.
Horror Writers Association
Nations of the Living, Nations of the Dead
Buckeye Jim in Egypt, from Lone Wolf Audio.
Galaxia Cthulhu

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