Mort Castle

Interviewed by Catherine Tudor

CT: You have the perfect name for a horror writer. On file, it is: Castle, Mort.  For those who don't speak French, the word mort, in French, means death. Is Mort Castle your given name or a pen name? Do you ever encourage writers to create a pseudonym? Why or why not?

MC: It's my real name, Morton Castle, and I, of course, go by "Mort" rather than "Morty," because you only want to be called Morty if you're Mickey Mouse's nephew.

Rex Miller was convinced that I had no choice in becoming a horror writer, not with my name.

Funny story which I've shared with folks over the years: A long time back, I met one of my heroes, that master of the elegant jazz violin, Stephan Grappelli. I asked him to sign a few record covers for me, but then, when he heard my name, he crossed himself, and explained he could not write "To Death." He signed the albums, "Good luck."

A pseudonym? Sure, if there's a reason. I've used pen names so that people who go seeking Mort Castle in the Serious Lit Mode don't pick up Mort the Comical Jokester.

But if you think you're going to score as a writer because you've taken to calling yourself Edwina Alana Poe or Ernestine Hemingway, nah, probably won't do it.

CT: Your fiction, though marketed as horror, could also be classified as literary, and you write poetry. Do you think of yourself as a horror writer? Why did you choose to write in that genre? Do you feel the horror genre is respected as much as any other genre?

It was really with my horror writing that I first came to realize I could take myself seriously as an artist, that I could do what every artist in any medium does: Try to find answers, or at least insights, into the One Big Question: What does it mean to be a human being?

And I'm thankful to a number of "outside the genre" writers and artists who helped me see that. Some "quite lit'ry folk"--Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, NEA grant people let me know that what I was doing spoke to them and did so in a meaningful and memorable way. It took years for me to realize it but I did at last come to realize there need be no gulf between making capital A art and creating popular fiction.

I like the horror field, of course. I like the horror community, the sense of continuity. I mean, I autographed a book in 1990 sitting alongside another of the contributors, a guy by the name of Robert Bloch, who just happened to get rolling in the horror biz because of this guy who encouraged him, fella by the name of H. P. Lovecraft . . .

Horror lets us see "people under pressure," and some of them display old Papa Hemingway's brand of courage, "Grace under pressure," and some of them display chicken guts under pressure and some of them become monsters under pressure.

And horror is so broad: I can work out variations on answers or at least hints to answers of the human conditions question again and again--without trying to conform to or worrying about anyone's definition of horror. Or of "dark fantasy," or of mainstream literature, or literary literature, or post modern, millennial non-linear retro-subtextural how's your Mom Ed prose.

People often ask my wife, Jane, "Why does your husband write those horror stories?"

"He's a realist," is what she tells 'em. Go read the papers. Turn on CNN. It ain't all about puppies and rainbows and little kids talking silly to Bill Cosby. Kurtz knew, "The horror. The horror." That's what we got, folks.

What I'm writing is "Mort Castle stuff," trying to make it the best I can, and I am no longer terribly concerned about whether it's even fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a performance piece.

That I have found an audience with "horror readers" is very satisfying, as is my finding an audience with fantasy readers, and mystery readers, and literary readers.

Truly, today, I say I have my niche audience: People who can and do choose to read.

CT: You belong to the Horror Writers Association. Do you recommend beginning writers join professional organizations such as this? Why or why not?

MC: Sure. Damn, this writing thing is so lonely. It's you and words and walls. Anything that takes away some of the aloneness is not only helpful: for most of us, it's necessary.

You get info and advice and market news and all that from the HWA, but more important, you get essential validation as you pursue the craft and sullen art.

CT: You have been praised for your teaching skills.  What do you learn from teaching? What do your students learn from you?

MC: Particularly in the past 20 years, I've learned to go softly, to be gentle. I used to think that if you were meant to be a writer, then nothing would stop you and Mort the Master Critic: this way to the woodshed! would help you stay tough. Then I worked with a lot of really poor students, I mean, financially disadvantaged, I mean they did not have money, okay? And I saw society smashing these kids, and their peers smashing 'em, and their folks with their defeated "don't get above your raisin" ideas, and . . .

Some made it anyway. Some got hurt and stayed hurt and never achieved what they might have.

You can smother talent. You can kill ambition. You can murder hope. If you're a teacher, you're given a license to do exactly that.

And you ought not.

I've learned that Christopher Logue was right when he wrote:

"Be not too hard,
  for life is short
  and nothing is given
  to man. "

Let you in on another couple things that teaching has done for me.

It's helped keep me functioning as an artist. I cannot teach grad students or fifth graders, cannot tell them that writing matters unless I am writing.

And truth, those young people I work with at Homewood-Flossmoor and Bloom and Bloom Trail high schools, well, they keep me young, excited about ideas and art instead of worrying about Enron endorsed 401-K plans or if Serutan really could provide some extra zip.

CT: There is a strong rhythm in your prose. Your anthology Moon on the Water contains many references to jazz. Tell us about your interest and experience in music and how that affects your writing.

MC: It was my pal, poet Bill Wantling, who died in '74, that first helped me get a glimmering that it's all music, that it all swings: poetry, songs, prose.

Of course, I had a musical background: studied classical violin for enough years to know if I truly gave my life to it, I could someday be second chair in a third rate orchestra. Moved on to guitar and banjo and fortunately found a mentor in Josh White, who was very kind to a really wise-mouthed 19 year old Mort. Met and worked with lots of fine musicians: Blind Jim Brewer, Steve Goodman, Jim Post . . .   

Recorded one album in 1965 with a folk trio, The Innsiders (BACA label), did some TV, lots of club work . . . 

Tell you, when I'm writing, I always have an instrument within easy reach. I can find you the sections in stories like "Bird's Dead" or "Love, Hate, and the Beautiful Junkyard Sea" that come right from a guitar chord or mandolin lick or banjo scale.

You can understand why doing the audio CD Buckeye Jim in Egypt for Lone Wolfe Audio was such a joy. It's got it all: Written word becomes spoken word. Sound effects. Original music performed by the folks in our band, Seeking Employment, Charles Niebling, Mike and Zane Baker,  and The Original Drifting Drill Bits. Ray and Rose Hutchins, the Drill Bits, are both in their 80s now and hadn't sung together much since the 1930s.

CT: You edited Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association. How did this come about?

MC: Easy. James Gormley thought up the idea. Writer's Digest Books asked HWA Vice-President Robert Weinberg to edit it. He said he was too busy. He suggested me for the gig and said he thought it rather funny that they hadn't come to me in the first place because I had 1) done so much work at all levels of the education biz and 2) had been an instructor/editorial associate of the Writer's Digest School for almost 20 years.

Writer's Digest thought I was right: I was their absolute first second choice.

CT: Please explain the process involved in editing an anthology.

MC: Tell you, I am a heavy-handed editor. I mean, some people need no editing. I wouldn't suggest a comma change in the short works of people like Ed Gorman, Jack Ketchum, Jerry Williamson, or Elizabeth Massie. They have the right voice to speak their vision every time.

Others, some of them better known than the above, do need editing--although not all of them realize. (Those who don't realize it are not those I'll work with.)

Above all, what I try to do as an editor is what I try to do as a teacher: help a writer discover what it is he wishes to say and how he can best say it--in his own way.

CT: Have you ever considered epublishing any of your work? How do you feel about epublishing and the print-on-demand  industry that is evolving on the Web?

MC: Ah, epublishing and POD, we're just talking about technology, okay?

There are real epublishers, like fictionwise, and there are vanity presses using the epublishing technology.

In any event, unless you're Stephen King or one of a very few others, there's not yet a market for your epublished work. There sure isn't for mine. I've yet to see a dime from anything that's appeared e-peared (Get it? E-peared . . . Never mind).

POD--hey, it's an efficient way of printing some certain types of work.

When it's used by presses like the late and lamented Darktales, original publisher of Moon on the Water, it's used well.

When it's used by WEPUBLISH.DOT.IF.U.PAY . . . then it's the old vanity press and your work is stigmatized because, if you are published alongside of dreck, guess what? You are perceived as still more dreck.

CT: Horror writers must face their fears in order to create an atmosphere of dread or suspense for readers. Are you afraid of anything? Does your work ever frighten you?

You're kidding, right? My best stuff scares the hell out of me: that's why it's my best stuff.

When it is Mort, the Artist, that's me right there, okay? Me happy or me scared or me blindsided or  . . .

Here's a slice from "Dani's Story," from my selected stories in the collection, Moon on the Water:

There are voices, you know, and they talk to me--after hours. Truth is, I'm hearing them more and more often. I don't sleep well, not anymore, and so, two or three in the morning, I'm up reading, trying to write, trying not to feel sad, whatever. And it is then "The After Hours Voices . . ." . . . they don't scream. They are soft, insistent, and regretful. They are not unlike the haze around a mountain peak in an Oriental painting, and just as real.

And when that got written, well, that was none other than Moi talkin' on the page.

Read Gary Braunbeck. Read some of the new young lions, like the ascending masters Joel Arnold and Judi Rohrig. You don't think they had to go way down and take a good look and come back with . . . "The horror. The horror."

CT: Who is your favorite author?

MC: Charles Frazier rates pretty high for Cold Mountain. James Ellroy for the LA Quartet: he understands that it's always all about sin and redemption . . . Don DiGrazia, who might just have the new Huckleberry Finn in his brilliant debut novel, American Skin.

Whew, way too many to list any one favorite--it would be like saying I listen to only Ella Fitzgerald. But I always admire Jerry Williamson, because he never writes down to a reader and never panders to some schlepper's perception of an audience. Stephen King, because he is pure gutsball, a guy who has 100% honest conversations with the guy in the mirror. The old master, Hemingway, because he understood that it is so frightening out there in the *pues y nada* that you need a clean, well lighted place--and, for the same reason, David Morrell.

And one more new kid on the block, I think Steve Savile will have staying power and I always read him with interest: his goal is up there in the House of God and not at the foot of the mountain.

CT: What do you believe is the scariest movie ever made?

MC: The Hills Have Eyes. Absolutely relentless. Nothing but intensity.

CT: What is the best time you ever had on Halloween?

MC: It was a simpler age. I was in college. I dressed up a friend's 12 year old kid and did a real job on him. I had a Hollywood makeup guy working with me. Liquid collodion. All these horrible burn scars and marks, blood dripping mouth. Hunchback. Leather jacket wrapped in chains. A very big and real axe on his shoulder.

Sent him out and he goes shambling down the way and people are screaming and yelling "Oh, my god!" Woman answers his "trick or treat" knock and hands him about three tons of candy and yells, "Just go! Go! Please!"

It was all right.

No biz like show biz, you know?

About Mort Castle

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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