By: Alan McCartney
Carol Mitchell’s move from realistic fiction to speculative storytelling may look like a sharp turn, but the author of A Good Haunting: Stories sees a clear connection between the two. At the center of that connection is biomimicry, the practice of looking to nature for structures, behaviors and solutions that humans can learn from or emulate.
Mitchell is the author of the novel What Start Bad a Mornin’, the short story collection A Good Haunting and nineteen books for children. Her short stories and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals. She holds an MFA and is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and several other arts institutions. She teaches writing during the day and continues her own work at night, including a new novel.
A Good Haunting contains nine speculative stories linked by Caribbean identity, grief, death and motherhood. Myths and traditions rooted in Afro-Caribbean heritage appear alongside magic, transformation, immortality and other fantastical elements. Yet Mitchell says her attraction to fantasy begins, in part, with close attention to the natural world.
“My first response to that question is, ‘How can you live in today’s world and not write fantasy?’” Mitchell said when asked about moving from the realistic fiction of What Start Bad a Mornin’ toward work that is often fantastical.
Her more serious explanation is rooted in biomimicry.
“My interest in fantasy actually stems from an intense fascination with biomimicry: the idea of emulating features found in nature to solve problems we face as humans,” she said.
Mitchell points to Velcro as a familiar example, noting that its design was patterned after the way plant burrs stick to clothing. For her fiction, however, the concept is less about inventing products than about discovering natural processes that can become metaphors, character traits or speculative possibilities.
She says that even What Start Bad a Mornin’ contains this way of thinking. While writing the novel, Mitchell was interested in the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly and used that image to think about the possibility of leaving a former identity behind and remaking the self.
“I am fascinated in the ways in which nature protects and perpetuates itself in ways that seem fantastical, and I often transfer these abilities to my characters,” Mitchell said.
That transfer is especially visible in “Emergence,” one of the stories in A Good Haunting. Mitchell says the story leans into the ability of tomato plants to make their leaves poisonous to caterpillars. A biological defense mechanism becomes the seed of a speculative scenario.
Mitchell also studies relationships among non-human animals, including the roles assigned to females of different species. Those observations connect naturally to a collection in which women, mothers and daughters occupy much of the emotional center.
“These ideas coalesce into various ‘What if’ scenarios in my mind and lead to fantastical stories,” she said.
The result is fiction in which the supernatural does not necessarily arrive from nowhere. It can grow out of a question about biology, an inherited myth, a social expectation or a human response to danger. In A Good Haunting, characters may encounter spirits, immortality or transformation, but those devices often expose pressures that already exist in ordinary life.
That is also why Mitchell’s speculative turn remains connected to her realistic work. Both approaches are concerned with identity and change. A fantastical premise simply allows those ideas to be pushed further.
Mitchell’s reading life reinforces that interest in imaginative world-building. She says she tends to read several books at once and reads almost exclusively Caribbean-connected literature. She is currently reading Celeste Mohammed’s Ever Since We Small, which she describes as entertaining, thought-provoking and informative, and rereading Nalo Hopkinson’s The Midnight Robber.
“Her work is so imaginative and powerful,” Mitchell said of Hopkinson. “I learn a lot from her approach to world-building and her expansion and questioning of existing myths.”
For Mitchell, then, fantasy is not an escape from reality. It is another method of examining it. Nature supplies mechanisms that can seem impossible until closely observed. Myth carries inherited explanations that can be extended or challenged. Caribbean life provides the cultural grounding.
Mitchell’s approach also reflects the discipline she recommends to other writers. She argues that reading and courses can help, but that improvement ultimately depends on putting words on the page, creating material that can be revised, discussed and strengthened. That emphasis on practice fits a process built around repeated observation and experimentation.
A Good Haunting brings those elements together in stories where characters face grief, love, betrayal, motherhood and questions of home. The speculative details may be extraordinary, but Mitchell’s creative process begins with a grounded question: What can the world that already exists teach fiction about what might be possible?
A Good Haunting is available on Amazon.
