The Hand, Mind and Written Muscle:
How PTSD & TBI Helps Inspire A Writer Part II
“A wise mentor once told me that we are born with a family. We have no
control of who or what they are. When we get older, a hallmark of our maturity
is to understand that we get to choose who or what we call our family. “
-Baer Charlton
SPORK!
recently had the pleasure to interview Baer Charlton, author of the children’s
book the Very Littlest Dragon and Death on a Dime.
Baer’s
personal experience on living with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)/ TBI
(Traumatic Brain Injury) and how he proactively uses his writings as a
therapeutic outlet, all helps bring his characters to life. With inspiration coming from personal experience, Baer opens up and shares some words of wisdom on understanding ones self .
•••••
Is equality in the writing
community a struggle for characters who stray from the main stream difficult?
Sadly, I do see a lot (or
at least a certain) “stay with the status quo and we’ll accept
you.” I think we are seeing more acceptance on certain grounds such
as women and some black issues. But if the woman is too powerful or the black
is too assertive, then the book/movie is pushed into the niche marketplace. The
same definitely holds true with gay issues.
Bird Cage, Pricilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Fu,
Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar are great examples. The
gays are the humor fall guys… but if it’s serious like Brokeback Mountain, it can have all of the critical acclaim it
wants, but the real vote is at the box office; and financially, Brokeback was just too much for the
religious mainstream and right.
Which as a social anthropologist, I find really sardonically ironic.
All of this is very close to a raw nerve with me, and I’m hoping I can
dance around the head-on confrontation. In my mystery series, one of the major
characters is not only gay, but a retired Naval Intelligence officer, POW and
recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. But he does like wearing those really ugly granny dresses when he’s
working in the garage.
In Stoneheart, my Marine
becomes close friends with one of the most controversial figures, a trans-gender. A lot to love about this
crusty old retired contractor, as long as you can get past the fact that she
changed toilets.
Have you found that your TBI / PTSD
helps feed into the creative process and characters in Death On A Dime?
All of my disabilities, foibles and peculiarities feed into the
process.
My years of jerking cars from wrecks and hauling them across San Jose
produced the mundane side of Hooker.
My being overweight, love for cooking and caring for others shows up
in Dolly
the dispatcher.
My year spent in a wheelchair during college shows up in the retired
detective.
Time spent as a midnight radio disc jockey gave me [the character] Sweets.
Being a klutz [newbie], I fobbed off on the character Squirt.
He [Squirt] will be back or around for a while, but he’ll never be
able to shed the nickname. If they ever decided to make the book into a movie,
I even know the kid for the part!
What do you find most exciting
about Death on a Dime?
Personally? That it found me.
The time
and location of the mid-1970s in San Jose was a truly exciting time. The old
Mafia was losing turf to the younger more street aggressive Vietnamese Mafia,
as well as the Mexican cartels moving coke and other recreational drugs into
the South bay area. The Silicon Valley was just starting and the nerds hadn’t
even figured out that they even had muscle, much less flex them.
There was still a special innocence in the world, where boys dreamed
of cars with big engines and girls dreamed of boys bent over [examining their
cars]. Families still went to the schools for Friday night games, and there
were open fields, where old kids played games that were more mature then touch
football. The speed limit was 55, and most cars could go twice that, and [if
lucky], some three times that.
The fastest tool for solving a crime was between two ears, or putting
six heads together.
To paraphrase Dickens, “…it was
a terrible time, but also kind of awesome.”
Of your books (future projects
included), which one do you most personally identify with?
I’ve been a professional picture framer for over 40 years, so getting
to publish The Very Littlest Dragon, and explaining the complexities of
the profession was a personal coup.
The [hero] character, Tink, journey rose more from my anger at
Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly
Duckling becoming ‘politically incorrect’ and pulled from schools and
libraries.
But personally identify with? That would have to fall to my mystery
series. The hero is a young tow truck driver and kind of a rebel without a
cause. His “family” is a mix of quirky people that I knew/know. The period is
San Jose, CA from 1973-78, which is when I lived and drove tow truck there.
If you take the first book as a single book, you have a murder
mystery. But if you take the arc of the half dozen books, you have the story of
how a diverse collective of radically different people can make up a cohesive
family.
All of my stories are about people and relationships.
From a tiny dragon in a mug…
to a black woman
passing as white….
to a lost Marine
with PTSD & TBI finding his way home…
to a writer who is willing to give his left leg for a snap of the
football on his 50th birthday (The 13th Man).
The oldest story of mankind is the hero’s journey. It has been told
billions of times and ways, but one thing remains, it is always about the
people.
You’ve mentioned that you have
worked with people who are the “salt of the earth.” How have these people
influenced your work?
There isn’t a “caste system” in the United States!
Every blue-collar worker will tell you, that is bunk; but only
because we call it “class”. I grew up in the lower rungs of the middle class.
We had shoes on our feet, but we also had patches on the knees of our pants in
the summer.
I gravitated towards people who saw life more in terms of “truths they
could touch”.
Rhetoric is not the tool of a janitor or grease monkey or hard rock
miner. Their truths can be seen, are obvious or at least observable. If you
push the dust mop down the hall of a high school, you can look back and see the
trail of shining linoleum; work shows.
Gatsby is big
right now, but only because they want to sell glitz. I think a better movie for
right now would be Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, or Grapes of Wrath.
It’s great to dream about the high-life, but those huge mansions contain a lot
of empty air. There is a lot more love and honest truth in Honey Booboo’s world
than there is in Dallas or Nashville.
We like to poke fun at Hallmark’s “Movie of the Week” as being
smaltzy and a tissue shredder; but there is a reason they still get millions of
viewers. When we are finished with our day of labor, paying bills, dealing with
the problems of the home, we still want to see that there is a reward in
life.
I read in Author
Moment that your mother was a pretty big influence (so is mine!). How
did she influence you?
The year before I was born, my mother learned how to print using a
small tabletop printing press. She was the same all-around artist she taught me
to be, carving linoleum blocks, printing our Christmas cards, as well as a
zillion other things.
I learned to read, at age three, by setting type. By the time I was in
school, when they would give me Dick & Jane books, I was already reading
folk tales from Japan. Only problem was, I was holding the books upside-down;
the way I learned to read.
Setting type, and feeding a printing press one tiny piece of paper at
a time is a mind numbing process. So as one of us would set type, the other was
running the press, we would talk into the night. The safest talk was telling
stories, or more like “building” stories.
We would start with a premise, and then the characters, and finally
move the characters through the journey. As we got the gist of the story nailed
down, she would write down the salient points on a 3 x 5 card. That card would
go in the bundle. Later, that bundle became the boot in my backside to write
and submit my first article.
Long after she was gone, I opened that bundle of memories, and her
last word on a tiny piece of paper fell out. It was the one thing she could
never bring herself to attempt, and she wasn’t going to go quietly into that
long goodnight without one last kick at her son.
She left me that one last word; “Publish”.
Two months later, I was a published journalist in Rider Magazine.
Would you call her an advocate?
Advocate is a very strong word. It carries with it the powerful fist
of confrontation; something my mother wasn’t good at. What she was good at was
loving.
The social language of Jews has a perfect word for what my mother was
- a nudge.
She never nagged or pushed . . . but softly pulled and cajole. Maybe
if she had done a little more advocating and confrontational ass-kicking, I
might have done home-work and been better than a D+ student when I was home.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make the Dean’s List until after she was
gone.
What type of writing styles,
subjects if any, do you wish to see more of in the future?
Anything but Vampires or Harry Potter!
As someone with PTSD and TBI what
advice do you have for others who find themselves in the same position?
Here is where we’re going to have a problem. This [question] assumes
that I’m a guru, and I have answers.
Have I known that my brain-box was out of whack since the 1970s?
Not just yes, but vividly yes.
Do I have answers?
Not really, but I do have things that work for me.
- · You will have acquaintances; even good ones . . . but know who your good friends are, and hold them carefully. (For me) You’re going to be a jerk, the good ones will wait for the Baer they love to show back up.
- · Memories, review your old photos. . . if you don’t recognize where you were, ask your good friends. Then write the information down. If you string the beads together, you might get lucky and end up with a necklace you like.
- · If people don’t seem to want to be around you, even though you take a shower every day. It’s you, so find out why, and get help working on it. There is help out there even for free. But you need to ask.
At the end of the day, what is
the one sentence you want to leave behind for future fans, budding authors and
TBI/ PTSD members alike?
My religion/mission on this mud-ball is to put a smile on the faces of
people I meet, and that their day is better for having interacted with me.
Your mission, if you so choose to undertake it, is to continue my
work.
(PS: you don’t have to wait until I’m dead!)
•••••
Phyllis Hamilton is the
esteemed author of the riveting novels, Cypress
Whisperings and A Lark On A Wing. She
is currently working on a her third novel. You can buy her books here
Whitney Hill is founder and editor of SPORK!, a consolidated news and assistive technology
website for people with mental, physical and invisible disabilities.
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Hand, Mind and Written Muscle: How PTSD & TBI Helps Inspire A Writer has to
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