The Brooklyn Rail

Caroline Macon Fleischer’s audaciously hybrid second novel, A Play About a Curse, does what it says on the tin. Shortly after completing her undergraduate degree in Dallas and feeling scorned by her beloved professor, the brilliant forty-something theater artist Maxine Due, the book’s aspiring playwright protagonist Corey Cordele visits a storefront clairvoyant and places a vicious curse upon her former mentor. The two women enter a tense and twisted downward spiral that becomes more and more disturbing as Corey’s narration becomes increasingly unreliable. Set partly in the artistic wastes of Texas, partly in Chicago’s vibrant theater scene, and partly in the siren-rich medieval lake city of Annecy, France, A Play About a Curse weaves horror and folklore to explore impatience, jealousy, fame, and self-destruction. Rendered partly in traditional novelistic first-person and partly in script format following a classic three-act structure, Macon Fleischer’s mash-up of prose and drama delivers a bizarre tale of what ruthless ambition can drive a person to do. Full disclosure: I myself was Macon Fleischer’s mentor back in the day, when she was my undergraduate student at DePaul University here in Chicago. Now, she’s one of the most exciting multi-genre writers at work in America, one of the most dedicated members of the typewriter poetry collective Poems While You Wait, and one of the most fun friends a person could have, and she would never put a curse on me (I’m pretty sure). Here, we talk about hybridity, horror, and how mental illness both can be, but does not have to be, scary.

Kathleen Rooney (Rail): Your dedication “For my mentors, Heidi and Kathleen,” struck me as both heartfelt and hilarious. Did you always know that you’d dedicate this book to us, and should we be nervous?

Caroline Macon Fleischer: Yes! I knew I would dedicate it to you two. The first-draft title of the book was The Mentor and the Protégé. I wrote the dedication first thing, after the title page. Structure is my boyfriend so I tend to insert paratext onto the page while drafting. This helps me catch an early sense of how to shape the book. As for the curse element, I like the challenge of thinking in opposites while I write. “My mentor relationships are secure,” becomes “My mentor relationships are demented.”

Rail: The book’s combination of prose narration and a play-script format feels fitting for the subject matter. What does this mixture of genres let you do that simply sticking to one or the other wouldn’t allow?

Macon Fleischer: Selfishly, it feels badass. Being a multi-hyphenate rocks for quality of life but sucks for branding. As an artist, I’m wedged between shelves—a playwright who writes horror novels but is also a poet, essayist, and someone with a lot of hobbies. What does it mean? That I’m a failed millennial because I can’t fit my interests into a subscription box?

Rail: I’d read this book in a book club because there is so much to discuss, but also because your descriptions of food are second to none and would be fun for a themed gathering. Like in the fancy restaurant, Corey and Maxine order “chocolate and raspberry souffles” that “arrive with chimneys of caramel smoke.” How did you decide to make food so prominent and what’s the secret to writing it well?

Macon Fleischer: Themed activities are like my whole personality. I use a version of this book club activity in class. The students are asked to build an experience specific to the book—intentionality behind every thought—time of day, how many guests, where it is, what’s served, what’s discussed, everything down to the damn lighting scheme. As for the food, I try to pay homage to the beautiful Hayao Miyazaki meals—fish pie in Kiki’s Delivery Service, steamed dumplings in Spirited Away. I have a similar feeling about the food depicted in the video game Stardew Valley, which is amazing because it’s a 64-bit game. In A Play About a Curse, I hoped the meals would make the vignettes memorable. I keep the food wholesome throughout the book—souffles, sweet Texas tea, noodles with egg—which I use to undercut petrifying moments.

Rail: Same question in relation to scent. Your use of olfactory imagery—particularly of how Maxine smells when she is thriving versus when she is under the curse—is evocative. Does it come naturally to you to write about smells so vividly, or is it a conscious move?

Macon Fleischer: Omg. I like sniffing and touching things. Like a lot. When I get to go in with the fine-tip brush, I’m so excited. I resort to visuals last, if I can help it, and center on texture and scent, then taste, then sight.

Rail: To me, the genre-combo allows the horror elements of the book to become more horrifying. The idea that Mélusine, the clairvoyant, might really be a siren, the idea that perhaps Maxine is really a lovely mentor and Corey’s locked in some kind of claustrophobic battle inside her own head, the corrosive effects that envy and excess ambition can have on our very bodies. How did you decide to deploy the horror in what might be, at the end of the day, a pretty no-frills story of intergenerational competition between two gifted women?

Macon Fleischer: Totally. Horror authors get trapped presenting emotional plots as symbolic or satirical. It’s funny, right? When I’m scared and can’t sleep, I’m not panicking about curses and sea monsters, but about things not going as planned, letting people down, getting my heart broken, feeling haunted by something I said wrong… that’s scary. I’m also glad you asked this because I’m excited to hear readers’ theories on the explanation of the curse. With the mechanics, I decided on three separate rationalizations and built in textual evidence that could support each of these three. At the Theatre School, I was lucky to take a script analysis class with Dr. Rachel Shteir who followed up our every opinion with, “But where’s your textual evidence?” I wanted the windup to feel open ended for readers but controlled for me as the author.

Rail: The idea that the clairvoyant here, named Mélusine, might actually be a mélusine—that is, a woman who is a serpent or fish from the waist down, like on the Starbucks cup—is key to the creepiness. At what point did this myth enter the story?

Macon Fleischer: I’m a hobby researcher and once I find something interesting, it goes boom, boom, boom. In 2021, I learned about the Spanish artist Joan Fontcuberta while in an alternative history rabbit hole. He’s a conceptual artist, which is a special type of person—it’s got to be someone who enjoys research, has the magic touch for creating something experiential, and has artistic chops. For his project called Sirens (2000), he creates a persona, a priest named Father Jean Fontana, who discovers the skeletons of an unknown aquatic species called Hydropithecus. The imagined discovery is supported by photo documentation and a fabricated article from Scientific American. The skeletons from this alt history are now on display in the Musée-Château d’Annecy. I renewed my passport and traveled there to see it. The fossilized piece is on the tippy top floor of the exhibit and there isn’t much about it online. After so long climbing those narrow medieval stairwells, I thought maybe it went to another museum or something. Its placement in the museum is amazing because it’s the nautical floor amongst real Lake Annecy history, photographs, and scaled models. I appreciate this piece getting mixed into the lore because evidence of our imagination is very real, especially since human history is entrenched with myth. The third act of A Play About a Curse continues shadowing Corey and all her chaos, but it’s also somewhat a nonfiction piece about Annecy written by me, the author. A love letter to the many layers of multimedia the book has and the weirdos like Fontcuberta out there, doing something similar.

Rail: Corey speaks about how the Disney film The Little Mermaid, and then the much darker Hans Christian Andersen version, influenced her as an artist. What books and films influenced you early on and what works specifically influenced A Play About a Curse?

Macon Fleischer: The Swiss scholar Marie-Louise von Franz is wonderful and was a mentee of Carl Jung. I adore her and their dynamic suits the book! In her writing and lectures, she refers to him as her friend and it’s incredibly endearing. One of her special focuses is symbols in dreams and fairy tales. It’s no coincidence that people in different regions and historic periods conjure the same images. The year I went to France, Disney’s Luca came out. The film isn’t based on one specific legend, but incorporates tales of sea monsters in Italian mythos. The director, Enrico Casarosa, mined elements of the story from exploring as a child—similar to another fav of mine, Shigeru Miyamoto of The Legend of Zelda and Mario. These examples are all born in a child’s imagination—from wandering creepy remote caves to flying a red moped across the sky.

Rail: Speaking of Jung, at one point, Corey quotes him: “No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach hell.” The curse turns Maxine’s life into a living hell, manifesting as severe mental illness. Later, without giving too much away, Corey gets her turn with a mental health decline. Can you speak about how you decided to weave this mental health aspect into the plot, and how, if at all, your own artistic and mental health journeys have impacted one another?

Macon Fleischer: A year ago, I would’ve covered my face and said my mental illness is separate from the book. Now, I can see how this final version of the book wouldn’t exist without it. In 2024, I had a months-long psychotic episode which started off with seeing too many of Jung’s damn synchronicities. As time went on and people started to question my health, I became confused and aggressive. I didn’t see the problem. I guess that’s how it works. Finding the right treatment has been tough because, as a woman, I was immediately assumed to have bipolar. It’s hard to articulate as a crazy person, someone repeatedly listed as an “unreliable historian” in medical documents, that I don’t have a mood disorder. When the moods do come up, they’re a consequence of the frantic frustration that comes with not knowing what planet I’m on. This condition wreaked havoc on my self-esteem because it seemed to come out of nowhere. In retrospect, and with medication and hands-on management, I see my paranoia and delusions started sooner, probably in my late twenties. My experience in 2024 influenced the plot of the book, but also the structure. When I started taking antipsychotics, I couldn’t sit still and type because I developed a nightmare combination of effects for a writer—akathisia and anhedonia. My body felt like a cell that’d been lined with needles and frankly I lost my will to live. Finally, I tried a different approach and turned on my theater brain. That mindset freed me because I got to talk through the dialogue and walk around the space. There, I embraced the hybridity of the play-novel and chose to position the dialogue as a script. In the book, several moments of Maxine’s dialogue refer to my personal experience and research on psychosis and schizophrenia. Maxine recognizes the global significance of these mysterious disorders and how they may be a window to spirituality, but like me, she’s also a pragmatist who views treatment and medication as a privilege that allows her to live how she wants. If I lived under different circumstances, such as in a smaller community in a non-surveillance society, maybe I could lean more into my mind’s spirituality. But for my personal dreams—being a great mom and teacher, getting to live and write in a busy city—I notice my suspicions but try not to engage too much. I wrote that in my journal early in all this: “I surrender to the pattern.” Nowadays, I’ll write, “I refuse to surrender to the pattern.”

Rail: You have Maxine’s email signature as a Suzan-Lori Parks quote: “Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that, we can get things like history." How did you decide that would be important to her? Is there something that every play or story you write is about?

Macon Fleischer: Yearning is a permanent fixture in my writing and my soul. It’s so big it blocks the sun. I haven’t yet found pleasure in yearning. For me, it’s more of an ailment. I wish I could glamorize desire, but for now it comes with guilt of the past and worry about the future. Maxine’s choice to use this quote as an e-signature is twofold. One, Maxine is called one of the few living icons of the American theater, which is a good way to describe Parks. I’m sure they’re friends. Secondly, I think Maxine has mastered a skill that I haven’t, which is that how you as an individual frame a story is the story. History is a test of perspective.

Rail: In act one Corey observes, “When she was my teacher, I viewed her as a pillar in the distance, a place to walk toward where I knew I’d belong.” As a professor, I think about this idea of a role model or mentor all the time, because I wonder, and I’m asking you: is it possible to have a mentor and not feel competitive with or ultimately disappointed in them when they reveal themselves to be surpassable or all-too-human?

Macon Fleischer: It’s pretty goofy and backwards to: one, view a mentor’s humanity as a flaw and, two, try to surpass them. Tangentially related, I just was reading the Greek myth of Arachne, who was a regular not-supernatural lady, a talented weaver. In the myth, she challenges the goddess Athena to a weaving competition and slays. Athena can’t handle the jealousy and publicly beats Arachne with a weaving tool. Humiliated, Arachne hangs herself. I didn’t know this, but arachnids and arachnophobia came from this myth, both because she was a weaver and because she hung herself like a spider. The message is about Athena’s hubris and the cost of making assumptions about those we think are beneath us.

Rail: Follow-up: what is the difference between being someone’s mentor or protégé and being their friend?

Macon Fleischer: One of my mantras is, “All things can be true at once.” My take is that boundaries can harden or soften, but what draws people together is, like, humanity. [Laughs] Now that I’m a college professor too, I see how the mentor-mentee relationship can be self-feeding, inspiration and insight moving circularly. These are people who both want to make the other proud but also feel cautious to not disappoint the other. In our friendship—as in Kathleen and Caroline, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts—there’s both. You’ve been supportive about my career and my writing, especially poetry. I think where we’ve fallen off that track, in the best and super fun kind of way, is with fiction. I really enjoy kicking drafts back and forth with you on both our stuff. Also I really just like hanging out.

Rail: Aw, I really like reading your drafts and hanging out, and your poetry makes me laugh out loud like no other. But shifting gears, Corey notes “At theatre school, we often turned to the idea that all art is violence.” Why do you have her make this observation and to what extent is that concept accurate?

Macon Fleischer: It is accurate! Corey gets that from Anne Bogart’s A Director Prepares, which I also studied in theater school. Bogart’s definition of violence isn’t hand-to-hand combat but more about the intensity behind artistic decisions. Directors who waste time with indecision like, “I don’t know, maybe put the chair over there, wherever you want” end up with some flimsy shows. It’s obvious when you see a play where the director struggled with indecision because the production feels flaccid.

Rail: In one of the book’s interludes, Maxine answers the seemingly impossible question “What defines a play?” through the lens of Bertolt Brecht, explaining that he “defines epic theater as a performance that distances itself from the audience rather than drawing them in. In today’s climate, it’s popular for audience members to ask themselves: ‘Do I see myself in the character?’” adding “I think it’s a limiting, self-infantilizing way to view a story.” How do you define a play and what do you want to get out of seeing one?

Macon Fleischer: I paid homage to different production styles across the book. We get the shouting in the living room scenes, which is very Chicago theater, plus multimedia scenes with sounds and projections, plus magical realism, plus surrealism, Greek tragedy, Brechtian, and more. The self-infantilizing comment was very much inspired by you and our conversations about morality in art. I was lucky to study with the theater practitioner Barry Brunetti, who is now retired, whose curriculum focused on these intensities which felt terrifying in the room but in retrospect feel—I say with love—cheeky because it was a safe space that was never explicitly called one, which is rad. He’d make us all close our eyes and he’d say, “What color shoes is Caroline wearing?” and we’d all fidget anxiously. He tested our presence in the room as well as our observation and listening skills. In another example, he taught a class called “In Your Face Theatre,” where we studied plays that were deliberately revolting or provocative. A very challenging class. I’ve wondered how such a class would fare in this artistic climate, where people seem generally afraid to engage in taxing content. Culturally, we’re at an apex of tension. Everyone’s energy is on reserve so it’s hard to point fingers, although I wish people would test their limits more, let some of these ideas claw at them, then observe how they feel afterward. I don’t like people who form an opinion before bothering to engage. Meek and lazy behavior.

Rail: Ugh, I want to take that class. Have you personally ever been to a clairvoyant or psychic?

Macon Fleischer: I’ve only been to one formally-listed-on-Google-Business psychic. Soon after I finished the final draft of the book, I went to one just a few blocks from your building. Picture it: above a funeral home, unopened mail and empty Coke cans and cigarette butts tumbling down a red carpet staircase on the way up. The stench! YouTube with a slideshow of nature scenes around the world. I didn’t care that it was a scam. I gave her a hundred dollars to see what would happen. She had me clutch a little rock that said “faith” on it, which I later saw at Family Dollar. She was so confidently wrong. That said, telepathy and precognition are real and study-able. Take something such as the CIA’s remote viewing research—thousands of people have benefited from those techniques. It fascinates me how most world religions hinge on the power of prayer, meditation, and manifestation, yet it’s written off as debunked in mainstream science. I’m skeptical to think all these beliefs people across mankind have dedicated their lives to out of faith are moot just because theorizing on the unknown feels uncomfortable. “It’s something, but we don’t quite know what,” is a perfectly acceptable answer.

Rail: Throughout the Chicago section, Daniel, who is running the residency that both Maxine and Corey are participating in, has an array of exercises and prompts like “Get the Scary Out” and “Hot Seat.” Do you have any much-loved (or hated) exercises that you like to give your students?

Macon Fleischer: Weird exercises are my jam. My pedagogy is largely focused on the experience of the classroom. It isn’t always possible, but I’m known to show up early and move around furniture, adjust the window curtains and lighting, or get people standing or on the floor. Teaching playwriting, I like to drag props out of the supply closet and make stations. When teaching English or creative writing workshops, we get limited to one table, so I’m keen on bringing objects from home which have interesting scents, textures, and tastes. A student favorite is when I bring a big bag of objects and dump it in the middle of the table. Students get to choose a few of the objects and build characters and scenes around what they picked.

Rail: CLASH Books, your publisher, is an indie cult fave, known for their punk rock attitude and affinity for horror and genre-blending work. How did you end up publishing this with them?

Macon Fleischer: I met my editor, Christoph Paul, at the AWP conference in Seattle. Curse had just crashed and burned on submission with every respected publisher in New York City. So I was blabbing about that, not even really pitching it, and he asked me to send it his way. He read it on the plane ride home and I had an offer a few days later! It feels fated because, after signing, I realized how many CLASH books I already had at home and one was even on display because I loved the cover—At Sea by Aïcha Martine Thiam. That designer, Joel Amat Güell, made the cover of Curse. He went multimedia on it with a lithograph design. Christoph and his wife Leza Cantoral are really good people. In my book, there’s a line that says “I’m not interested in pony shows. In it to make cool stuff.” That really encapsulates CLASH. Their sense of fun is infectious.

Rail: You’re producing the audiobook of this novel yourself—how are you approaching it?

Macon Fleischer: Yes! I’m so craving face-to-face interaction which we’re all deprived of, even still, post-pandemic. My husband Andy Fleischer (who I cast as Daniel after his sparkling audition) as well as Taylor Blim (the actor playing Corey) were commiserating about how these sweaty, intensive, emotionally amped years of training led to self-tapes and Zoom calls. Feels like a void. I’m doing something a little different than a traditional audiobook which feels akin to a staged reading. I want the rawness and imperfections of theater to come through and make the recording an experience. Heidi Stillman, the other dedicatee of the book, celebrates the ephemeral nature of theater. She’s been in my head with that for years because it’s cool.

Rail: Later in the book, Corey states “I realized then that I’d integrated evil into myself. I viewed it without judgment as a special trait or skill.” What is evil and why are some people pulled into its dark glamor?

Macon Fleischer: I feel like mistakes are morally neutral but evil comes with wishing harm on others. Why anyone would want that is mysterious to me. I can’t even handle when people are mad at me, which is a fatal flaw of its own.

Rail: The scariest thing in the novel, arguably, is, as Corey notes near the end, “Human scorn, the worst punishment of all.” Why is scorn so painful to Corey and what made you construct a whole narrative around her perception of this scorn?

Macon Fleischer: Corey has some whack takes, but I agree with her on this one! Scorn is ultimately self-serving. One is left to think they need to earn approval and respect back. That’s when power dynamics get screwed up, when the ground is too uneven to be fair. As a mother, for example, I’ve noticed that usually the consequence of my son’s so-called mistakes is his shame that comes after. No need to allow someone to feel ashamed but continue to reprimand them.

Rail: What have you read or watched recently that you want to recommend here, horror or otherwise?

Macon Fleischer: You recommended the 1977 film Suspiria which was artistically tense and so yummy with the visuals. I also felt inspired by the 2018 game Celeste, made by an indie company called Maddy Makes Games. Both of these show how perception creates its own existential reality which can distort how we view the world. I’m also obsessed with Anna Biller’s 2016 film The Love Witch, which doesn’t give a crap about realism and commits itself to some weird, preternatural, theatrically aesthetic snow globe.

Rail: What’s next?

Macon Fleischer: As for horror, I’m co-writing a scary feature film with the actor Daniella Pineda and we’re working fast and having a blast. In non-horror, I’m writing a memoir about my mental illness but it isn’t at all “woe is me.” I want it to be spectral, inspiring, and charming. There is more than enough horror in and about the mind, but psychological symptoms often point to something special and good about a person.