Carol Mitchell on A Good Haunting: Why Grief, Power, and Community Shape Her Caribbean Stories
Carol Mitchell on A Good Haunting: Why Grief, Power, and Community Shape Her Caribbean Stories
When novelist and educator Carol Mitchell sat down to talk about her latest collection, A Good Haunting, the conversation quickly revealed that her fiction is doing more than entertaining readers. It is exploring what it means to live through grief, navigate power, and find connection in a world that often pushes people apart.Mitchell, who was born in St. Kitts and Nevis and spent formative years in Trinidad, writes stories shaped by Caribbean folklore, family memory, migration, and deeply human struggles. In this interview, she explains how her stories blend supernatural elements with emotional truth, why isolation is such a powerful theme in her work, and what she hopes readers take
away from her writing.
A Good Haunting, Caribbean folklore, grief, power, and writing with Carol Mitchell
Hollis Chapman talks with novelist, short story writer, educator, and George Mason University professor Carol Mitchell about her speculative fiction collection A Good Haunting Stories. The conversation centers on Caribbean folklore, grief, isolation, power dynamics, and how lived experience shapes creative writing across cultures.
Mitchell shares how her Caribbean upbringing, family storytelling traditions, and teaching background all feed into her fiction. She also reflects on why community matters now more than ever, especially in a world where technology can make people feel more connected and more alone at the same time.
Key topics
- In this episode: Carol Mitchell introduces her new collection, A Good Haunting Stories, a set of nine speculative short stories shaped by motherhood, grief, culture, and the human need for connection.
- Mitchell traces her origins as a writer, from wanting Caribbean-set books for her children to writing her own, eventually publishing 19 children’s books and building a career in short fiction and novels.
- The discussion explores isolation as a recurring theme, including how grief can feel deeply personal even when a community gathers to support the bereaved.
- She explains Caribbean mourning traditions like nine nights, and how collective rituals can coexist with private emotional pain.
- The longest story, “The Way of the Bold,” comes up as an example of betrayal, isolation, and the struggle to trust after cruelty within a family.
- Technology and curated online life are discussed as contributors to loneliness, with Mitchell arguing that digital connection cannot replace face to face care, touch, and real awareness of someone’s condition.
- Caribbean folklore and the supernatural are presented as cultural inheritance, including ghost stories, myths, and figures from regional tradition that shape both storytelling and worldview.
- Mitchell describes how the book’s cover reflects life and death, with imagery of vultures and a pregnant belly symbolizing that tension.
- She emphasizes that her stories are not autobiographical, but are emotionally rooted in lived experience, including moments from Barcelona, fears of walking alone at night, and the experience of being a trailing spouse.
- Power dynamics are another major thread, especially how women navigate patriarchal structures and how power can shift, decay, and ultimately fail against nature and the universe.
- The conversation closes on hope and community, with Mitchell encouraging people to find trusted people, be authentically seen, seek help when needed, and actively join communities through shared interests.
Timestamps
Introduction to Carol Mitchell and her new speculative fiction collection02:14 – Caribbean roots, family storytelling, and the path to 19 children’s books04:09 – Why she started writing Caribbean children’s stories05:50 – Grief, isolation, and why community can still feel lonely07:26 –
“The Way of the Bold” and betrayal inside the family09:27 – Why technology can intensify loneliness instead of relieving it12:35 – Caribbean folklore, ghost stories, and the supernatural tradition15:28 – The meaning behind the cover art and where to find the book16:56 – Carol Mitchell’s website and her wider body of work17:53 – Visual storytelling and the possibility of film or TV adaptation19:08 – Writing place realistically and turning lived experience into fiction22:23 –
Power dynamics, patriarchy, and the struggle to hold control24:48 – What Mitchell hopes readers take away from the stories26:40 – Favorite author Nalo Hopkinson and her influence27:36 – How Mitchell teaches writers to work through writer’s block30:35 – Where to find A Good Haunting Stories and upcoming events31:29 – A closing reflection on isolation, help-seeking, and rebuilding community
Notable quotes
“Caribbean people hold Christianity in one hand and superstition in the other.”Copy
“We’re all here together because we need each other to survive.”Copy
“The interactions that you’re having online are great, but they’re not everything.”
What A Good Haunting Is Really About
At first glance, A Good Haunting might sound like a book of ghost stories. And in one sense, it is. The collection includes nine speculative short stories, many of which draw on folklore, supernatural imagery, and cultural myth. But Mitchell makes it clear that the book is just as much about ordinary human experience as it is about the uncanny.She describes the collection as a culmination of ideas she has been gathering over the years, with stories that reflect her “obsessions with motherhood” and the many ways people respond to life’s hardest experiences.
That includes grief, betrayal, aging, power, fear, and belonging.The stories are set across a wide range of places – several Caribbean islands, the United States, and Ghana – which gives the collection a global reach while still grounding it in Mitchell’s lived experience.[IMAGE: Book cover of A Good Haunting with a visual that suggests both life and death.
Cover of Carol Mitchell’s book A Good Haunting showing symbolic imagery of life, death, and Caribbean storytelling]
What makes the collection especially compelling is that Mitchell does not treat culture like decoration. Instead, culture shapes how characters think, grieve, fear, and survive. That gives the book its emotional depth.[INTERNAL LINK: Related post on how authors use cultural memory in fiction.
Why Grief and Isolation Run Through the Stories
One of the strongest ideas in the interview is Mitchell’s explanation of grief. She notes that grief can bring people together, especially in Caribbean communities where rituals like nine nights help support the bereaved. But she also points out that grief is still deeply personal and often isolating.That tension matters. On the surface, mourning can look communal.
Friends and relatives gather, people cook, people show up, and the ritual becomes a shared act of care. But Mitchell reminds us that once everyone leaves, the person who is grieving still has to sit with the loss, the regrets, the unanswered questions, and the emotional aftermath.This is one reason isolation appears so often in her fiction. It is not just loneliness for loneliness’ sake. It is the way grief can cut people off from themselves and from others.In one of the collection’s stories,
The Way of the Bold, a character experiences a devastating betrayal by her mother and responds by choosing isolation. Mitchell says that choice is rooted in a hard truth: when trust is broken by the person who should have protected you most, connection becomes difficult to imagine.But that is not where Mitchell leaves her characters. Even when they resist community, the stories move toward the idea that human beings need each other. Her personal belief is simple: we are here together, and survival depends on that togetherness.That belief gives the collection its emotional center.[CHART/GRAPH: A simple diagram showing the emotional arc from grief to isolation to reconnection]
How Technology Has Changed the Way We Connect
Hollis Chapman raises a question that many readers will immediately recognize: if community matters so much, why do so many people feel more isolated now than ever?Mitchell’s answer is direct. Technology helps us connect, but it cannot replace real human presence.
She points out that online interaction is often curated. You can appear fine while your life is falling apart. You can show only the version of yourself that you want others to see. In that environment, friends and family lose access to the small signals that tell them something is wrong – the facial expression, the hesitation, the body language, the shift in tone.That matters because people often need more than words.
They need to be seen.Mitchell also emphasizes the importance of touch and physical proximity. Those are the things that disappear when digital communication becomes the default. A text message can check in, but it cannot fully replace someone sitting with you, noticing you, or showing up when you are struggling.Still, she is not pessimistic.
She believes the pendulum may already be swinging back toward community. Economic realities are forcing people to live differently, including the rise of multigenerational homes, shared housing, and tighter-knit living arrangements. In other words, some of the same pressures that increased isolation may eventually help people rediscover closeness.That is a useful reminder for readers: connection is not just emotional.
It is also practical. Sometimes the way we live pushes us to rethink what community really looks like.[IMAGE: Photo or illustration of neighbors or multigenerational living.
: People talking face to face in a community setting, representing the value of real-world connection][INTERNAL LINK: Related post on digital burnout and community-building]
Why Caribbean Folklore Still Matters
Another major theme in the conversation is folklore. Mitchell grew up surrounded by ghost stories, family storytelling, and characters from Caribbean oral tradition. Those stories were not just entertainment – they were part of how people explained the world.She mentions figures from Caribbean folklore such as Maman Dlo, Douen, Soukouyan, and the Laja Blas.
These characters are part of a long tradition in which supernatural stories carry warnings, moral lessons, and cultural memory. They reflect how people understand danger, belief, fear, and survival in a specific place.Mitchell notes that Caribbean people often hold Christianity in one hand and superstition in the other. That tension between faith and folklore is part of what makes the tradition so rich.
The stories are not random or silly – they grow out of real experiences and shared history.At the same time, Mitchell is interested in revisiting these myths for a modern audience. Some of them are outdated, but they still carry meaning. By rewriting or reimagining them, she keeps them alive while also making space for fresh interpretation.
This is one of the most valuable things folklore can do in fiction: it helps preserve culture without freezing it in the past.Mitchell’s stories also show that supernatural material can be a way of talking about ordinary life more clearly. Fear, control, loss, and hope often become easier to explore through myth than through realism alone. Caribbean folklore-inspired illustration or symbolic shadowy landscape.
Caribbean folklore imagery inspired by myth, superstition, and oral storytelling traditions. Related post on using folklore in modern fiction
The Real Power of Her Stories
Power shows up repeatedly in Mitchell’s work, but not in the obvious political sense. She is more interested in the power people have over one another in family relationships, marriages, friendships, and social systems.She explains that women in her stories are often struggling with power in multiple directions – with spouses, children, parents, society, and themselves.
That reflects a larger reality: many people are trying to hold on to control in situations where they have very little of it.One story that stands out in the interview is Luminescence, in which a young man experiences a series of tragic events and feels powerless. When the people he expects to support him fail him, he makes a drastic choice. Mitchell does not spoil the ending, but she makes the point clearly: when people are desperate for control, they may act in ways that cost them dearly.Her view of power is almost physical. Power moves.
It changes form. It does not stay where people think it will. And when people get power, they often begin justifying everything they do to keep it.That observation gives the collection real depth. Mitchell is not just writing about who has power.
She is writing about what power does to people.The final story, she says, suggests that all our attempts to control life may ultimately be limited by forces larger than us – nature, the universe, and the fact that none of us is exempt from vulnerability. That is a sobering idea, but it is also freeing. If no one gets to escape the larger forces of life, then maybe humility and connection matter more than domination.Pull quote graphic with the line about power changing form]
Quote graphic summarizing Carol Mitchell’s perspective that power shifts form and changes people]
What Readers Can Take Away From A Good Haunting
Mitchell is refreshingly clear about what she wants readers to get from her book. She is not chasing a grand moral lesson. She wants people to enjoy the stories, enter the worlds she has built, and maybe laugh a little along the way.But if readers also come away with a deeper understanding of other cultures, or if they recognize shared human experiences in people whose lives seem different from their own, that is a bonus she deeply values.The universal themes in the collection are easy to spot: mothering, love, coming of age, pain, joy, grief.
These are not abstract ideas. They are the experiences that shape everyday life, no matter where you live.That is why Mitchell’s fiction works. The Caribbean setting gives the stories specificity, but the emotional questions are universal. How do you trust after betrayal? How do you grieve without disappearing into grief? How do you live honestly when the world rewards performance? How do you stay connected?Those are questions readers can carry long after they finish the book.[INTERNAL LINK: Related post on writing universal themes through specific settings]
Writing Advice: How Carol Mitchell Handles Writer’s Block
Toward the end of the interview, Hollis asks Mitchell about writer’s block, which makes sense given her work as both an author and teacher. Her answer is practical and reassuring.She does not believe there is one universal fix. For some people, the answer is to step away and work on something else. The subconscious keeps working in the background, she says, even when you are cooking, walking, or doing a puzzle.
An idea can surface later as if it arrived out of nowhere.She also strongly supports building a writing routine. The brain learns patterns. If you sit down at the same time each day, eventually your mind starts recognizing that it is time to work.At the same time, she encourages grace. Writing does not only happen while your fingers are on the keyboard. Research, thinking, observing, and even living your life all feed the process.
That advice applies whether you are writing fiction, essays, or blog posts.If you get stuck, the solution may not be to force the words. It may be to give the work time to breathe. Writer at desk with notebook, coffee, and computer]
Writer working at a desk, representing routine, creativity, and overcoming writer’s block]
Frequently Asked Questions
What is A Good Haunting by Carol Mitchell about?A Good Haunting is a collection of nine speculative short stories that blend Caribbean folklore, supernatural elements, and universal human themes like grief, motherhood, betrayal, and power. The stories are rooted in Mitchell’s Caribbean background but explore experiences that connect across cultures.Is Carol Mitchell’s writing autobiographical?Not directly.
Mitchell says her stories are not autobiographical, but they are deeply informed by her lived experiences as a woman, mother, wife, and Caribbean writer. Real places, memories, and emotional experiences often spark the stories, even when the plots are fictional.Why is folklore important in Caribbean literature?Folklore carries cultural memory, values, warnings, and identity.
In Mitchell’s work, Caribbean myths and supernatural figures are not just decorative – they help show how people understand life, fear, spirituality, and community in culturally specific ways.What themes appear most often in Carol Mitchell’s work?Some of the biggest themes are grief, isolation, power, motherhood, betrayal, and the need for human connection.
She is especially interested in how people respond when they lose trust or control.How can I get over writer’s block?Mitchell recommends stepping away, writing something else, trusting that your subconscious is still working, and building a routine so your brain knows when it is time to create. She also says to give yourself grace, because writing includes more than just typing.
Want to explore more about Caribbean storytelling and literary craft? Check out our related posts on folklore in fiction, writing grief, and building a consistent writing routine.External Link Suggestions
One-Sentence SummaryCarol Mitchell’s A Good Haunting uses Caribbean folklore, supernatural imagery, and emotionally rich storytelling to explore grief, power, isolation, and the need for genuine human connection.