About
MARIE CARTER is a Scotland-born, New York City-based writer and tour guide.
Her first book, THE TRAPEZE DIARIES, based on her experiences of learning trapeze, was published by Hanging Loose Press. Her novel HOLLY'S HURRICANE was published in 2018 and was a Finalist for the 2019 Montaigne Medal. Her third nonfiction book, MORTIMER AND THE WITCHES: A HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FORTUNE TELLERS, was published by Fordham University Press on March 5, 2024.
Marie has been a guest on NPR, BBC Radio Lincolnshire, The Expat Chit Chat Show, Talking Hart Island, and has been written about or featured in The New York Times, Queens Gazette, Huffington Post, QNS, and many other media outlets. She also appeared on PIX11 in October 2018.
Her work has been published in NINETEENTH CENTURY, Hanging Loose, The Brooklyn Rail, Spectacle, and Yogacitynyc, among others, and in the anthologies The Best Creative Nonfiction (W. W. Norton, 2007) and Voices of Multiple Sclerosis (LaChance, 2009). She has also been awarded and attended a residency at the MacDowell Colony.
Marie has taught Memoir, Creative Nonfiction, and Creative Writing at Gotham Writers' Workshop.
Marie is the editor of the anthologies Word Jig: New Fiction from Scotland and co-editor of Voices of the City, published by Hanging Loose Press.
Marie graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in English Literature.
Featured Work
MORTIMER AND THE WITCHES: A HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FORTUNE TELLERS
The neglected histories of 19th century NYC’s maligned working-class fortune tellers and the man who set out to discredit them.
Under the pseudonym Q.K. Philander Doesticks, P.B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City’s tenements and slums. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Mortimer Thomson's peculiar and complicated biography.
Living primarily in the poor section of the Lower East Side, nineteenth-century fortune tellers offered their clients answers to all questions in astrology, love, and law matters. They promised to cure ailments. They spoke of loved ones from beyond the grave. Yet Doesticks saw them as the worst of the worst evil-doers. His investigative reporting aimed to stop unsuspecting young women from seeking the corrupt soothsaying advice of these so-called clairvoyants and to expose the absurd and woefully inaccurate predictions of these “witches.”
Marie Carter views these stories of working-class, immigrant women with more depth than Doesticks’s mocking articles would allow. In her analysis and discussion, she presents them as three-dimensional figures rather than the caricatures Doestick made them out to be. What other professions at that time allowed women the kind of autonomy afforded by fortune-telling? Their eager customers, many of whom were newly arrived immigrants trying to navigate life in a new country, weren’t as naive and gullible as Doesticks made them out to be. They were often in need of guidance, seeking out the advice of someone who had life experience to offer or simply enjoyed the entertainment and attention.
Mortimer and the Witches offers new insight into the neglected histories of working-class fortune tellers and the creative ways that they tried to make a living when options were limited for them.
