Mentorship and Magic in Loyola Professor’s new novel

If Shakespeare and Stephen King co-wrote a play in a haunted rehearsal room, it might open like Caroline Macon Fleischer’s “A Play About A Curse.”

The lights dim, air hums and somewhere in the rafters, something ancient bubbles. It’s theater with teeth, horror filled with dialogue and a meditation on ambition asking what happens when admiration curdles into obsession.

Released Oct. 21 and serving as a hybrid equal parts novel and stage script, “A Play About A Curse” follows Corey, an aspiring playwright betrayed by her mentor Maxine, an award-winning icon of the American stage. 

In a moment of rage and heartbreak, Corey visits a clairvoyant in a violet-lit Dallas strip mall and casts a curse binding the two women in ways neither anticipates. When Maxine and Corey later cross paths at a Chicago playwriting residency, the stage is set for a psychological showdown where reality begins to blur. 

Part horror novel, part theatrical fever dream, Fleischer’s second book reads like an A24 production on paper — beautiful, unsettling and threaded with the surreal cadence of live performance. 

Fleischer, a multigenre writer and theater artist, also teaches creative writing at Loyola. With “A Play About A Curse,” she returns to her on-stage roots, crafting a story with both prose and play. The professor’s background started in theater where she worked as a playwright and dramaturg, harboring a desire to bring some of the collective elements found in theater to writing. 

“I wanted to bring some of that theater collaborative spirit to writing and authorship in general,” Fleischer said. “I felt it was this really lonely, isolated practice, whereas in theater, it’s so group-based and hands-on.”

Written as a hybrid of script and prose, the book moves between traditional narrative and dialogue format, giving readers the sense they’re both watching and reading a performance. Fleischer said the idea to blur the boundary came naturally. 

“The key highlight is that it’s written in the prose-script hybrid,” Fleischer said. “You can see the dialogue on the page, but then other prose sections have that traditional paragraph structure.”  

“A Play About A Curse” started out as a regular, prose novel, but after her publisher Clash Books suggested a revision, Fleischer found herself unable to write in her usual way. The writer said after completing her first revisions, she was going through mental health problems and started losing her passion for the project. 

Fleischer said this struggle was a blessing in disguise because she was able to stop thinking about the book and turn to her theater mind. Channeling her playwright capabilities, Fleischer said she was able to get creative with her approach. 

“I took the risk to format it as dialogue and a huge reason for that was just that I could walk around the space, think about how it would be live, think about how people are actually talking to each other,” Fleischer said. “I’m sure I looked like an insane person walking around talking to myself, but a lot of the lines are just transcriptions from me doing that, talking as the characters.”

The haunting heart of  “A Play About A Curse” emerged from a question Fleischer asked herself — what if the real horror isn’t supernatural?

“I had this epiphany that there’s a lot of horror books that have social drama as sort of a side quest,” Fleischer said. “But what keeps me up at night is the social drama. I’m not lying awake afraid of the sea monster villain. I’m lying awake wondering what if people don’t like me? Or did I say the wrong thing? Or will I get my heart broken?”

In exploring that fear, Fleischer turned to “The Devil Wears Prada” for inspiration. Fleischer said she was inspired by the female mentor-mentee relation and found herself drawn to the tension in the dynamic. The writer said the film’s polished world gave her a framework to consider what happens when mentorship turns into rivalry. 

Fleischer said she wanted “A Play About A Curse” to use the structure of a three act play with a tragic hero. For her, the story takes a turn from a successful mentor to mentee relationship. 

“I was really intrigued by this woman-woman mentor relationship and reflecting on all these amazing women who have helped shape my career and have been so generous,” Fleischer said. “Then I just thought the opposite. What if it hadn’t gone that way? What if I became the enemy with a mentor? What if it was so bad that I placed a curse on her?”

Now in her fifth year teaching at Loyola, Fleischer’s experience with mentorship has shifted from theory to practice. Between classes, office hours and the rhythm of advising students, the professor said she’s had time to see her early questions play out in real relationships. 

In her teaching role, Fleischer said she noticed students being nervous to approach a professor and asking for guidance or a favor. As a professor, Fleischer said mentorship is also needed for the adult. 

“It’s made me realize how self-feeding mentorship is,” Fleischer said. “I’ve noticed when students ask me for letters of recommendation, they lead with ‘I’m so sorry to ask you this,’ as if I have some precious life that they’re bothering. Learning from the students helps mentor me too. It’s insight moving in two directions.”

In her creative writing classes, Fleischer said she encourages students to read beyond what feels familiar. As a writer, she said students need to consider discomfort as part of the process, to question their own expectations of a story.

“The main thing I hope my students take away is that it’s not as important to relate to the character as they might think,” the professor said. “It’s actually beneficial to be challenged in that way and not to agree with what you read, but just ask yourself, ‘Why is morality so important to me as I’m reading?’ That’s expansive. That goes as far as reading stories from people outside of your cultural experience or outside of your gender experience or outside of your perspective.”

In her classroom, Fleischer said the conversations often extend into broader questions about creativity and technology. Fleischer said she discourages AI use but approaches the topic with empathy seeing these discussions as a chance to help students rebuild confidence in their own ideas.

“I’ve tried to be more nuanced in terms of just listening to people and hearing them out,” Fleischer said. “We’re just taught that we’re not good enough and our opinions don’t matter and our thoughts don’t matter.”

For Fleischer, that message about imperfection and curiosity sits at the center of both her teaching and her writing. She returns to it often, tracing it back to the writers and thinkers who came before her.

“A lot of new writers come into my class feeling they have to demonstrate some sort of perfection,” she said. “What if Patanjali had ChatGPT or what if Plato had ChatGPT? They weren’t worried about demonstrating perfection. The whole idea was that they didn’t know the answers and were just asking questions. The product is finding joy in asking the questions rather than trying to demonstrate that you’re beyond human.”

“A Play About A Curse” is available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.