Flame Vine: His Voices

Charlie Porter's prequel to the award-winning, Shallcross (2014), Flame Vine is a novel that takes a deep dive into living with the chaos of hearing voices and the search for safe places to shelter from the storm.

A tightly-woven tale with themes of self-erasure, fear, hallucination and the joys in between, Flame Vine carries the reader through the life of Aubrey Shallcross which happens to be punctuated by schizophrenic episodes shared by Triple Suiter and Amper Sand, the voices in Aubrey's head.

In a masterful way Porter transports the reader into the world of voice hearers, introducing us to the good voices -- and the bad -- to self-medication through addiction, and acting out on impulses.

The condition of hearing voices is not always pathological, and many voice hearers do not come forward or tell anyone for fear of being discriminated against. This is not a story about paranormal powers, nor is it fantasy or magic realism. This fictional piece is taken from the real world, the scientific world, and South Florida's cultural landscape, except Porter's theory about slippers-voices one hears in their head that live on the neuronal roads and in the vast, unknown spandrels of the brain. The reader does not have to believe in slippers, but the author does.

Charles Porter grew up in Stuart, Florida, on the St. Lucie River. The family home was the same old wooden house in which his father was born. He went to public school, then Catholic school, and graduated from Belmont Abbey College with a degree in philosophy. After traveling for two years around the U.S. in a camper pickup truck, he went to work in his father’s lumber yard following his father’s untimely death in 1963. In 1988, he sold the lumber company and became interested in the sport of dressage, an Olympic equestrian discipline, and now devotes much of his time to schooling, coaching, and the buying and selling of imported horses. He continues to write poetry and music, but in 2006 turned to prose. Porter lives in Loxahatchee, Florida and South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He has one son, Michael, who is a circus performer and lives in Las Vegas.