Ask the Author: Mark Morton
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Mark Morton
The idea for my most recently published book, The Headmasters, came from two things, one specific and one more broad.
The specific thing is my great dislike for wood ticks. As you probably know, wood ticks are small creatures (are they insects?) that get onto your ankles when you're walking through tall grass. Then they climb up and sneakily bite into you and suck your blood until they blow up to the size of a pencil eraser. That image of wood ticks is what I imagined the Headmasters of the book to be: like plate-sized wood ticks that attach themselves to your back and sink two "coils" into your brain.
The second thing that motivated me in writing The Headmasters is the fact that the world is full of people who are so downtrodden, that they feel utterly hopeless. These might be young people in urban centres like Los Angeles, or older people in, say, the dying coal towns of Kentucky, or Indigenous people in Canada who have faced poverty and racism for hundreds of years; there's no end to the places where people are so afflicted with hopelessness that it feels impossible for them to overcome their circumstances. That's what the humans in The Headmasters experience: being so subjugated by oppressive circumstances that resistance (to borrow a phrase!) is futile. In fact, in the novel, if a human with a Headmaster even *thinks* about fighting back, the Headmaster will sense that thought and kill the person before they can act. So I'm not saying that The Headmasters is an allegory of social ills -- not at all -- but it does portray, I think, how people can come to feel so defeated, that a generational cycle of hopelessness gets established.
The specific thing is my great dislike for wood ticks. As you probably know, wood ticks are small creatures (are they insects?) that get onto your ankles when you're walking through tall grass. Then they climb up and sneakily bite into you and suck your blood until they blow up to the size of a pencil eraser. That image of wood ticks is what I imagined the Headmasters of the book to be: like plate-sized wood ticks that attach themselves to your back and sink two "coils" into your brain.
The second thing that motivated me in writing The Headmasters is the fact that the world is full of people who are so downtrodden, that they feel utterly hopeless. These might be young people in urban centres like Los Angeles, or older people in, say, the dying coal towns of Kentucky, or Indigenous people in Canada who have faced poverty and racism for hundreds of years; there's no end to the places where people are so afflicted with hopelessness that it feels impossible for them to overcome their circumstances. That's what the humans in The Headmasters experience: being so subjugated by oppressive circumstances that resistance (to borrow a phrase!) is futile. In fact, in the novel, if a human with a Headmaster even *thinks* about fighting back, the Headmaster will sense that thought and kill the person before they can act. So I'm not saying that The Headmasters is an allegory of social ills -- not at all -- but it does portray, I think, how people can come to feel so defeated, that a generational cycle of hopelessness gets established.
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