Meet Romey Petite

Today we’d like to introduce you to Romey Petite.

Hi Romey, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My name is Romey Petite—it was also my great-grandfather’s name. I’m a writer, an illustrator, and a performer living in Downtown Southern Pines. I am one half of Studio Holden Petite (along with my partner Laurel Holden) which created and kickstarted the book Spiderella: The Girl Who Spoke with Spiders. I also play a phantom named Mort the Dead Author.

Mort is death as a dramatic persona: He’s a character I employ as a literary device to read a collection of short stories I’ve spent a decade composing into a body of work called The Exquisite Corpse. The mask I‘m wearing allows just the right distance I need to enjoy reading my own work for a captive audience. As for becoming Mort, it feels like I’m playing a serious clown or being turned into a puppet made of my own bones.

The spirit of an artist is the inner child: You put all this time and energy into trying to create a profound thing, you can even go to school for it, but that’s really just an excuse to get tunnel vision about details of the craft. Engaging the audience with what you’re trying to share happens when, one day, you just wake up and do something ridiculous.

It will remind you of something you’d do when you were still a kid, but you’re older now and returning to it feels right. My stories didn’t come together until I painted my face, made a paper-mache mask, and did a voice to go with them.

I attribute a lot of what I’ve managed to accomplish to the guidance of my hypnotherapist P. R. Palm of Calm Palm NOLA (in New Orleans), pursuing shadow-work in the spirit of the enigmatic filmmaker Brittany Markert (also in New Orleans), to John Biguenet of the Loyola University of New Orleans, and to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I am a very lucky person with a lot of kind people who believe in me, but I think anyone who plays a dead author is bound to have skeletons in their closet. A big part of painting my face a spectral clown white represents my maternal Creole family—in particular, their decision to ‘passe blanc.’

Lots of Black Creole families did this at the turn of the century, but my mother’s parents decided to call themselves Sicilians as late as the ’60s. It was a fiction told to the community around them in order to obtain upward mobility with more opportunities in the Deep South. There’s a great deal of hidden shame associated with this schismatic decision, and it definitely had an effect on my identity growing up.

My dad is a white guy with French/Spanish Creole ancestry he’s really proud of (tracing to Alcee Fortier who translated folktales into his ancestral tongue). Whenever he’d be boasting about his lineage, I noticed how quiet my mother was.

She didn’t have the same records of ancestry to flaunt even though she was a Creole, too. Then, while at Loyola University, I read Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” which lead me on a journey into a lot of repressed family trauma. I recently performed Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” for an audience at the Weymouth Center as my character Mort the Dead Author in honor of Mitch Capel (Gran’daddy Junebug), which has probably been one of the most significant moments of my life to date.

It meant speaking out about something my mother has always encouraged me to hide away for fear of being misunderstood. I’ve come such a long way since the confused teenager I was, estranged, unable to figure out where I fit in.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Just like my mother, I am a storyteller. Just like my father, I retell things with my own spin. On long car rides, my mother didn’t need a book to read from. Stories would flow from her, one after another.

My father would read to me from a dusty old text, but he’d often shut the book once he’d gotten the gist, changing its ending or making an observation that couldn’t be found on the page when I’d take a look later on. When I become Mort the Dead Author, I am reading my own work, but the mask allows me to set a tone—an atmosphere like a web to catch my listeners in. I’ll often improvise so each reading feels fun.

If I’m proud of anything at all, it’s this: Twelve years ago, in 2009, I set out to become a serious writer, trying to earn the respect of peers, family, and professors. Instead, I’ve become a living cartoon character, just not a particularly lively one. Mort is a serious clown, a grim comedian, a Don Macabre. Playing Mort, I’ve done both a sold-out show and Raise the Roof at the Sunrise Theater.

I perform local open mics as often as I can. It seems I’ve encouraged a few fellow clowns to come out into the spotlight: One is my pal, the musician Alex Weiler, who plays a brightly-colored character named Penny Pipsqueak in a band called The Frozen Charlottes.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I’ve mentioned earlier that my family is Creole. Mort is definitely an old dead white guy who wanted to be like Edgar Allan Poe.

Just like my maternal family learned to ‘passe blanc,’ I play this persona when up on stage. In fact, my identity is more complicated than that. I don’t even think of myself as or identify as a man. I feel much more like a mannequin.

Sometimes, I’ll play a drag queen named I, Pity the Ghoul who strums on a cigar box ukulele. I think she comes from this funny voice my mother would do when telling me stories.

Pricing:

• My short story collection Horrorscope is $10.
• Spiderella: The Girl Who Spoke with Spiders is $30.

Contact Info:

• Website: romeypetite.com / spiderellastory.com
• Instagram: @romeypetite and @mortpetitepresents
• Twitter: @romeypetite

Image Credits
Daniel Beaudoin