Podcast appearances and mentions of Ruth Franklin

We were thrilled and a little nervous to sit down with Ruth Franklin to talk about her work and share our origin story. The Book Cougars may not have been born without Ruth Franklin. Or, come to think of it, Shirley Jackson. We were excited to talk with Ruth about her brilliant new work, THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK, and her previous biography, SHIRLEY JACKSON: A RATHER HAUNTED LIFE. You won't want to miss our conversation with Ruth. She is a fantastic writer and a great conversationalist. The interview begins at 01:13:25. In our Just Read segment, we discuss “The Cold Embrace” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the current story from THE PENGUIN BOOK OF GHOST STORIES. Note: we spoil some plot points so read this ten-page short story prior to listening (unless you don't care, then feel free to listen with abandon). Head to the shownotes, where you'll find a link to the story available to read online. Rejoice, for Chris has finally finished SWANN'S WAY by Marcel Proust! However, this won't be the last you hear about Proust. She has committed to reading the next book in his longer work, IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, with Robin Gustafson's group in Feb/Mar 2026. After Proust, Chris found a delicious palate cleanser in THE STOLEN QUEEN by Fiona Davis. Emily finished CARE AND FEEDING: A Memoir by Laurie Woolever and THE CLIFFS by J. Courtney Sullivan, which marks off another square on her Ghost Stories Bingo Card. She also attended the virtual ALL CT READS 2025 Adult Author Talk with Monica Wood who penned HOW TO READ A BOOK, which was one of her Top 10 Reads of last year. Thanks to our two sponsors this episode, authors Lise Mayne (TIME ENOUGH) and Aline Weiller (FUN: Essays on a Life Embraced). As always, we talk about more books and Biblio Adventures than we list here. We hope you enjoy listening and that your next book is a great read. Happy Reading! https://www.bookcougars.com/blog-1/2025/episode231

John J. Miller is joined by Ruth Franklin to discuss 'The Diary of a Young Girl' by Anne Frank.

80 years ago, in early 1945, 15-year-old Anne Frank died from a typhus epidemic in the Nazi German-based concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. As the 7500 square foot replica of the Otto Frank family secret annex in Amsterdam opens in New York City, writer Ruth Franklin is publishing her new biography called "The Many Lives of Anne Frank." According to Franklin, the title of the book refers to the multiplicity of ways in which Anne Frank has been understood and misunderstood. Anne Frank's diary is one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time. Reportedly over 30 million copies have been sold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Episode 228! 2025 is the year of the Ghost Story. We've created a tab on the website to keep you up-to-date on our quarterly readalongs, the schedule for the year-long buddy read of THE PENGUIN BOOK OF GHOST STORIES: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce, and there is a downloadable Ghost Story Bingo Card; we would love for you to play along. Be sure to bookmark the page and check back for updates. On this episode we do a deep dive on Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE which is our first quarter readalong. Chris has read the novel numerous times; this was Emily's first time, and she is now a Shirley Jackson devotee. During the conversation, they mention other complimentary readings, podcasts, and film adaptations, including the biography SHIRLEY JACKSON: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin. Chris and Emily both had #CouchBiblioAdventures. Emily watched the movie Lee starring Kate Winslet about photographer Lee Miller. It reminded her of Whitney Scharer's novel THE AGE OF LIGHT. Chris watched Season One, Episode Four of ROAR: The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on Her Skin based on the book of short stories by Cecelia Ahern. Emily also attended an in-person event via RJ Julia's Booksellers in Madison, CT with Kristan Higgins in conversation with Charmaine Wilkerson and her new novel GOOD DIRT. Of course, we also talk about what we're currently reading, hope to read, upcoming jaunts, and scary neighbors, after all it is the year of the ghost story. We wish you lots of Happy Reading! Show notes for the episode: https://www.bookcougars.com/blog-1/2025/episode228

80 years ago, in early 1945, 15-year-old Anne Frank died from a typhus epidemic in the Nazi German-based concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. As the 7500 square foot replica of the Otto Frank family secret annex in Amsterdam opens in New York City, writer Ruth Franklin is publishing her new biography called "The Many Lives of Anne Frank." According to Franklin, the title of the book refers to the multiplicity of ways in which Anne Frank has been understood and misunderstood. Anne Frank's diary is one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time. Reportedly over 30 million copies have been sold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Episode 227, featuring an author spotlight with Megan Marshall discussing her new collection of essays, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. Megan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who turns her writerly gaze and historical imagination on her own life, her family and friends, and the “after lives” of her biographical subjects. After Lives publishes the day this episode drops–purchase your copy post-haste or request it at your library. We have been enjoying a “real” New England winter this season, which has kept us hunkered down and reading on our respective couches. The books in our Just Read segment are: A New Home, Who Will Follow? by Caroline Kirkland The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spottswood How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith by Mariann Edgar Budde My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave by Elle Cosimano (release date 3/4/25) The Vanishing Kind by Alice Henderson (release date 3/4/25) I'll Be Right Here by Amy Bloom (release date 6/24/25) In short stories, we discuss “The Old Nurse's Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell, the first story in The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce, which we will be reading throughout 2025 for our year of reading Ghost Stories. Chris also read the ghost story The Inn by Guy De Maupassant. We did get out and about for a Biblio Adventure to the New York Society Library to see a reading of Lord Byron's Manfred by The New Relic Theatre. While there we also watched a virtual event via the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism featuring Ruth Franklin in conversation about her new book The Many Lives of Anne Frank. And we had two couch biblio adventures. Emily watched the film The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse based on the book by Charlie Mackesy, and Chris participated in the Women's Prize Book Club with Sarah Waters in conversation with Simon Savidge about her novel Fingersmith. Of course, we also talk about what we're currently reading, hope to read, upcoming jaunts, Simon & Schuster's news about book blurbs, and more. There's a whole lot of yuck in the world now, and we are grateful for good books and bookish friends. Thank you, friends, for listening and connecting with us on social media, email, or Zoom. We wish you lots of Happy Reading! https://www.bookcougars.com/blog-1/2025/episode227

In this episode, acclaimed author Ruth Franklin explores the transformation of Anne Frank (1929–1945) from ordinary teenager to icon, shedding new light on the young woman whose diary of her years in hiding is the most widely read work of literature to arise from the Holocaust.With antisemitism once again on the rise, Franklin's The Many Lives of Anne Frank  takes a fresh and timely look at the debates around Anne Frank's life and work, including the controversial adaptations of the diary, Anne's evolution as a fictional character, and the ways her story and image have been politically exploited. Franklin reveals how Anne has been understood and misunderstood, both as a person and as an idea, and opens up new avenues for interpreting her life and writing in today's hyperpolarized world.

Dogs are Smarter Than PeopleThere's an old NPR article about writing bestsellers that quotes critic Ruth Franklin's overview of American best-sellers as saying "No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception."In his book Hit Lit, which we've been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in the past 100 years or so.We've been talking about that a lot. Hall analyzed Gone With the Wind, Peyton Place, To Kill a Mockingbird, Valley of the Dolls, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Dead Zone, The Hunt for Red October, The Firm, The Bridges of Madison County and The Da Vinci Code.And I just wanted to have a moment to regroup because I found an old interview with Hall and Marc Schultz on Publisher's Weeklywhere he talks about what element he found in those 12 top selling books that surprised him.He says, “One I didn't expect to find is something we came to call the Golden Country, which is a phrase from Orwell's 1984. Winston, the protagonist, trapped in this dull empty world, has created in his imagination this edenic, natural, beautiful landscape called the Golden Country. It's his ideal world. And not just in these 12 books, but in all the bestsellers we looked at, there is always an image of a place or a time that's this idealized, edenic, natural landscape that serves a reference point for much of the story.”We've talked a bit about that in the last week. There's this idealized want of an idealized world or time that we long for, right? And the characters in our books long for it, too.In that same interview, Hall says, “But the ingredients themselves remain the same, as Americans we're really reading, and have wanted to read, permutations of the same book for the last 100 years, and probably into the foreseeable future.”And it doesn't have to necessarily be awesome writing for us Americans to want to read these books.“Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, once cracked, "If I'm a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste.'” Sarah Weinman writes, “What Metalious and her kin in best-sellerdom really possess, as Hall explains so well in Hit Lit, is the power to connect with readers through their hearts and guts as much as, if not more than, their minds.”It's about your heart, humans. About your heart.DOG TIP FOR LIFEAs we learned from the raccoons, don't be aggressive if you don't get your food or else they call the sheriff on you.RANDOM THOUGHT LINK ALL ABOUT A WOMAN CORNERED BY 100 RACCOONS. YIKES!The linkPLACE TO SUBMITGuidelines:The winner receives $3,000; online publication; and a consultation with Marin Takikawa, a literary agent with The Friedrich Agency. The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agent feedback. Submitted excerpts must be under 6,000 words. Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published excerpts will be automatically disqualified. The entry fee is $20. Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee. This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses are welcome to submit unpublished work, as are self-published authors. The contest's deadline is 11:59pm PST on Sunday, October 27, 2024.For full guidelines, check here. SHOUT OUT!The music we've clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here's a link to that and the artist's website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It's “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome. We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here. Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot! Subscribe

Shirley Jackson in North Bennington, Vermont. Award-winning biographer Ruth Franklin visits the small village of North Bennington, where Jackson lived for twenty years. We stand in the square where Jackson imagined 'The Lottery' and conjure the ghost of Merricat Blackwood as she collects her sinister groceries in Jackson's last and greatest novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Modern Classics edition)https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133431/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle-by-jackson-shirley/9780141191454Blackstone Publishing audiobook edition of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, read by Bernadette Dunnehttps://www.blackstonelibrary.com/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle?sp=15364 The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Modern Classics edition)https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133428/the-lottery-and-other-stories-by-jackson-shirley/9780141191430Penguin Audio edition of The Lottery and Other Stories, read by Francine Brodyhttps://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133428/the-lottery-and-other-stories-by-jackson-shirley/9780141994871 Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson (Penguin Modern Classics edition)https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/312885/life-among-the-savages-by-jackson-shirley/9780241387801Penguin Audio edition of Life Among the Savages, read by Kate Handfordhttps://www.penguin.co.uk/books/312885/life-among-the-savages-by-jackson-shirley/9780141994901 Ruth Franklinhttps://ruthfranklin.substack.com/ Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklinhttps://wwnorton.com/books/Shirley-Jackson-A-Rather-Haunted-Life/ The Moonscones Micro-Bakeryhttps://www.facebook.com/p/Moon-scones-100088145470570/ Powers Markethttps://powersmarket.com/ The John G McCullough Free Libraryhttps://mcculloughlibrary.org/ Presenter – Henry Eliot: https://www.henryeliot.co.uk/Producer – Andrea Rangecroft: https://www.andrearangecroft.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The archive and library at LBI contains over 2000 memoirs. On this episode, Mark and literary critic Ruth Franklin, author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, discuss the line between fact and fiction in memoir writing and the evolution of Holocaust memoirs from first hand accounts to books written by second and third generation authors.    LBI Presents is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York | Berlin and Antica Productions.    Hosted by Mark Oppenheimer. Executive Producers include Laura Regehr, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Senior Producer is Debbie Pacheco. Associate Producer is Emily Morantz. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson.

Shirley Jackson in Bennington, Vermont. For this spooky Halloween special, award-winning biographer Ruth Franklin joins Henry to haunt the eery corridors of the derelict Everett Mansion, the house that may well have inspired the greatest ghost story ever written, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jacksonhttps://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133430/the-haunting-of-hill-house-by-jackson-shirley/9780141191447https://apple.co/45OjA79 Blackstone Publishing audiobook edition of The Haunting of Hill House, read by Bernadette Dunnehttps://www.blackstonelibrary.com/the-haunting-of-hill-house?sp=17673https://apple.co/46I1m8K Ruth Franklinhttp://ruthfranklin.substack.com/Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklinhttps://wwnorton.com/books/Shirley-Jackson-A-Rather-Haunted-Life/https://apple.co/475esgb Blackstone Publishing audiobook edition of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, read by Bernadette Dunnehttps://www.blackstonelibrary.com/shirley-jackson?sp=67707https://apple.co/40fy133 Edward H. Everetthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hamlin_Everett The Everett Mansionhttps://svclookingglass.com/4321/entertainment/the-ghosts-of-everett-mansion/Ghost Hunters Series 10 Episode 10https://www.syfy.com/ghost-hunters/photos/darker-learning-season-10-episode-10Southern Vermont Healthcare Realtyhttps://svhealthcare.org/news/svhc-introduces-real-estate-developer-for-former-college-campus Alfred Weissman Real Estatehttps://www.awre.net/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWaZDC4nyjoHenry Eliot: https://www.henryeliot.co.uk/Andrea Rangecroft: https://www.andrearangecroft.co.uk/Lucy Little: https://www.lucyalittle.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cześć kochane słuchaczki i kochani słuchacze! Ten odcinek to odcinek rocznicowy – czy uwierzycie, że nagrywamy się już dla Was od czterech lat? Same nie wiemy, kiedy to przeleciało. Postanowiłyśmy wykorzystać urodziny, by dokonać podsumowania tego, co się przez ten czas wydarzyło, i by zobaczyć, jak się zmieniłyśmy. W tym celu przesłuchałyśmy ponownie pierwszy odcinek naszego podkastu i w pewnym sensie nagrałyśmy go od nowa. Będzie więc o tym, jak wyglądały nasze początki, co wpłynęło na nasz rozwój i będzie też oczywiście o Shirley Jackson – po raz kolejny, tym razem pełniej, szerzej, ale – tak jak cztery lata temu – z entuzjazmem i miłością do książek. Jeśli lubicie to, co robimy, wystawcie nam ocenę na Spotify i zaobserwujcie nas w mediach społecznościowych – to najlepszy prezent na kolejne urodziny podkastu! Książki, o których mówimy w podkaście, to: Shirley Jackson, „Loteria”, tłum. Mira Michałowska i Marcin Wróbel, ilustracje Miles Hyman, Marginesy; Ruth Franklin, „Shirley Jackson. A rather haunted life”, Liveright; Shirley Jackson, „We have always lived in the castle”, Penguin; Shirley Jackson, „Zawsze mieszkałyśmy w zamku”, tłum. Ewa Horodyska, Replika. Mamy Patronite! Jeżeli chcesz dołączyć do naszego grona Matronek i Patronów, będziemy zaszczycone! Dla tych, którzy zdecydują się nas wspierać, mamy spersonalizowane książkowe rekomendacje, newslettery głosowe, podziękowania na stronie i wiele więcej! Szczegóły tutaj: https://patronite.pl/juztlumacze Zachęcamy do odwiedzin na naszym profilu na Instagramie: https://www.instagram.com/juz_tlumacze i na Facebooku https://www.facebook.com/juz.tlumacze oraz na naszej stronie internetowej https://juztlumacze.pl/ Intro: http://bit.ly/jennush

On this Episode Keith is talking to Ruth Franklin from Secret Paradise. Ruth lives in the Maldives and runs Secret Paradise as a sustainable tour operator.Ruth invited Keith out to the Maldives a few weeks ago to show him around the REAL Maldives. This didn't consist of large resorts, this consisted of visiting the local islands and immersing with the local people. Listen to the episode and hear all about what the Maldives has to offer for the Adventure Traveller!Enjoy———————————————We are The Bucket List Company. Welcome to our Podcast, where wanderlust and inspiration meet practical tips and information for all of the top adventure travel destinations around the world.FOLLOW US:Instagram: https://instagram.com/the_bucketlist_coFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/bucketlistcompanyOfficial Website: https://thebucketlistcompany.co.uk/———————————————#bucketlisttravel #adventuretravel #travelbucketlist #bucketlisters

In this first episode of our Multi-Day series with Mat Newton, Ruth Franklin shares her journey to success in the B2B tour business, discussing the importance of having documents in place, creating a succinct pitch deck, connecting with product managers and CEOs on LinkedIn, and making connections and adding value to stand out in a competitive market at trade shows. 00:00

 I've read all of Shirley Jackson's work. I loved it! What should I read that's similar? from mrsmorganbakestoomuch via IGOnce again our booksellers began their recommendations with the query -- "are you sure you have read everything Shirley Jackson has written? There is a lot."  Assuming mrsmorganbakestoomuch had, they jumped in. The discussion highlighted Shirley Jackson's connections to Bennington, Vermont, the frequency with which her work is mentioned in Shelf Help, and that perhaps her estate should be Shelf Help's first underwriter. Jack highlighted Jazz by Toni Morrison and Secret History by Donna Tartt, leading to a short seminar on Ms. Morrison and her works. Kari mentioned Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry. Emma had a long long list including Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi and Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado (seconded by Jack).  All mentioned authors whose work resembles Ms. Jackson's -- Angela Carter, Kelly Link.  Emma also pointed out that winners of the annual Shirley Jackson Award would be a great list to tackle. We hope this helps all you Shirley Jackson fans out there; and based upon our episodes there seem to be quite a few.Shelf Help is a podcast where booksellers help you answer one of life's trickier  - and we'd argue extremely important - questions: what should you read next?  If you've got a reading dilemma, you can email us a question or voice memo at shelfhelpuv@gmail.com. We're here to help your shelves. Shelf Help is a collaboration between the Book Jam, a nonprofit designed to inspire readers; CATV Upper Valley media community (NOW LOCATED AT JAM, Junction Arts & Media); three Upper Valley bookstores: Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, VT; the Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, VT; and Still North Books & Bar in Hanover, NH.  

This year we asked you for stories of precious objects and Ruth Franklin was one of many who responded. Ruth's precious object only became so when she stumbled upon its true history.

Julia and Victoria get into their feels with A Thousand Mornings, a book of poetry written by Mary Oliver, and chosen by their special guest Samira Sakbay.Become a Member! Follow Us on Instagram or Storygraph!Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that give us a commission if you decide to make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Learn more.Mentioned in the Episode:A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver“Daisies” by Mary OliverWhat Mary Oliver's Critics Don't Understand by Ruth Franklin in The New Yorker“No Birth No Death” with Thich Nhat Hanh by Plum VillageRecommendations:Upstream by Mary OliverThe Waves by Virginia WoolfHow I Became a Tree by Sumana RoyThe Hidden Life of Trees by Peter WohllebenAn American Sunrise by Joy HarjoRalph Waldo Emerson collected writingsEmily Dickinson collected poemsWalden by Henry David ThoreauE. E. Cummings collected poemsRupi Kaur's InstagramMorgan Harper Nichols's InstagramThe Soul of an Octopus by Sy MontgomeryCurrently Obsessed:D.P. K-Drama on NetflixHighasakite's new album MotherYouth of May K-Drama Punisher by Phoebe BridgersBroken Horses by Brandi CarlisleBy the Way, I Forgive You by Brandi Carlisle

It's been a dismal year so far for travel and tourism in South East Asia. Now, as vaccine rollouts accelerate and events – and reopening speculation – gather pace, we're launching a brand new weekly show. The SEA Travel News Show will feature a snappy mix of news, updates and mini interviews to keep you up to speed with the latest happenings here in South East Asia. Our take-off edition features the latest from Thailand, Bali, Singapore and Australia. Hannah joins Gary to chat through the potential outlook for travel and tourism for the rest of 2021 - and into 2022. Phnom Penh-based Nick Ray, Founder of Hanuman Films and long-time Lonely Planet writer, dials in from the World Travel Market (WTM) in London to tell us about the South East Asian presence at the show. And we finish in the Maldives, which recently received its 1 millionth visitor in 2021. Ruth Franklin, Co-Founder of Secret Paradise Maldives, tells us why she is feeling optimistic for tourism to the Indian Ocean archipelago in 2022.

It's more than 15 months since The Maldives reopened after the COVID-19 lockdown. Progress has been impressive with a few tribulations along the way - and the nation welcomed its 1 millionth visitor in 2021 last week. Many countries in South East Asia have looked closely at how the Maldives managed its reopening and rebuilt its tourism sector. So in Part 4 of our Destination 2022 series, Gary discusses the outlook for the rest of 2021 and into 2022 with Ruth Franklin, Co-founder of Secret Paradise Maldives. Ruth explains the challenges and successes for resort and local island tourism, and some exciting home-stay plans for 2022. She outlines the key inbound markets since reopening, and others - such as China and South East Asia - that are still missing from the mix. Ruth also outlines shifts in airline routes, the value of a strong repeat visitor market and emerging patterns of travel. Looking ahead to 2022 - which marks the 50th anniversary of tourism in the Maldives - we assess the marketing strategies being developed to broaden the inbound mix as more countries permit outbound travel. Plus, what are Maldives Border Miles, and why do they matter?

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting Of Hill House - Episode 2 - Is Hill House Haunted Or Not?!   I'm Christy Shriver and we're here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.    And I'm Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.     Read the first paragraph of chapter 2.    That is the first paragraph of chapter 2 of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.  This is episode 2 as we explore this haunted space- and Christy, haunted it is.  Last week, we spent a lot of time talking about Shirley Jackson and her relationship with her mother.  It was our argument that a lot of the terror she creates springs originally from the dysfunction of living with a toxic mother.  We introduced the idea of reality versus illusion and the difficulty of knowing one from the other- especially in these toxic relationships.  We introduced the idea of feeling trapped and alone.  All of these feelings metaphorically expressing themselves not just in the characters who populate the story, but also in the physical space- the haunted house itself.      And Jackson borrowed from every gothic trope she could find to build for us a very relatable creepy house-  it's so stereotypical, we have to wonder if that in itself is part of her strategy- which of course, it very much is.   But, why?  What is she expressing? Of course, we know that haunted houses do express evil and fear and always have. We, also know that houses, in and of themselves, occupy a very important place in our psyche.  As people, we have an incredibly powerful psychological attachment to the physical spaces that populate our lives.  Physical spaces can bring us memories; as in favorite vacation destinations, they can be sacred as in a church, and they can also be haunted.  Let me quote Dr. Montague as he explained the origins of haunted houses to his assistants in chapter 3     Page 50-51    Jackson, herself, was always interested in houses- and for good reason.  Her grandfather had been a very important architect  in San Francisco, and she brought all of that family interest into her own life.  Jackson wanted to write a ghost story and then she set out to write Hill House, so, I guess it just made sense for her to research a bunch of different houses in order to create the one for her story.  She even enlisted her mother to help her get some research about a famous haunted house in San Jose, California, the Winchester Mystery House- one that still attracts millions of visitors visit every year.      I also happened to notice that Dr. Montague directly references this very famous house.  I wish I can say I had heard of it, but I hadn't, so I looked it up.  A woman by the name of Sarah Winchester inherited $20 million in 1881 from her dead husband and his family who had made their money selling firearms.  She was said to have moved to California to build a home for the spirits of the dead people who had been killed by the firearms made by her husband's family.  The Winchester house is really bizarre and worth Googling.  I can see why it has so many visitors.  It is enormous: 24,000 square feet; it has 10,000 windows, 47 stairways and fireplaces, 160 rooms, and 17 chimneys among other things.      It's weird looking too with all those turrets that remind us of what a proper haunted house should look like,  and Jackson studied it and her house has turrets, but Hill House isn't just one house, and it's not near as large as the Winchester House.  It's funny how many theories there are about what all inspired Hill House.  Stanley, Shirley's husband worked as a professor at a woman's college, I'm not sure we got to that last episode, but he worked at Bennington College in Vermont.  Well the Music building on campus is called Jennings Hall, and it is apart from the other buildings.  It's made from gray stone and stands against the hills, kind of like the opening of Hill House.   Lots of people see that connection. Ruth Franklin, Jackson's most recent biographer and probably the leading expert on all things Jackson, talks about a file she found in Jackson's archive at the Library of Congress when she was researching Jackson's life.  She found a collection of pictures and newspaper clippings about all these different places and events that inspired Hill House.  One was a newpaper article about a poltergeist incident in Long island, there were pictures of a couple of castles, there was the Winchester house stuff, but then she found one called the Edward H Everett Mansion- which is also in Vermont, and actually very near Bennington where Jackson and her family lived.  Franklin and her husband went there when she was researching for her book on Jackson and were basically shocked at how evil that house looked.  She and her husband both got chills just being on the property, so Franklin believes a lot of Hill House is inspired by that place.      At the end of the day, Hill House is the invention of Shirley Jackson's mind- not a specific place on earth.  It is also a creepy ole' metaphor for something- and when you're reading the book by chapter 4 where we go to in this episode - you don't know what it could be- but you intuitively feel it has to have something to do with a home- but definitely not a happy home- but maybe a place that should have been happy but is twisted, but maybe it is even a place that promised to be happy or to be something- but it lied about that.  I think when we read novels, especially the ones we like, sometimes we don't really know what we identify with- we just feel some sort of connection.  I think that's the big question in this book- especially at the beginning.  What am I supposed to make of this house?  Why am I compelled to read about it?   If it's so creepy why does Eleanor stay there?  What compels her to go inside? What's attracting her there?  Is it just that it's not her sister's house so anything is better than that?  Is she looking for a home?  As we read further on, we will come to understand that that is exactly what it is all about.  Of course, for all of us- having a home is important.  Wouldn't you agree, with Bing Crosby, Garry, that there's no place like home for the holidays?    Homes and thus families are important, there's a lot of psychological research to support that, of course.  But let's just narrow in on the idea of that physical space we associate with our home- where we currently are living and hopefully nesting.  For many of us, if we are going to make it our home- and not just a place where we sleep and maybe eat, a home is part of our self-definition- it is that physical space that expresses who we really are.  That's why decorating a home in your own way and making it beautiful to YOU is so important.  It's why I encourage people, even if you're wealthy enough to hire professional decorators, to be involved in that process in a personal way.  Most of us, however, don't have that problem, but we should make our home reflective of our interests, our passions, our tastes.  We should let it reflect OUR identity- in a positive way.  It's also true and I quote Robert Frost here, “Home is the place that, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  That's another very important idea.  It is a place where you feel safe, and you can be oriented in space and time.  It's a place where you can be vulnerable without being exploited.  But that's where the dangers reside, right?  If you are vulnerable, then by definition, you can be exploited- and of course, that happens, and it definitely happened to Shirley Jackson.    For me, a house really does has a spirit to it.  As strange as that sounds, especially if someone has lived in the same place for a while.  In some sense, a physical space has to develop its own energy and personality.  This is what I mean, Garry and I got married when my oldest daughter was a junior in college.  When she entered our new house- her new home, even though we put her things in a room, put her pictures on the wall, and tried to make her feel “at home”, she just didn't bond with the physical space.  She was living at college in a house of her own, and she was spending just a few days a year with us.  Her room at our house was nice; it was beautiful; but the house just wasn't her friend yet.  A full year later, we had a house fire, and I was in tears as things burned, thankfully just one room truly burned before we stopped the fire, but Anna was very stoic about the whole thing.  She just couldn't be sad.  She told me, point blank, I don't feel anything.  I don't feel like this is my space.  This isn't my home.  Of course this made me sad because I wanted her to feel at home there in our space with her sister and step-father, but it wasn't something I had any power to create.   There were no memories in that space for her at that time, and the only that that would ever change that is creating memories for that space in that space- of course, the fire ironically was a memory for us all- but it really is about the passing of time and what we do with the passing of time.  Living there- bringing friends there, filling up the air with the smell of food and the fire place, sharing meals together- playing games around the table- the house has had to develop a spirit of its own- and hopefully a positive safe and welcoming one and hopefully one that is still being developed.    Of course you're right.  That is why it's important to be intentional about that sort of thing because just as a space can be positive, it can also be negative.  And just as it can have a positive effect on a person, it can have a negative one as well- obviously.     William Sax, Professor of anthropology, says it this way: People and places where they reside engage in a continuing set of exchanges; they have determinate, mutual effects upon each other because they are part of a single, interactive system.”  Listen to what he means- people and places engage with each other- they interact with each other and have effects on each other- they are part of one single interactive system.  It's a very interesting way of looking at how we engage the world.  This is true.  It's originally a Southeast Asian concept, but it really nails a universal truth.     Of course it's that very idea that I also see Jackson taking and running wild with it in her book- physical space interacting actively with the people who occupy its space.      Reading here how Jackson plays around with the concept of this house is really a hyperbolized version of spaces interacting with people- and in her case, she builds an entire 80 year history of negative memories in this house.  Here, crazy enough, the house actually is a villain- although I know that's not totally obvious by the end of chapter 4- but even early on before the house spooks a single person when we read the history of the house, we can see how much negative emotions and hurt are a part of the spirit of this house.     For sure, Jackson makes Hill House into a literal character in the story.  This house has emotions.  She tells us explicitly this house is without kindness and has no concession to humanity- not unlike her own mother (as we saw last episode).  She goes on to say Hill house is not fit for love or for hope- that's how Jackson literally describes it.  But unlike a real house in the real world, what makes this fictional story creepy is that we are going to see that the house has agency- or it at least appears to.  The house does stuff- or maybe it does stuff- that's the big unanswered question.  Who's doing the stuff in the house.  Either way, Of course, this is all the opposite sort of things we want in our physical home, and I'm sure almost everyone would agree with that.   And let's be mindful here.  Shirley Jackson spent a lot of time thinking about her house.  She spent a lot of time, in fact, most of her time, thinking about her home.  She was first and foremost a homemaker. And she was extremely intentional about what she invested her time in.  She did a lot of cooking- and neglected a lot of cleaning opting to make her space a fun liveable one, contrary to popular standards and practices of her time.  She, probably better than most writers or any genre at any time, knew exactly how powerful a home was and could be and how a person could frame it.  Heck, she financed her entire life out of humorously discussing hers.  Her house was famously vibrant, full of life, full of energy, full of visitors- both celebrated literary friends of hers, as well as the dozens of childhood playmates that continuously bounced between the walls.  She clearly knew how to make a happy home, but here in this book, she strips all of that positive away and we see she also knew what a house without kindness could be like.       So interesting.  What's also interesting to me is that historically, this haunted house archetype goes back hundreds of years, well before Jackson came on the scene.  We all know this, I mean who hasn't seen pictures of those gloomy castles in old Gothic stories.  We all know those houses that wreaked havoc on Victorian readers, on Scooby Doo readers, on all of us.  I've read several of these to my own kids over the years, And now that I think about it, all these haunted houses kind of look like Hill House, they usually have two stories maybe a turret or tower, but for sure a black cat on a porch, bats coming out a window, and full moon somewhere behind it.      So true,  I think I've even mailed one or two Halloween cards with those very images on them, but literary haunted houses are slightly differently than the Scooby Doo thing.  In literary fiction authors use these Gothic tropes, and I'm going to put Jackson in this group, to create some sort of metaphor, to flesh out something moral or psychological- and this makes the inside of the house much scarier than the outside- as creepy as these pictures are.  The house represents something inside that is scary and that really exists in our world.  So the question is, what about this house scares us?  What are we really afraid of?  What are the ghosts?    And for me, although, I know this is totally a non-literature way of looking at things, to answer that question I find myself looking at Shirley Jackson as a person and the world she lived in.  Shirley Jackson was a woman of the 1950s, she was a writer and commentator and a deep thinker about that world.  She was a daughter, as we discussed last week, but she was also a mother herself.  And the definition of motherhood in the 1950s was very unique in American history because, and I talked about this a little last episode, but there was a giant shift after WW2 for the American family and especially for women.  Last episode, I talked about that second wave of feminism and Jackson as a professional woman may have looked at all of that, but today I want to bring up another important and that is this idea of the postwar rush to the suburbs and America's cult of the family- that is a very big distinctive historically about this time period. And it in fact, it is still very much a part of our American identity, even to this day.  After WW2, life changed for almost everyone in a positive way.  Life wasn't as hard as it had been before the war.  People could own a home; everyone seemed to want a family.  It was a status symbol.  We all wanted a particular kind of family- the nuclear family with a mom and a dad and children who were the product of that marriage.      That's not just an American thing- isn't that what everyone aspires to all over the world even today.      Of course- but for America, in this post World War 2 era, everything was changing and prospering in a new way and so this was not a pipe dream- it was attainable in a way that had NEVER been possible before.  Think about Of Mice and Men and how destitute things were during the depression.  That was all over.  Now- People had time to think about things like competitive living.  Before that we all were just trying not to starve.  We also had mass media that was projecting what prosperity looked like, or at least should look like.  This kind of atomic family was the picture of happiness.  This social framework was on the covers of all the magazines, in all the movies, in all the tv shows.  It was sanctioned by our churches, and how good or successful we were as humans depended on how well we created this particular family.  If your family wasn't this kind of family, we used the word “broken”.  You came from a broken home.  I know this very personally because this was my reality.  I was raised in a “broken” home.  My parents were divorced- although I'm not from the 50s, but even during my childhood this was a very shameful thing for a child- something was wrong with you, with your family, with your home.  Shirley Jackson's home wasn't physically broken at all- at least not in the way that mine was, but the appearance of perfection haunted her from her earliest memories.  Her parents were in hot pursuit of that perfection.  And as an adult when she was homemaking she was very aware of all of these family and social dynamics at work.  Almost all of her writings center around these ideas in one way or another, the fiction and the non-fiction.      So, back to Hill House, if we look at a home your way, as a place where individuals are supposed to belong- let's look at these characters from that perspective of why they might be showing up at Hill House.  Because the characters in this story are definitely not coming from that background.  They are all broken, if we pay close attention.  We see that Eleanor doesn't have a father or now a mother.  Theo is very vague about her identity, even about who she lives with- we don't even know if her roommate is a man or  a woman, the only thing she lets out in her introductory comments is about spending her vacations alone at boarding school which is kind of dark, and Luke will claim later on to not having a mother.  So, I guess, none of them really have a place to go for the holidays, to use the language from Bing Crosby's song.  When they get to Hill House, although the house itself is creepy, they seem happy to have found each other.  The lure of having what this house may be offering is greater than the risk of what could be scary about it being haunted.  The girls even wear bright colors to brighten up the dreary home; they run outside, the house is in a valley and kind of covered up, but they also claim it's a “place for picnics”, something happy families do- and of course, we'll see at the end of the book that this parody of the picnic will come back to haunt both girls. In the beginning, Eleanor and Theo claim to be cousins and the last sentence of chapter 2 is, “Would you let them separate us now?  Now that we've found out we're cousins?”.      When they meet Luke in chapter 3, Eleanor very quickly asks, “Then you're one of the family? The people who own Hill House? Not one of Doctor Montague's guests?”  Of course, she doesn't mean her own family- but for Eleanor- in some ways that is what she is fantasizing about- this notion of family- a place to call home.      Let me also point out that by this point in the story, even though, we're still in the very beginning, the house has already played a benign trick on Eleanor and Theo- there was an incident about a rabbit frightening them.  It's cute and funny but odd none the less.  Hill House, for Eleanor, although is obviously ugly, vile and haunted, is not an unhappy place.  It holds promise.  When they come in and meet Dr. Montague, he pours drinks for everyone and Eleanor comments, “Everything's so strange, I mean, this morning I was wondering what Hill House would be like, and now I can't believe that it's real, and we're here.”  She struggles to believe it, but as she sits with the other three and the thought she has is this and I quote, “I am the fourth person in this room; I am one of them; I belong.”    And of course, all of the conversation between the four of them is fun-loving.  They make jokes about what they do in the other world.  Almost all of it is non-sense.  Eleanor talks about being the talk of café's, Luke says he is a bullfighter, Theo claims to be clad in silk and gold.      Yes, and Dr. Montague assumes the role of a a traditional father-figure.  He calls them children and tells them stories.  Let's read that part.  They all sit around, and he tells the story of Hill House.    Page 54-      It's definitely a creepy story and the Crain family is definitely a miserable group of people, but getting to the current moment if Mr. Montague is the father-fugure, Luke, Theo and Eleanor are the kids, then in some sense the house is the mother- there's no one else.  But from the history of the house, there was never really a real mother that ever lived here.    Yes- and that brings me back to my discussion of the 1950s.  Before the 50s, life in the United States was more difficult.  Many people we're struggling to exist- mostly fighting mother nature on a farm or a ranch.  When wealth came to the United States in that post war era, like we already said forming an ideal family and an ideal home was at the heart of that- but at the heart of the home were the children.  A new word showed up in the Webster dictionary in 1958 that had never existed in English before- that is the word, “parenting”.  And whatever it meant, parenting was about the responsibility of making perfect kids or at least making a perfect growing up experience for kids, and how to do that was naturally- again in very American form- supercontroversial and divisive.  There was this book that came out in 1944 by a doctor by the name of Dr. Benjamin Spock.  This book took America by storm.  In his book, he claimed parents should not discipline their children.  They should be permissive.  The idea before this was that humans were evil, and children were humans, so they needed to be disciplined or tamed into doing right- if you indulged them you would “spoil” them- that was the word.  Dr. Spock took the opposite approach, his theory was that all of us are good and it is not possible to spoil a child.  A child who is loved will never be spoiled by things you give him/her or do for him/her.  If they had everything they needed, they didn't need to act out or misbehave.  In either case, no matter which side of the argument you fell on- one thing both camps had in common was the child was the center of the home. Everything was about the children.     And this was where Shirley Jackson, the mother, fit in.  Look at the titles of her two books of essays about her children, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Jackson took seriously this debate about “parenting”.  In 1960 she wrote a book titled “Special Delivery, a Useful Book for Brand-New Mothers”.  Let me read a small quote from an essay in there called, “Whos' the Boss?”    “After Careful study it is going to be clear to the earnest mother that the enormous propaganda on child raising in books, magazins, and even adverstisments is being largely written by babies.  Baby is the boss, the articles point out flatly; first you are waiting for him, an dthe you are waiting on him.  Perhaps this is because 20 or 25 years ago the going rage in baby care was exactly the opposite.  Children who were allowed a little freedom of choice were going to be ‘spoiled' and the worse possible thing an anguished mother could do was pick up a crying baby. In our family there is a sharp division of opinion on the question of the authority of the child.  Our four children ardently support he cause of absolute indulgence, warmly seconded by their grandparents on both sides.  My husband and I, bolstering one another secretly with reminders that we are firm, righteous, fair, stem although impartial, band beyond all else the heads of the family, have managed to fight the issue to a standstill somewhere between the two camps.”    She is funny.      She definitely is, and even in Hill House, there are parts of the dialogue that are really funny- especially when we get to the parts about Mrs. Montague who is absolutely absurd.  But here's where I want to land.  Eleanor is our central character- no doubt.  We are wedded to her point of view.  There is no doubt that the allure of Hill House is also her desire for a family- to not be alone- one of the creepier elements for me in this book is Eleanor's constant revisiting the phrase “Journeys end in lovers meeting”.  I think it's repeated 14 times, maybe more than that.     Yeah- what is that about.    Well, of course, we never really know.  It's actually a quote from Shakepeare's play 12th Night.  Which is a comedy about a girl named Viola.  12th Night is very typical Shakespeare, I actually just watched it at a Shakespeare in the park this summer in Nashville.  It's a happy play and after a lot of misteps and misidentities Viola finds true love at the end.  The Journey for Viola ended in a lovers meeting.  But the way Jackson uses it isn't like the way Shakespeare uses it at all.  It really is not used in any kind of romantic sense.  Eleanor wants to meet love, but I'm not sure she's very particular as to the kind of love she meets.  It doesn't have to be sexual, for sure.  Although there's a little bit of flirtation with Luke, it definitely ends poorly. This is a very asexual book.  In fact, the most graphic sexual part has to do with the demented Hugh Crain and his abusive relationship with his daughters.  Eleanor is looking for a family- she wants to be the center of someone's world, and that is normal and understandable, but she's also a bratty kid in many ways.  She's judgmental of everyone else, we will see.  Jackson is going to create every member of this family of Hill House to be dysfunctional and self-orbiting.  Every member of the family is tyrranically trying to be in control- and notice that is what Dr. Montague pointed out in the history of the house.  Hugh Crain, who built the house, is a horrible father- he parented his daughters as we find out late in the book- through sheer terror.  The house is a horrible mother, it's oppressive and vile and deceitful- but the Crain kids were terrible too.  They were competitive and hurtful.  And now we get these “kids” – if that is what we're going to call Luke, Theo and Eleanor- are going to all three be portrayed as self-centered and competitive.  Dr. Montague in this playful exchange at dinner says this and notice Jackson's carefully chosen words, “You are three willful, spoiled children who are prepared to nag me for your bedtime story.”  Jackson uses the loaded language of her generation- words everyone in the 1950s would recognize.      So are you saying, Jackson is saying, children are tyrranical as well as mothers?  Is everyone tyrranical?      Well, I really don't know if I'm ready to comment on that yet but maybe.  I want to point out something though that IS interesting.  Both Theo and Eleanor were selected to come to the house because they supposedly have powers, Theo has telepathic power and Eleanor can create these poltergeist experiences where we can move things around- maybe subconsciously even.  This, I think is an important detail to include.  They are not powerless, and Jackson leaves room we will see to see both of them exercising their powers at various places in the book, maybe.      What do you mean by that?  That they may be using their powers or maybe they aren't, we can't be sure?    That's it exactly- and we're not even sure if they know if they are using their powers- they seem not to really understand that they have them. Now, let's go back and think about the HOUSE itself- As the story sets itself up in the exposition, four very different people have moved into the house.  The only thing they have in common is that they all have some sort of brokenness in the background, even Dr. Montague as we will find out when we meet his hideous wife, but they all are willing to move into a house that is supposedly haunted- but how and by whom?  And what are they going to do in the house.  Of course this question comes up in their evening together- their first bonding experience sharing food and drink together- and Dr. Montague confesses that he has no idea what will happen to them.  They will take notes, but that is all he can offer. They will drink brandy- as Luke points out- they are there to drink spirits- pardon the pun.  And they most certainly will.   Before they go to bed that first night, Theo and Eleanor share the stories of where they come from.  Let's read this part.    Page 64    What is interesting about that exchange is that we, as readers, already know Eleanor is lying.  None of what she just told them is true.  Things at Hill House are not what they appear to be.  In chapter 4 when they tour the house, Dr. Montague makes a point of pointing that out.      Page 77     Much of chapter 4 is describing the house- and the house is off- you can't see it at first- but it's off center.  There is a fairly large distortion because so much is off. There's also the marble statue of Mr. Crain, the veranda that's crooked, the cold spot in front of the nursery ironically which is symbolically in the middle of the house, and then the chapter ends with noises. This is the first really scary part in the book.  Eleanor apparently wakes up with someone calling her.  She thinks it's her mother at first before she remembers she's at Hill House.  When she goes to Theo's room Theo is scared out of her mind because she's heard someone knocking, plus it's terribly cold.  The noise gets louder until Eleanor shouts wildly, “Go away, go away!”  The door trembles and shakes against the hinges and ultimately they hear a little giggle and a whisper and a laugh before the Dr. and Luke get to them.    That is all very creepy and very definitely the stuff scary movies are made of.      Yes, and chapter 4 ends with Dr. Montague's observation.    - read  ending pg 99    Whatever is pressuring the house- is pressuring this little make shift family to break up.      But then again, no one ever knows what forces  are at work in any family dynamic. Do we?  What kind of subversive forces are at work in a house, in a home… in a home that is haunted?    Ha!  Good point Jackson.  I guess we often never do.      Well, that's terrifying enough for one episode.  We will pick up with chapter 5 next time and see just what exactly Jackson is doing with our minds.  Thanks for spending time with us as we explore the terrifying world Jackson has created at Hill House.  As always please tell your friends about us, push out an episode on your twitter account, or your Facebook account.  Text an episode to a friend.  If you're a teacher and want to use podcasts for instruction, go to our website and download a listening guide for your students to fill out as they listen.  We want to support learning around the world, and helping us share the world is how you can help us grow.  Thank you     Peace out.        

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting Of Hill House - Episode 1 - MeetThe Author And The Personal Issues That Created One Of The Best Horror Genre Books Of All Time!   `Hi, I'm Christy Shriver and we're here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.    And I'm Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  If you are listening to this in real time, we are well into the month of October and in the United States, the month of October means Halloween.  Halloween, as we've discussed before, is not Christy's favorite holiday.  Christy, why is that?    Because it's horrifying.  It's about death.  It's about being scared.  It's about demons.  I don't understand why we're celebrating these things.      And yet, I have seen you dress up as Wilma Flintstone; answer a door bell to a slew of terrifyingly dressed children, hand out candy and enjoy every minute of it.  For those of you who live in other parts of the world- that is what we do here in the United States on October 31st.  My son, Ben, and his wife Rachel live in a part of Memphis which is particularly serious about Halloween, so we, if we can, love to go down there on Halloween and get in on the party.      That's true- and it is wild. They have a neighbor whose yard literally looks like the set of a horror movie with graves, and ghosts and witches and everything.  It spooks me, but on the other hand,  I do love dressing up, and I love seeing all the kids dress up.  That part I'm cool with.    And yet, here we are reading a classic work described as Female Gothic or horror fiction- the work of the celebrated Shirley Jackson, perhaps her most famous novel The Haunting of Hill House.      True.  But I will say that Literary Horror is slightly different than Nightmare on Elm street.  Here's a little story about myself, so I had never watched a horror movie growing up.  My mother didn't allow it in our home, and back then these movies were rated R and the people at movie theaters really policed that sort of thing- so if you were a young child, obviously you could watch a rated R movie, but they didn't make it easy for you.  Well, anyway, when I was a sophomore in high school, this little school that I attended at the time took an overnight trip out of town to hike up this mountain, Pico da Bandeira.   After the hike, somebody pulled out the VHS of this move and we were going to watch it (I'm pretty sure it was a bootleg).  Anyway, I was so excited- most everyone in Brazil loves horror movies and Nightmare on Elmstreet was one of the most populat at the time.       Well, how did that go for you?    Not well, I'm not sure I got through 15 minutes.  I spent the rest of the night under the covers and with my hands in my ears.  I didn't even want to hear it.      HA!!  Well, what I find fascinating about Literary fiction is that it's scary for all kinds of different reasons, not the idea of someone jumping out and stabbing an unsuspecting girl.      Exactly. It's not some obvious caricature of a gore covered mummy walking around with a hatchet that defines it.  It's metaphorical; it's about the cost of seduction; it's about psychological disorders and it's very much about anxiety.      Well, you know I love it when we get psychological.  One thing I found interesting, and this is coming from the perspective that we just did an entire series kind of around women's issue with A Doll's House, but I expected Shirley Jackson's work to be more feminist than it is.  Also, the book has all this mother/daughter stuff in it.  I wasn't expecting that.    Yes- it very much has everything to do with mother/daughter relationships.  That motif starts on the first page and never lets up.  I got tired of counting mother references, and I never found an article that did the math, but there are reference to mothers endlessly- and something that drew my immediate attention- especially the first time Eleanor wakes up terrified in the middle the night yelling for her mother.  But that is just one way of looking at the book- although that's a great place to start and where we will start our discussion today as we attempt to make it all the way through chapter 1 of the book.    But in a more general sense, what Jackson was looking at was this imbalance of power that can exist in relationships between any two people.  She wants to express the seduction and betrayal of the powerless by the powerful. She expresses how one person uses the power in the relationship basically to crush another person.  And unfortunately, she understood this problem so well because it was her entire life story.  She had that experience with her mother, and then she turned around and had it again with her husband, and really she had it within the community at large of the 1950s.      And, of course, being written in the 1950s, many women of her generation quickly related to it.  In fact, in some ways, it reminds me a little bit of that very famous work by Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, that became so important in American history but wasn't even going to be written for another ten years.    Yeah, I've heard of that book, but honestly, I don't know much about it.  What is the premise and why does it connect, in your mind to Shirley Jackson.    Well, I'll be upfront and tell you I have never read the book, so I'm speaking from second hand knowledge.  But, what I know about it from teaching and studying history is the impact it had on American culture because of the power of the argument Friedan makes in the book.     First of all I would like to point out she's interviewing women that attended Smith College, which is a very well to do private school in Massachusetts.  survey sample was not very scientific     Friedan, at her 15th college reunion, took a survey from her fellow colleagues, about how they felt about their lives.  The basic premise of her book is that society had created a myth that women were most fulfilled if they were taking care of children, staying at home,  supporting their husbands, and staying away from politics and business.  In the book, she claims that entire worldview for women is a myth- at least for many women.  I will never assume to speak for women and I certainly won't speak for all women.  But Friedan will, and she went after the 1950s stereotypical Leave it To Beaver kind of mom that had been the socially accepted lifestyle.  She said many women were absolutely miserable.  She claimed that society's pressure on women for women to succumb to what amounted to in many cases mindnumbing non-stimulating existences was causing depression.  She famously said it was a “problem that has no name”.   And whether you want to challenge her or agree with her, you have to respect that her idea absolutely resonated across America and really the entire world.  Her book was a best seller, selling over 3 million in her lifetime and has been translated into at least a dozen major languages around the world.  Many textbooks credit Friedan for sparking the second wave of feminism that was a key feature of the 60s, the kind of thing we see portrayed in movies like Forrest Gump in the character of Jenny.  This women's rights movement was not interested in voting rights; it was moving forward to the next level.  It was pushing for workplace equality, birth control, abortion rights, breaking the glass ceiling in academia and business.  Where I see it aligning with Jackson, who came much earlier, is that this book, The Haunting of Hill House is a metaphorical expression of everything Friedan wanted to say about women in the 1960s- the house is haunted, so to speak.  The house was crushing women.  It was making women crazy.     Well, you're starting to steal a little bit of my thunder –next week we are going to spend almost the entire episode discussing the house itself, but you are dead on about what Jackson is doing in her work…pardon the pun.  But, I want to say before all the men moan and groan and say, I'm turning this off if this is going to be another one of those feminist books- the book really is much more than a political commentary- in fact that's just one way of relating to it.  The metaphor most definitely can be read exactly as you have connected to the femininist movement of the 1960s, and many many people have read it just that way, but I'm not sure Jackson herself really did, although there's no doubt she was an advocate for many of the things you just enumerated. She, like Ibsen, would say her work is art and not a piece of political propaganda.  She would also likely claim, and I know I'm being presumptuous to speak for her, but I do think she would claim, that would be a very small way to understand her body of work, if that's all you thought it was. She was writing the emotions and then the reader found themselves in them.     I was also interested to see that Jackson, very much like Elizabeth Barrett Browning struggled fighting critics over the years.  Stanley Hyman, her husband and literary critic during their lives, in the preface for a book he published of her yet unpublished work after her death famously wrote, “For all her popularity, Shirley Jackson won surprisingly little recognition.  She received no awards or prizes, grants or fellowships; her name was often omitted from lists on which it clearly belonged, or which it should have led.  She saw these honors go to inferior writers.”    True, and Hyman, although I have trouble giving him credit for anything because of his and Shirley's relationship which we'll talk about in a different episode, but he predicted that Jackson's “powerful visions of suffering and inhumanity” and would be found “increasingly significant and meaningful.”  He truly always understood that her long form or serious work was more than pop fiction, or gory horror, and yet that was not the majority view of that time.    And part of that is somewhat understandable.  One thing I didn't know about her until we started reading up on her for this podcast series was that her acclaim during her day really came from two places- one was for the short story, “The Lottery”, but the other and this is what I didn't know- was her best-selling essay collection on domestic life titled Life Among the Savages.  I haven't read much of that, to be honest, but what I did read is really truly funny stuff stuff.  She was Erma Bombeck before Erma Bombeck.    Yes- and she was funny, and she was writing about her kids, house cleaning, being a mom, a member of a local community and all the craziness of middle-class life.  It was the stuff that people were living in their world, and she made it funny.  People didn't take seriously the psychological insights into issues of emotional isolation, rage, paranoia, and the fragmentation of the human mind- from a person who was a regular contributor to magazines like Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, McCall's and Ladies Home Journal.    No, it was just too different, and of course, you can't discount the condescension from the serious art community- I mean here was a woman writing in a genre that nobody took seriously about female protagonists- which was often not taken seriously- and was famous for cute anecdotes about the comedy of errors which is life as a house-mom raising four children in a small town.We must remember also, as a general rule, the 1950s are not that far removed from the time period where women didn't read literature at all- there was a thing called “ladies reading material” That's what women read.  Men read literature, but women writing for women was not elevated enough to actually be called “literature”- it was simply reading material for women.       Oh- well – I guess we shall make that distinction- although I will say, as a woman writing “ladies reading material” for money she did fairly well for herself.  Shirley Jackson made serious cash off of these stories- in fact, she outearned her husband- and it was the essays that were funding their lifestyles, not her novels. Her biographer Ruth Franklin, commented in an interview that she could make  over $2000 per essay which at the time was enough to fun to fund her Morris Minor collection.    Nice- well British Sports cars are always a fun thing to keep around the house.     I'll say.  But back to her legacy for a second, Jackson is like Elizabeth Barrett Browning in that her work, well after her death, found it's way into the canon and today is very much taken seriously.  In fact, we're teaching her right now to all the 11th graders at Bartlett High School, and almost all American students will at some point read  her short story “The Lottery”, the  famous short story that triggered more public outrage  in 1948 than anything published before or since by the magazine the New Yorker.  Hundreds of people cancelled their subscriptions and even more wrote the magazine totally exasperated.      Well, it's political and psychological and really even religious as well.  But back to the 11th graders at Bartlett, do you think your kids will be able to appreciate or enjoy the depth of the psychological analysis in her novel that today is the central hallmark of her work?    Yeah, I think many of them will get it.  I look forward to how they understand what she's talking about.  You know, students today live in such a different world and the ghosts and houses that haunt them look so differently than the ghosts and houses that haunted our generation or much less Shirley Jackson's.     I look forward to discussing some of these issues with them and see what fascinates them the most.      One of the things that fascinates me the most and I'm expecting to come out is Jackson's multiple direct and indirect references to the relationship between mothers and daughters.  It's clear in this book that whatever is going wrong in Eleanor's mind has something to do with her dead mother.  I have two daughters, and I really pray, I am not the kind of mother Shirley Jackson had or that my daughters ever express any of the feelings she expresses about mother/daughter relationships- nothing that would haunt and torment my children after I'm dead.      No, I'm sure none of us want to have that kind of legacy with our children.      And yet, there are women like Geraldine Jackson, Shirley's mother.  Geraldine was truly relentless in her cruelty towards her daughter.  She was cruel to her as a child and her passive aggressive disapproval was something she perpetuated all throughout Shirley's life right to her untimely death at age 48.      Yes and I think understanding Geraldine' cruelty really helps me see some of the things in Jackson's writing that I may have overlooked before.  And I know that an author's life cannot be used uncritically to explain an artist's work; obviously art speaks for itself, but maybe more than any other writer we've read together, Jackson uses her writings to express pain in artistic ways that were personal to her, but universal to many of us.  Geraldine's ruthless subtle and sometimes not so subtle demoralizing was something Jackson could not get out of her mind.  .  Geraldine's own personality disorder took a heavy toll on Shirley.    And it was always expressed with all the best of intentions- she was always so concerned.    Let's tell a little about their story and then people will know what you're talking about.     Okay, well the story starts when  Jackson was born in 1916 (although she lied about her age and claimed to have been born in 1919- which I think is funny), but anyway, she was born into an affluent family and up until she was 16 they lived in Burlingame, California.     Let me interrupt, just for context, Burlingame, to this day is one of the most expensive cities in the United States.  The median house in Burlingame costs over 2 million dollars- and I'm not talking mansions- this is the price range for what would be an average home that would cost a tenth of that in other parts of the US.  Every review on bestplaces.com talks about how unaffordable it is for most people to live in this Burlingame.     Yep, and Geraldine, Shirley's mom and her father Leslie, cultivated that cliché'd vision of the upper class  country club lifestyle.  They were into the production of this very sophisticated appearance of success and wealth, what was important was the appearance of things.   They were into competitive living, and that,  of course, still includes having perfect children.  Shirley's brother, I might add, was beautiful and competitive and made them proud, but unfortunately for Shirley, she was not- and this was just a huge disappointment for Geraldine.  She could not nor did she want to fit the mold.  Shirley was heavier than the other girls.  She didn't enjoy the same kinds of things as the other girls.  She didn't have that “All-American” barbie doll look like the other girls.  She wasn't into the deputante thing, and if she had been wasn't cute enough.    Yes, I read a couple of articles that called Jackson morbidly obese, so I googled images of her, it was true that she was heavier , but, in my mind, she falls way short of the criteria for morbidly obese by today's definition, especially in her youth. And I want to say something else about this 1950's lifestyle we've been discussing. After WW 2 there was a huge economic boom that doubled family incomes in the decade. It was the first decade of widespread middle class wealth. And one sign of that new middle class wealth was the ability to live on one income. Wives staying at home were a sign of wealth and prestige.     Maybe not, but she certainly wasn't the daughter Geraldine wanted nor could be proud of at a deputant ball.  In fact, truth be told, Geraldine was actually disappointed when she found out she was pregnant because she didn't want a child at that time.  But Geraldine's largest problem and obsession was with Shirley's weight- and her obsession with Shirley's weight never ended.  She made comments about her weight- all of the time.  They were gratuitous, just dropped in to remind her that she was fat.   Here are some quotes from a couple of Geraldine's letters to her daughter just to show you what I'm talking about. “Glad you're dieting.” “Excess weight is hard on the heart.” “You should get down to normal weight. Try non-fat milk.”  Even after the publication of what would be Jackson's final novel, Geraldine could be relied on to bring up her weight, “Why oh why do you allow the magazines to print such awful pictures of you?...I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like.”      Yes, let me read the full quote for context.     If you don't care what you look like or care about your appearance why don't you do something about it for your children's sake— and your husband's. . . . I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like. . . . You were and I guess still are a very wilful child and one who insisted on her own way in everything— good or bad.    This is a straight up narcissistic rant.     There was always the subtext that was no matter what Shirley did with her life, she could never live up to her mother's expectations- even if she was famous- Jackson wanted acceptance of who she was- but she wanted it on her terms, and she and wanted to prove to her mom that the way she was was a good way, and she could be good at life just by being herself- but that was never going to happen.  In fact, at one low moment, Geraldine actually told her daughter that she was a failed abortion.      Wow.  That is just hateful.  Geraldine wanted a girl in the image of what she wanted, and she was never going to compromise.  This is classically what people call today a “toxic mother”,  And this plays a terrible toll on girls who have toxic mothers.  These behaviors can destroy women's images of themselves.   And this is what seems to have happened with Jackson and her mother.        Let me just back  up and say, it's absolutely natural and healthy for a girl to look up to her mother; a mom is the original ideal of what a woman should be.  That's how we all learn to navigate in this world, and likely a mom and a daughter will have a lot in common for obvious reasons.  There is a lot of joy in that.  There is a special bond in that.  Over the years, though, as a little girl develops into a teenager, although at first she wants to be exactly like her mom, that desire kind of separates out.  In a normal relationship, as a girl transitions into a woman, she individuates.   She becomes her own person.  Some things of her mother she will keep; others she'll discard.  And healthy moms respect and encourage their daughters individuality.  A normal mom will do whatever she can to equip her daughter, make her bolder and stronger.  But as painful as it may be from a mom's perspective, healthy mom's accept daughter's choices- even the ones they think are mistakes.  That's just what they do, and if they end up being mistakes, it's okay.  We all get to live our own lives.  But in Geraldine's life, what Shirley did was a reflection on her, so she couldn't let the fact that her daughter was overweight go.      Well, how do you think she took it when Shirley told her mom she was marrying a Jew in 1940- or I should say that she had already married a Jew, she didn't even tell them she got married until several months later because they were anti-Semitic people,  I can imagine that didn't go well?        No, I'd say it probably didn't, but I really don't know.   I do want to say one other thing, Christy, don't get me wrong, I think it's pretty well-established that motherhood is by definition a lose/lose proposition- moms just can't win.  It's impossible to raise a perfect child, just like it's impossible to be a perfect person, so of course we can't raise a person in the most perfect of emotional environments.      Mom's will unrealistically be blamed for things that may or may not be their fault- the reality is no one can be perfect, we will hurt each other and there will insecurities that spring up because of the way we are raised, and that's kind of normal too- it's normal for dads; it's normal for moms.  But, that is not the same as being a toxic mom.  Geraldine was toxic.  Nothing was ever going to be good enough for Geraldine.  She was perpetually disapproving, and Shirley was never going to meet her standards.  Geraldine was also always very controlling- I read somewhere she made Shirley wear garters and high heels as a little girl.  She was constantly guilt-tripping Shirley.  She constantly made negative comments; she manipulated her emotions, and most of the time she did it passive-aggressively.  She did it under the guise of love.      And that seems to be in one sense what Jackson expresses in her writing- it's at least what lots of people have identified with in Hill House.   There is this sense that Shirley could never get her mom out of her head, and of course, she's not the only one who struggles with these kinds of things.  In Hill House,  the main character is a 32 year old young woman named Eleanor Vance. I want to add that 32 is not a young age.  She's not telling the story of a child and the abuses of a mother on a small child.  Eleanor is a fully grown adult who should be living her own independent life for quite some time.  But she hasn't.  She hasn't even had an opportunity to do so.  Eleanor has no friends and is alone. That's what we're told at the beginning and we will see all the way through to the end of the book when she tells Theo she has never been wanted, it's been how she's felt always.  We're also told Eleanor's mother is dead right here at the beginning, and that Eleanor has been taking care of her relentlessly since she was twenty years old.   Eleanor's mom is a constant presence in Eleanor's psyche, even beyond the grave.  She even buys clothes that she knows her mother hates- pants- just because her mom is dead and can't do anything about it.   Eleanor is being haunted before she ever gets to Hill House.    True, and this lack of self-esteem and then loneliness is what has resonated with so many women and men who read Jackson's stories.  It also is what directly led to a lot of the suffering Jackson experienced in her marriage to Stanley.      Stanley Hyman, there's a character.  Before I smear him, I guess I will say right off that bat that he, in many ways, was very supportive of Shirley professionally and admired her intellectually.  My problem with him is that he degraded her sexually- and that is the cruelest and most intimate and demeaning forms of degradation that there is.    For one thing he absolutely did not respect the sexual boundaries Shirley wanted in their marriage.  Besides having so many affairs with students at the school he taught but also really just anyone—he seemed to enjoy telling Jackson all about these trysts.  I've read a few of the letters he wrote about women he was sleeping with on various business trips, and I got the feeling it's almost like he was bragging a little bit.  I'd read a few quotes, but they're vulgar.  He talked about groping girls- giving details about what he had done. It's gross never mind hurtful.  And Shirley would get upset.  Although she was a free spirit and Bohemian in some ways, this was not okay with her.  She didn't want a open marriage where everyone just slept with whoever they wanted.  There are letters where she writes him and expresses how this behavior made her feel, but she never mailed these letters.  I don't even know why.  Maybe she didn't have the nerve.  Maybe she knew it made no difference.  Maybe she wanted her family and that was a price she was willing to pay.  I'm speculating.  We only know that  she just took it.  She wouldn't confront him, at least that there isa record of.  She just forced herself to accept it and moved on with her life.      And that is an indication of low self-esteem, obviously.  Jackson wouldn't have put up with that sort of thing like she did, if she didn't think, at some level, it was her fault or that she didn't deserve to be treated any better than that.  This is the legacy of a toxic parent.  Allowing people to treat you in a way that is lesser and that is not how you treat them is a direct result of low self-esteem, but I want to add that future abusive relationships is not the only symptom of low self-esteem and it isn't the only symptom of low-esteem we see in Jackson's life.   Behaviors that provoke self-harm  like over-eating, over-drinking, and pill-popping- all things Jackson did- are also a result of low esteem and indicate high levels of anxiety.  Feelings of sadness, depression, anxiety, anger, shame and guilt- are also things we see in Jackson's life.  She seems to have truly struggled emotionally.     True, but before we get too dark, Shirley was all of that, but she wasn't ONLY that.  She had a happy side too- an apparently tremendously happy side.  I say that from interviews I read that people did with her children.  When her kids write or talk about their homelife, the reports are glowing.  Her home was a happy place.  It was chaotic and topsy turvey at times, the kind of crazy that people love.  They didn't even see any tension between their parents.  For one thing, Stanley didn't have a whole lot to do with the family- lots of men didn't in the 50s, that was the mother's domain, but from the perspective of her children, her marriage to Stanley was a happy one, as was their home.  So, we see all of that going on.  Back to her biographer, Ruth Franklin, Franklin titled her biography about Jackson, “A Rather Haunted Life” kind of to reflect that idea- that she was haunted, but not entirely, just rather haunted.      Yes, and it was that dichotomy that leads to all kinds of cognitive dissonance.  I read in another article by a different biographer that Shirley, as a mother was deeply involved but also emotionally erratic.  “Her moods and anxieties colored her children's days.  No one could be more loving; no one could be meaner.”      Which brings me back to her as a writer.  One critic observed that out of over 110 different stories that Jackson wrote in her lifetime, most of them are about imperiled, divided or anxious women- and that is including both her scary and her funny stories.  And when we get to her final three novels- they are gothic completely about anxiety, entrapment and in the case of Hill House, a deeply troubled female with an inability to differentiate well between illusion and reality.      Understanding that really makes the famous first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House  meaningful in a deeper way, at least it does to me. And I do want to emphasize this first paragraph is one of the most famous paragraphs in all of Jackson's writings:    No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”    And what do you always say, when we start these books, that great writers will give their story away in the first sentence or two.    They almost always do.  This one in particular invites us to think about so much.  First of all, it starts with a negation- “no” but there are a lot of negative words here.  It's hard to understand, but something is telling us no- and when we get to the end of the book, that prophecy is fulfilled, although I won't spoil that just yet and tell you how.  But there's so much more.      Listen to the ideas she introduces-  there is the idea of being alive- of being sane- or not sane- another negative word- of standing in the darkness-in the silence- of being alone.  Of being in a house, but yet…being alone.   The alliteration highlights and brings together her key ideas- within walls- drawing attention to the idea of claustrophobia- sensibly shut; silence lay steadily I might add brings the silence and the claustrophobia together.  Then of course- whatever walked- walked alone- the w sound kind of swoshes in her head and haunts the end of that sentence.      All of her personal demons in one sentence.    Yes- and all of her personal demons getting ready to flesh themselves out metaphorically for all of us to understand and experience with her.      This assertion that she makes about absolute reality, of course is a religious or philosophical statement.  This idea that we absolutely just cannot know what is real, and if we did know what is real we would go crazy.  She's going to say that even little bird or crickets (a katydid is a cricket if you haven't heard that word yet, it's not very common)- Not even the simpliest organisms can handle a world without illusions.  We need them to protect our own sanity.    Yes- and the subtext here suggests because reality is dark; and the reality is you are alone in this world.  You can live – but perhaps you must accept a dream, perhaps an illusion that people have your back, people love you and will support you, but in reality- you are alone.  Perhaps you have to even create an entire fairyland- something to give you an escape from what you know to be true- the betrayal which is coming.  I'm speculating, obviously because I'm fleshing out what is implied with the subtext, at least implied to me-  but there is a sense that that is the direction she's leading us, and it certainly seems to be something we find in her personal story.     It's also kind of a religious statement because it speaks to the nature of reality and that is the essence of faith and walking through life not-alone.  Christy, what was her religious background.      Well, that's a very interesting question.  She was raised by members of the the Christian Science church, but later on she developed a real fascination with the occult and was even accused of being a witch.  Garry, what makes Christian scientists different from main stream Christianity?    Christian scientists, for those who are not familiar with Christianity, adopt many tenents of traditional Christianity but they break from it in a couple of ways that are obvious.  For one,  they do not accept the diety of Jesus Christ in the way traditional versions of Christianity do.  But the second is What most people know and that is the tension is the between The teachings of the Christian science church and their complicated relationship with the medical community.  They  encourage their members to pray for divine healings often perhaps instead of going to doctors.  And this has been controversial in some cases especially for family members outside of the faith.     That was certainly true for Jackson.  One time she and her brother were horsing around and her brother broke his arm, instead of going to the doctor Geraldine and her mother stayed up all night and prayed for his broken arm.  Her grandmother was a faith healer in the church and Jackson did not approve of this. So, she had this side of her, that would seem more secular- but then Jackson had her own sense of the spiritual.  She carried around tarot cards, tried to communicate with spirits later in her life, and flirted with all kinds of spiritual practices, like I said before, many accusing her of actually practicing witchcraft, ahtough I never found anything that really verified how serious she was about that.      So I can see why she might say something about absolute reality being somewhat unknowable or even a dark and lonely thing.      True, and at least in this book what we see in the the relationships that populate the lives  of the characters is that they are contrived.  In chapter 1 of The Haunting of Hill House, Dr. Montague, a title that is somewhat meant to mislead since he's really a ghost hunter, assembles a very select group of people to live with him for three months in a house that he thinks is probably haunted.  There are only four people that will be in this house- Dr. Montague himself, Luke, who is a member of the family who will own the house, Theodora who is selected because she may have extra-sensesory perspection abilities and Eleanor who as a child appeared to bring down a shower of rocks.      We will follow what happens to them from the point of view of Eleanor.  This story is written in the third person omniscient style, but it's way more akin to the free indirect discourse we saw Jane Austen create in Emma.  Laura Miller in the introduction to the book put it this way, readers "experience the novel from within Eleanor's consciousness, and however unreliable we know her to be, we are wedded to her".  And of course the farther into the novel you get, the more you understand how true this statement really is.  Most of the first chapter is really kind of a way to introduce us to Eleanor, and what we find out about her first is that she is 32, she genuinely and for good reason hated her mother until she died and now genuinely hates her sister.  Let's read this part…    Page 3    She's clearly alone and exploited by people who are supposed to be protect her.  This is further developed through the anecdote about her sister and their car.  Apparently they bought a car together but her sister never lets her drive it.  So, when Dr. Montague invites her to come to Hill House, she just takes the car and goes.  And while she's driving to Hill House, she imagines all sorts of things.  She imagines things that could never be real, like the road being an intimate friend or living in a house with a pair of stone lions and people bowing to her on the street because of these lions.  It's gives you kind of this crazy feeling- like how you would feel if you finally had escaped.    Yes, and that crazy feeling is going to intensify as the book progresses.  She's escaped her mother only to land sleeping on a cot in the nursery of a terrible sister.  She's not escaped her sister, but to go where.  At one point on her drive to Hill House she stops to admire a quarter of a mile of Oleanders.  Oleanders are beautiful flowers but they are also poisonous flowers.  She fantasizes about them about a castle with oleanders …then she gets back in her car and drives to a diner where she's going to watch a mother try to coax her daughter into drinking a cup of milk- and let me tell you know- these very same images that she sees on her drive in come back towards the end of the book as we, as readers, feel we are losing our grasp of reality.      But here in chapter 1, when she finally gets to the mansion, the care taker, Mr. Dudley flat out tells her, “You won't like it.  You'll be sorry I ever opened that gate.”    She looks at him and asks him to get away from her car…then she proceeds forward.  At the end of the chapter, we see her looking at this house and this is what she says, “The house was vile.  She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseases, get away from here at once.”      But of course she doesn't.    No, she doesn't.  That's the thing about haunting houses- they are dangerously tantalizing.  She was invited here by Mr. Montague and for better or for worse, she wants to be here.   I don't know if the Haunting of Hill House is the best example of this, but Jackson was absolutely fascinated with this- Jackson was fascinated with man's obsession with what Poe called the “imp of the perverse.”    Oh yes,  the urge to do something awful to someone and have pleasure in it.  I've seen this in kids, a kid just trips a stranger in the hall just because he can.  Paul Salkovskis, a psychology professor, suggests that it's evolutionary to have these kinds of intrusive thoughts as part of our way of problem solving for future problems.  But this idea that people have impulses to do mean things  or at least things we know we shouldn't and get joy from them.  Jackson was very interested in this idea.  So, are you saying that Dr. Montague is deliberately doing something mean.  Or that Dudley is?  Or Eleanor is?    Not really, in other stories she really demonstrates this much more poignantly, but the reason it comes to mind, besides the fact that I've been told to look for it in her writings, is that we are setting up relationships where we really can't trust each other to be there for each other.  Hill House looks like a place where you are really going to feel alone and exposed and that's where the terror comes from, but we will also see that it's soft and motherly and the people here at the beginning seem kind of exciting- it's seductive.      And I guess it does and has for many readers.  Let me just add one thing I didn't know until we started studying this book.  Horrornovelreviews.com claims that The Haunting of Hill House is the 8th scariest novel of all time.  And Paste magazine puts it into the unsorted top 30.      And so we open the gates to this terrifying place- Hill House- next episode we will look at the house itself, we'll look at the places where biographers think she got her inspiration for the house, we'll meet the other residents, explore the history of the house and begin to experience the ghosts- if that's what they are- as they manifest themselves to us through the eyes of Eleanor.                        

This is a bonus edition of Passports and Postcards. In this episode, we talk about the reclamation project in Rasdhoo Atoll and the damage that is it doing to the Coral Reef Ecosystem. #SaveRasdhoo AtollIf you would like to visit the Maldives, please reach out to my friend Ruth Franklin at Secret Paradise Maldives

Jessica and Adam discuss the books they're reading and give recommendations to Laura who asks: "I just read Shirley Jackson for the first time and while I can't say I enjoyed it (in fact often I felt queasy/icky/upset) I can't stop thinking about it and want to read more. Any thoughts on what to read next AND do you know of any good literary criticism of The Lottery and Other Stories?" Our website: litthesedayspodcast.com Our Instagram: @LitTheseDaysPodcast Our Discord: https://discord.gg/ARTydwMt Books discussed: The Deep by Rivers Solomon - check out the song that inspired it: https://discord.gg/ARTydwMt Farewell to Manzanar by James D. Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Volume 1 Maus by Art Spiegleman Yeats is dead edited by Joseph O'Connor Nihilism by Noel Gertz The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin The Veldt by Ray Bradbury Those Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

In this episode, I speak with Ruth Franklin who is the co-founder of Secret Paradise Maldives, a community-based tour company specialising in private and group adventure and cultural tours from Hulhumale and Male, as well as multi-day local island hopping tours throughout the Maldives. I met Ruth back in 2018 when I was planning my first ever trip to the Maldives and was determined to see these beautiful islands in the eyes of a local. I wanted to explore how to visit the Maldives and learn about the Maldivian culture without staying at a resort, and Ruth was one of the first people I connected with to assist me on this journey. Ruth left a successful 28-year retail management career behind in the UK and took her passion for travel and sustainability to the Maldives in 2012 to co-found Secret Paradise Maldives. Since then, the company has grown into a pioneer in the eco-tourism sector in the Maldives, working with grassroots organisations and government bodies to promote positive environmental impact and community development. In the podcast, we discuss Ruth's journey, the tourism economy in the Maldives, and how Secret Paradise Maldives embrace responsible tourism practices while promoting local experiences on the islands. We also discuss the Maldives embracing the UNDPs "Reimagining Tourism" project, a joint initiative between the Government and UNDP Maldives to explore, develop and test pathways for making tourism in the country more inclusive, resilient and sustainable. Website: https://secretparadise.mv/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/secretparadisemaldives/ Accompanying blog posts: https://thealtruistictraveller.com/blog/category/maldives/

Ruth Franklin discovered the Maldives almost 20 years ago while visiting  as scuba diver in search of Mantas and Whale Sharks. When you find a destination where you fall in love with the people, the culture and traditions you tend to want to come back and that Ruth did. After visiting the Maldives over 30 times and chance meeting over coffee on the beach in 2012 the opportunity to begin a new journey was proposed.Ruth was able to leave her career of 28 years  in Retail and move to the Maldives to Co-Found Secret Paradise, an award winning, responsible and sustainable tour company. The company received TripAdvisor's Travelers Choice Award 2020 after five consecutive years of achieving  Trip Advisor Certificate of Excellence.Ruth's passion for the people, the country and all that it has to offer can be heard in this coffee conversation.If you want to connect with Ruth or Secret Paradise, check out the links belowRuth Franklin on Linkedin A well written articleSecret ParadiseWebsite

This week at the Silver Screen Video we are happy to have the author of award winning book, A Rather Haunted life, Ruth Franklin. You can find Ruth on Twitter @ruth_franklin and her website http://ruthfranklin.net/author/. In this episode we discuss the Shirley Jackson movie Shirley and Ruth's book. Hope you guys enjoy. Don't forget to check out our new Patreon to get access to The Silver Screen Video After Dark and more. Link is below for all our social media. https://linktr.ee/silverscreenvideo $3 Tier- Access to Silver Small Screen Video $5 Tier- Access to Silver Small Screen Video and Silver Screen Video After Dark $10 Tier- Access to both of the above tiers and you get to pick the film or film topic we discuss on an episode. Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to email at silverscreenvideopodcast@gmail.com with any comments or thoughts. Also be sure to follow us on Instagram @silverscreenvideopodcast or Twitter @SilverVideo --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/silverscreenvideo/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/silverscreenvideo/support

It's 7 months since the Maldives reopened for visitors in July 2020. The Indian island archipelago nation is being considered as a successful case study for COVID-era tourism – but how has it adapted to a changed world, and what lessons has it learned? This week, Gary and Hannah chat with Ruth Franklin, Co-founder of Secret Paradise Maldives, which focuses on local island experiences beyond the luxury resorts. In a candid and insightful interview, Ruth discusses the pre-COVID opportunities and the processes and protocols implemented to reopen for inbound travel. We discuss the future of sustainable tourism, tailor-made island experiences and guest house stays, plus the growing appeal of long-vacation travel. We also talk about the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, the potential for vaccine tourism – and what needs to happen for the Maldives to achieve its goal of attracting 1.5 million visitors in 2021.

Ruth Franklin on her selection: Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is deservedly famous for suspenseful fiction like “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House. During her lifetime, though, she was equally well known for the humorous stories she wrote about her absent-minded-professor husband and their four children, published in popular women’s magazines of the era and collected in two best-selling memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. “Charles,” the story I’ve chosen to read, is her first family story and perhaps the funniest, capped by a perfect punchline. Life Among the Savages, by Shirley Jackson Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0

Authors Adam Kirsch and Ruth Franklin explore the legacy of Jewish literature in the 20th century on the occasion of the publication of Kirsch's book The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century.  Kirsch and Franklin explore the evolving ideas of Jewish identity, neuroses and depictions of faith, the dividing line of the Holocaust, and the audience for Jewish literature in this wide-ranging discussion. (Recorded November 12, 2020)

In this episode, author and editor Benjamin Dreyer joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss the all-time great haunted house novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Benjamin Dreyer is the author of Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, a sharp, funny guide to style and grammar, which also happens to be a New York Times bestseller. He is also the copy chief at Random House, in which capacity he worked on Let Me Tell You, a collection of previously unpublished work by Shirley Jackson. And for those who want to do extra reading, the Shirley Jackson biography mentioned in the podcast is Ruth Franklin's A Rather Haunted Life.

In this week's episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction, co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan talk to #1 New York Times best-selling author Maria Dahvana Headley about the modern-day relevance of the epic poem Beowulf. She talks about her new translation of the ancient text, and illuminates how the “shit-talking” masculinity of the heroes of old can help us understand our current so-called leaders. To hear the full episode, subscribe to the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. And check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub's Virtual Book Channel and Fiction/Non/Fiction's YouTube Channel. This podcast is produced by Andrea Tudhope. Selected readings: Maria Dahvana Headley  Beowulf: A New Translation  The Mere Wife  Arie  Queen of Kings The Year of Yes The End of the Sentence, Kat Howard and Maria Dahvana Headley Unnatural Creatures, Neil Gaiman (Editor), Briony Morrow-Cribbs (Illustrator), Maria Dahvana Headley   Others: Transcript: Donald Trump's Taped Comments About Women, The New York Times Sarah Cooper and Helen Mirren Recreate Donald Trump's Infamous ‘Access Hollywood' Tape, HuffPost A “Beowulf” for Our Moment, Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker George Conway (Twitter) Walter Shaub (Twitter) Earth Abides, George R. Stewart  Circe, Madeline Miller The Odyssey, (translated by) Emily Wilson Beowulf, Seamus Heaney Television: The Wire (HBO) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shirley JacksonShirley Hardie Jackson was bon in 1916 in San Francisco, California and died in Vermont in 1965 aged only 48.  Though born in California, she attended Syracuse University in New York where she became involved in literary affairs. She published her first novel in 1948 when she was 32, but it was her short story The Lottery that brought her to public attention. Published in The New Yorker it divided opinion between those who thought it bold and daring and those who found it macabre and disturbing. In essence, like a lot of Jackson's work, it starts out in a realist, every day setting of a folksy rural community where everyone behaves just like we know they would, and then it turns out they have a mysterious lottery where the winner (or loser!) gets sacrificed for some undisclosed reason -- maybe just because it's tradition. She puts in such everyday details of community life that it's a real switch and bait as we think we're getting a home-town story and then it turns weird. Jackson's work has more than a touch of the surreal and I was reminded of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges as I was reading her collection Dark Tales recently.  Her novel The Haunting of Hill House was published in 1958 and is considered the best haunted house story ever written. I enjoyed it very much. She also wrote We Have Always Lived In The Castle towards the end of her life and I must admit I haven't yet read it! Jackson didn't take care of her health and ate and drank too much. This led to heart disease which killed her in 1965. Jackson didn't get on with her mother who seems not to have wanted her much and this seems to be echoed in themes of mothers and estranged daughters in lots of her stories.  Jackson was a wildly interesting character. She played the guitar, sang folk songs and could also play the zither. I wonder if she seems so interesting because we know more about her, being more recent, and I wonder if any of the old Victorian and older 18th Century Gothic writers were equally as quirky. Certainly Byron, Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft seem a wild crowd, and we know about them because they were famous and rich.  Jackson told people she was a practising witch and joked (?) that she put hexes on publishers and critics who offended her. This may not have been just a joke as these were the years of the first growth of Wicca and occultism was definitely a thing following Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons and others.  Jackson suffered from extreme anxiety and saw a psychiatrist who prescribed barbiturates and amphetamines, and then other meds to counteract the effects of these. This cocktail probably didn't help much. A new movie of her life Shirley has come out this year 2020 but I can't see it because all the cinemas are shut due to lock down... There is a nice review a biography of Jackson called A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin in the New Yorker, and you can find it  here (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson) A VisitA Visit was first published under the title A Lovely House in 1950, and then reissued after Jackson's death in 1968 as A Visit The horror literature critic S T Joshi describes it as a 'quiet weird tale at its pinnacle' and refers to 'manner in which a house can subsume its occupants.' At first listen, or maybe even second, I thought, what the heck is this story about? Like last week's story, Mr Jones, this is a gothic tale. We have a large and rambling house which is full of mystery, we have an imprisoned woman in the tower (old Margaret), we have unreliable witnesses, I told trust Mr and Mrs Montague, or Carla one inch. When Margaret is being shown around the mansion, Carla ignores all her questions about the Tower. In fact, it is Paul who answers her question about who lives in Support this podcast

Back in December 2019, we set #WriterGoals for 2020.We had no idea. This week, we go back in and revisit—which goals still stand? Which do we have to let go, and which just don’t feel right any more? Was there any point in setting these goals in the first place?In the end, we decide (not very cheerfully, it has to be admitted) that while our goals are necessarily changing, they’re always worth setting and revisiting. We’ll all be settling down to think differently about what we hope for in what’s left of 2020. Are you revising your 2020 goals, or sticking to plan A? Head over to the #AmWriting Facebook group and tell us about it.#AmReadingKJ: Undercover Bromance by Lyssa Kay AdamsThe Body in the Garden by Katharine SchellmanSarina: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady HendrixJess: Audible Original: David Sedaris, Themes and VariationsRat by Stephen King (found in the If It Bleeds novella collection)Hey—now is a great time to check out our sponsor, Author Accelerator, where you can launch a career as a book coach or get paired with the right coach to get your project moving. And if you’d like to support the creation of #AmWriting, we’d appreciate your help! Supporters get weekly Minisodes or Writer Top Fives—and our undying gratitude. Want in? Click the button. KJ (00:01):Hey everyone. KJ. Here we are talking writer goals again this week. It's our midyear review - pandemic style. If you're setting your own goals for the rest of 2020 our sponsor Author Accelerator can help you start a new side gig as a book coach or match you with a coach who can help you work through challenges both on the page and in the calendar for getting your current project done. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com/amwriting. Is It recording?Jess (00:33):Now it's recording. Go ahead.KJ (00:35):This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess (00:39):Alright, let's start over.KJ (00:40):Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast about writing all the things, short things, long things, fiction, nonfiction, essays, pitches, proposals, and as we say every week, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done.Jess (01:11):I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and a forthcoming book about preventing substance abuse in kids called The Addiction Inoculation. And you can find my writing at places like the Atlantic and the New York Times and the Washington Post.Sarina (01:25):And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of some romance novels. My most recent USA Today bestseller was Heartland, which came out in early 2020.KJ (01:35):And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, the author of the novel, The Chicken Sisters, which is coming out in June of this year as well as How To Be a Happier Parent already long out in hardback, but coming out in paperback this summer. And actually that's still happening, which I'm pretty pleased about. And the former editor of the Motherlode blog at the New York Times where I am still a reasonably regular contributor. And that's who we are. And where we are is in our houses, which is actually where we all are. But you know, it bears mentioning on this the 9th of May, 2020. Yeah.Jess (02:15):Which contributes to our topic today. You want to tell everybody what we want to talk about today?KJ (02:22):Oh sure. So we're gonna revisit our goals. Every year around this time we like to take a little mid-year review. We usually do it in June, so I guess we're doing it a touch early, but it has occurred to us that perhaps some of our goals are not going to be the same for the rest of the year. So it seemed like it was a good time to sit down and take a look at what we thought we were going to achieve, what we have achieved and what we're still hoping to achieve. So we've all got them lined up right here in front of us and away we go.Jess (02:56):Who wants to go first?Sarina (02:57):I would love to open.Jess (03:00):Oh, please do.Sarina (03:02):Well, you know, we all are fans of Dan Blank who has been a guest on this podcast and also has his own terrific podcast as well. And Dan Blank's podcast is called The Creative Shift. So he sends out a weekly newsletter that is pure gold and you should subscribe.KJ (03:26):It really is, it's one of the best ones I know of.Sarina (03:29):So, two Fridays ago, he sent one out that began with sharing a New Yorker cartoon that really speaks to what it's like to be a writer right now. And it's a picture of a guy in a rowboat in the middle of a choppy body of water. And you can see there's a shark, and there's a ship sinking behind him, and there's lightning, and it's raining. And the caption says, 'This is it - the time to finish your novel.' And I love it desperately because, you know, remember back in March when we were all like, Hey, what are we going to accomplish while we're stuck at home? Or how about when the three of us (and I'm so happy we did this, I wouldn't change a thing), but we sat and recorded an episode in December right before our office party where we go out together for lunch and we very cheerfully made a list of goals for 2020. Not having any clue that 2020 would shape up to be quite unlike most of the other years that we've sat around planning things together. So I think we should revisit those goals and see what is capable on here. And what have we learned about goal making from our lists.Jess (04:54):I was going to say the first thing I've learned is to be flexible, and to shift, and to adjust to your surroundings. Cause clearly that's the theme of the day. Alright. So what'd you have on there, Ms. Sarina?Sarina (05:10):Well, you know, many of my goals could really stand up in terms of getting the same things done. Especially where I had goals about helping other people, and helping other authors, and helping other women. And those things are all still true and I've been trying to do more of that. But of course I had some goals about like how much I was going to accomplish in terms of writing. And, you know, I'm not teaching anybody to read right now because my kids are old enough to handle this stuff by themselves. But, I didn't count account for my own potential anxiety and the difficulties of making career decisions when the whole world seems to be shifting. So goal I'm having the most trouble with is the one where I was writing an entire book to give to my agent to sell in a new genre for me and that suddenly feels insurmountable even though my work day could look the same because I don't know if that part of publishing is going to be there for me when I'm done. And that's like a mental obstacle to doing that.Jess (06:19):You mean the YA genre?Sarina (06:21):Yeah. Well, you know, unfortunately I have a lot of knowledge of economics and I'm watching businesses fail around me. And I have like a mental block about writing into a publishing world that might not exist when I'm done.Jess (06:42):Yeah, I hear that. Absolutely.KJ (06:47):I am still plowing through, my top number one goal was to finish a book that has now got a different title than it had in my list of goals, but that is fine. Who knows what the title is going to be, but that was my top number one goal was to finish it, and then hopefully get it out, and pitch it to editors. And that is still my top goal despite the obvious changes in the publishing market. I'm not struggling with that as much, but it's probably because I don't have the alternative that you have. Like you could put your time into stuff that you can independently publish and you know you will be there, and readers will be there, and digital book sales will be there. So, it's different, you've got a different choice there.Sarina (07:42):I was just going to say that the fact that most of my publishing is digital is such a blessing and I just don't discount it at all. And also my fear about that other project is not entirely rational, but part of me is in that rowboat with the guy in the thunder storm. And I'm not sure what to do about that. Like how to disembark.Jess (08:09):Well, it was interesting, someone asked a question in the #AmWriting Facebook group this week about this question and said, 'You know, what's everyone doing? Like are we pitching? Are we querying? Are agents picking up new clients? And are people buying books?' And so I went ahead and asked our agent and I said, 'I don't have to quote you or anything.' And she said, 'Hell yes, people are buying.' She said, she's had a couple of auctions. She said, you can totally quote me that people are buying, people are looking, that things are still chugging along in book sale world. I think a lot of people are scared about releasing right now, which is a really scary, new world sort of situation. But people are still buying books. People are still picking up new writers. So there was that sort of gut check of, Oh, there is some normalcy happening out there and our agent is not the kind of person to be you know, to be blindly optimistic. She's the kind of person to give it to you like it is.KJ (09:18):Yeah. Or even worse than it is. My fiction agent says the same thing and my editor says she's acquiring. So people are acquiring of course, whether they're like whistling Dixie and a thunderstorm is another question. But, they're trying, everybody wants to keep going. And I would like to have a book to sell them. I would very much like to have a book to sell them. What I am finding is that the speed at which I can complete this is totally different than it used to be. Even when I'm sitting down to work, I can't work as fast. Both because I think my focus is off and because my house is full of people. People everywhere, everywhere I look, there's another person and they eat. They just won't stop eating.Jess (10:25):Yeah. I'm the place of, Oh my gosh, dinner really does happen every single day. Like everyone's on their own for breakfast and lunch. But that dinner thing, that's our sort of reconnect with each other. We're still doing dinner. Dinner is important to us. And because I have big eaters, they tend to start asking at like 4:45. I'll get these texts. So what's the thought for dinner? So dinner happens every day, shockingly. And that's actually been, if anything, a positive for our family. So having something, you know, to eat evening and sit down and even if it's just like last night I threw together a soup. It's been a good thing, but it is shocking to me how much they can eat. But on the other hand, like our grocery bills are freaking me out. But on the other hand we are not eating out at all. So we don't even do takeout. But KJ, did you finish? Can I start talking about mine? Because mine go in a weird direction.KJ (11:26):Well I didn't. I mean, the goal of finishing that book is the only one that stays the same. I have essay goals on here and I am just not feeling the essays right now cause it feels like the only essays I can write would be about this. And I don't want to write about this. I really don't. I know a lot of people do, but I really, really, really, really, really don't. So you know, I had humor on here. I wanted to do some of that. Does it have to be covid humor? I don't know. So there's that. My promotion goals around The Chicken Sisters, the ones that are on here are still the same because... Podcast goals. Yeah. Well the shift is in how, but I didn't really write how into my goals.Jess (12:20):No, I mean the real fact for you is that some of the things that you were counting on, some of them in there are not happening.KJ (12:28):So, no, but it's not like everybody else is out there hawking their books face to face and I'm not, so I am not as bothered by that as as I might be. You know, the advantage to it (as an introvert who's not super into travel) I really wanted to do these things, but not doing them is okay too. In some ways.Jess (12:57):Can I just offer another silver lining to this though, is that it's unbelievable to me how generous other writers are being with each other right now. I know you and I have both bought a bunch of books that we may or may not ever read just because we're supporting our fellow authors out there. And I think it's a fantastic thing. And I mentioned in another podcast that I'm a new devotee of this long form podcast and on that they're talking to a lot of writers right now who are trying to release books during this and they're talking about the generosity of other authors. So that's been really lovely to see. So hopefully some of that will kick in for you too, KJ.KJ (13:37):I think it will. I feel pretty good and I'm having a really good time. One thing I'm having a good time with is that when this all started someone mentioned to me that the warehouse might not be able to send out advanced copies anymore. And I went, 'Oh, so wait, they're just sitting there? So would they just put them in a box and send them to me?' So they did. I basically have all the remaining advanced reader copies. And so I'm sending the Good Reads giveaway winner copies and I'm sending all the bookstagrammers and I ultimately spent a lot of time sort of going, which would be the very best bookstagrammers. And last week I was just like, you know, I'm just going to send these to the bookstagrammers that I follow and that follow me and that are sort of in my universe and that'll be happy and excited to get it. And I've been doing that and it feels really fun. So that's entertaining.Jess (14:40):That's a very cool thing. Plus, you know, there's the whole decorating of them. But Sarina, you had something you wanted to mention to KJ.Sarina (14:46):I did because when she was talking about essays, it made me realize that how much of the news I'm reading is all focused on the same thing. So that means that relevancy is suddenly like a little bit of a wrench in our goals because you could still write essays, you still have the time, and you still have the voice, but the relevancy of the things that you were probably going to work on is just gone. And I'm struggling with some relevancy, too. It takes a whole lot of optimism to write romance and you know, I'm a little bit stuck on that. And even just literally, I looked at the epilogue of one of my hockey books and I had my team winning the cup in June of 2020 and guess what? There isn't even going to be a cup in June of 2020 and it never occurred to me. Like I try not to paint myself into a corner. I do it all the time anyway, but it never in my wildest dreams occurred to me that there would not be a champion.Jess (15:53):It takes an extra layer of imagination, too. I mean, you're already constructing new worlds for your books and now suddenly you're having to like construct a whole world for your own world so that you can construct those. I mean, you have to have a certain level of optimism. You have to have a certain level of ability to envision a world in which your characters are not going through this, not touching each other thing. And I mean, look at that. You are trying to write about people who are so much touching each other in a world where no one's allowed to touch each other. I mean, it's a really weird thing.Sarina (16:25):It is. And I saw a really funny tweet from a narrator who was doing a book and he, without naming the book said, 'You know, this book really confused me. I was telling my friend because it not a lot happens. There's not a lot of conflict. They go to Ikea and buy some furniture and I was just waiting for the conflict.' And the friend said to this narrator, 'Dude, what you just described is like science fiction at this point.'Jess (16:56):That's true. That's absolutely true. Yeah. Alright, well I wanted to talk about the fact that so I actually did finish the edits on my manuscript. That was my number one goal, finish the edits on the manuscript and you know, it wasn't anything like Gift of Failure but there was still some heavy lifting to do. And I got them done. I'm looking at the date actually I got them done well before the date that I was hoping to get them done by. And the reason I wanted to get them done by that date was that I wanted to have a new proposal or at least the shortened version to show my agent cause she has no idea still what I'm thinking about. And I wanted to have that to her by April 15th and of course that was smack in the middle of just trying to wrap my head around all of this stuff. And you know, for me also personally, it's been anxiety provoking. Like I can sit here in my house, in the woods. I was telling my husband, this is a really weird paradoxical thing. I don't go out very often, obviously, but when I do go out, I get pretty depressed because here in my home I can ignore it and I can kind of forget about it for short periods of time. But going out in the world has been just scary and weird and anyway, so the worst of this stuff has come right at a time when I was hoping to get a new proposal done. And so what I've decided to do is give myself a break and I'm doing a lot of my research through audio. And while I'm listening, I keep a notebook near me, but I am outside. Because for the first time since I started a speaking career that runs on an academic schedule, I've never been home in time to get really good gardens ready for the growing season. And I definitely never got gardens in my new house. And I've always felt a little adrift without my gardens. So I've been giving myself a big fat break. And I leave the house as soon as I'm done with my stuff in the morning and I go outside and I don't come in until I have to get that infernal daily dinner thing going again. I walk in at the end of the day and I look at my husband and I say, 'I am just so happy outside.' And the other thing was because of all this anxiety, I wasn't sleeping very well and just exhausting myself during the day outside, and just being sore, and tired, and drained has been much better for my sleep. So I'm giving myself a big fat break right now, in terms of the writing part. Definitely still researching, loving listening to all the audio, but giving myself a big fat break, thinking of it as a little vacation has been really important to me. And I have gardens now. I have the bare bones gardens down and it makes me so happy and I finally feel like this house is mine again. You know, it finally is a place where I live. And and that's been fantastic. So yeah. And then the rest of my goals were things like, so finish the edits, got those done on time, finish the new proposal, totally didn't happen on time. But that was my own internal schedule and that's okay. And then back with you on the essay thing, cause I had complete five essays for collection by the end of the year. I've definitely thought about them. And for me that's a big thing cause I do a lot of the thinking, the writing internally first, and then I just of get it down. But yeah, I'm not writing about covid and these essays are about things that are so unrelated to that. And so it's just been close to impossible to get that essay writing done. But I'm feeling better now and I feel like that's going to come back online really soon. Our friend Mary Laura Philpott has sold a new essay collection and I happen to know that she's trying to get down to work on that. And so, I'm sort of mentally trying to partner with Mary Laura and be thinking about those essays. Spanish was a big one and I haven't done that. I just absolutely 100% failed at that. We had some goals around Spanish that were going to culminate with some big Spanish speaking for a trip that got canceled. Well and now my thoughts have shifted also to things like I'm starting to freak out about some of the spring speaking events. You know, a big source of my anxiety around an inability to stay focused for a few minutes at a time has to do with money stuff because my non-writing income went poof. And that's the majority of my income. So that's been challenging. And my husband works for a hospital that just announced that all of the top level people will all take pay cuts. And so my husband's taking a pay cut in the midst of this as well. And then if anyone's been following my social media, they know we just spent the equivalent of a small used car on our dog who almost died. So that's a stressful thing, too. And yet we're so fortunate, I'm not scared about paying our rent, but I am just anxious. If I had to rewrite my goals now, it would be do more of what's making me feel really good right now. And that's making me feel really good right now.KJ (22:42):Well that's a good question. Are we going to rewrite our goals? I think it might be worth sitting down and doing. Because one of the other reason that some of this stuff happened - I've got some goals here around the podcast, and the email list, and marketing with other podcasts. There's no reason I can't do those things other than that I've got about three hours of brain power in me every day and I use it up on writing the book and then I just have so much less steam than I used to have. I don't know. I guess it's the anxiety, I guess it's that. But you know, I used to be able to sort of write in the morning and then go back to do all the other stuff in the afternoon. And it's also all the household stuff. It's all this stuff, all this stuff. And some of these are just like we were saying, I just don't necessarily want to focus on that as much anymore.Jess (23:37):Okay, well then put a line through it. I'm putting a line through the Spanish one. I'm letting myself off the hook for that. You know what, I was just looking at number five, which was one email a month for my email list. And my email list has gone up a lot this year because of some high visibility podcasting I've done. But I'm really glad we're doing this today because that is a good kick in the pants for me. But you know what I've done that's been also really wonderful. I think I'm just missing teaching so much that I've been doing this thing on Twitter where I teach about rhetorical devices and I do a long thread and you could see the smile on my face while I'm doing them. It makes me so happy. I'm like pulling all these books off the shelves and it's teaching and I'm having so much fun. So I'm going to keep doing that. And you know, doing more of that I think would be really super fun for me. So I may even stick that in instead.KJ (24:37):That is so funny because I said one of the things we could talk about today is changing our approach to social media. And you said, 'Oh, I didn't change anything.' I was like, 'Yes, you did.' That's what I was thinking of. You know, we're filling in some gaps of things that we used to do in real life with social media. And I feel like that is one for you. And if you could or wanted a new teaching job, you certainly couldn't get it now. So you have found that. I've been connecting a lot more on Instagram. I've been going back into Twitter, which I had been out of for literally years. Trying to find ways to use Facebook that don't involve getting sucked in. And actually I'm on Instagram way too much. I need to stop. But also feeling like it really is providing a connection and a place to talk about books and things that are important to me. Like these are the conversations I might normally be having, like at a hockey game or in line at the grocery store or at the bookstore over coffee or whatever. And now they're taking place online in different ways. So that was what I was thinking of, but I was also thinking about you. How about you, Sarina, have you changed your social media at all?Sarina (25:54):Well yeah, but it's not all sunny around here. I've had to take some breaks, some like multi-day breaks from social media just because it feeds my anxiety when I can see people sort of emoting about the same things that I'm worried about. I have to walk away because sometimes it just amplifies all the things I'm worried about. So I think taking some steps back has really helped me. And plus I don't want to amplify my own...I feel very brittle right now and I don't really want to be brittle on social media, so I've just had to sort of back away.Jess (26:37):It's funny you say that because now thinking back, just about every time you text that you're freaking out about something, it's because you saw something on social media that just triggered you. So I think that's fantastic.Sarina (26:47):I mean, I'm more caught up on news right now than I've ever been in my entire life, but it's not such a great thing because the reason I can't walk away from Washington Post and the New York Times is that I'm looking for someone to tell me what's going to happen. And of course they can't really do that, but that's why I keep going back. So I've had to kind of step away from that, too. Not because news is bad, but because it can't serve what I'm really searching for.Jess (27:22):Didn't you say that you were on Google for something and you realize that there was a commonly searched for question on Google, which was what's going to happen? I don't think Google can even do that.Sarina (27:42):I love to see what other people are searching on Google. And I will stop and screenshot them if they're particularly wonderful.Jess (27:52):Oh, can I tell you something really cool? At Google headquarters in California I got to speak there after Gift of Failure came out and they took me through and I got a really cool tour and one of the things they have as a staircase and on the riser for each step of the staircase are the most Googled things so you can watch in real time on the staircase as all the things that people are Googling changes. And it was really cool while I was there looking at other stuff. They also have this room you can stand in and it screens all around you like floor to ceiling screens all around you and you can enter any search term you want. It could be you, for example. So I entered Jessica Lahey to see sort of what the world sees when they look at me across all platforms. And it allows you to see like does your website match up? You know, do you have a brand that has unifying themes, blah blah blah. And it was just really interesting to see how does my website match up with what's going on on Twitter and what's going on on all these different platforms. It was really kind of cool. That was kind of fun. But I'm sorry I totally took things off the rails because you were talking about what's going to happen and no one being able to tell you that.Sarina (29:07):Yep. And they still can't so it doesn't really matter.Jess (29:09):Well what has been interesting is from, and I know you're looking a lot at a lot of this through an economic lens, cause that's who you are. But my son is studying economics and can you imagine - this is when my kid is getting his introduction to the world of economics, like this is such a weird and bizarre time and he has a summer job that is (and I don't think I'm allowed to say where it is yet because I don't think anything's been signed) but it's at the epicenter of what's going on economically. And so we've been talking about it a lot, but from a very academic perspective, which has been interesting. I guess it allows me to sort of set it over there and have a bit of a reserve around it. But I mean it's not like it's good news. It's just academic instead of about like our personal economic situation. Can I interject one tiny thing? Can you all look at your word? I have them all in front of me right now. How are you feeling about your words?Sarina (30:18):I still like my word.KJ (30:18):I hate my words.Jess (30:23):Okay. Well my word was practice and I'm actually still feeling good about that because it's a good reminder to me that it's not about having these huge breakthroughs. It's about the daily practice of either thinking about structuring, blah, blah, blah. So I'm still happy with that. Sarina, your word was, do you remember?Sarina (30:39):Abundance.Jess (30:40):How are you feeling about that?Sarina (30:41):Well, honestly, I should still tape it up into every room I walk through because the truth is it's pretty abundant around here. Ebooks are still performing. My life is fine. It's just a little more anxious than it used to be.KJ (30:59):And my word was magic and I'm not feeling very magical right now. Although honestly, I am up and down every day. I don't want to be Pollyanna about this. Nobody is happy about what is happening, but I suppose it is a little magical that my family has not killed each other in the 67 days that we have been largely cooped up together. That is kind of magical. And I was thinking that I might put some magic in a next book draft, after this one. I don't know, maybe that will happen. Yeah, magic did not turn out to be a super helpful for this time.Jess (32:11):Speaking of magical thinking and inhabiting fantasy lands that don't exist. Should we talk a little bit about what we've been reading? Alright. Sarina you want to lead off again since you went first last time?Sarina (32:24):Well, I'm reading something that KJ gave me. The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix. This was a book that spotted before KJ bought it and I thought, I'm just happy that book exists. The writing is terrific. His writing game is super strong from the first paragraph of the prologue and I am intrigued.Jess (32:58):Oh, good. Cool. What about you KJ?KJ (33:01):Well, I'm reading a book, Sarina gave me. I am reading Undercover Bromance by Alyssa Kay Adams. We need to book club on this one, Sarina. We need to have a discussion, but like her previous book in this series, The Bromance Book Club. It is fun, satisfying, fast paced, and distracting. And that's about everything I ask of a book right now. And I also am reading The Body in the Garden by Catherine Schellman. This is a historical mystery and I have not read very much in the mystery genre for many, many years. And it's kind of fun to see that in a same way that historical romances have taken a real turn for having a modern way of thinking within the historical romance as opposed to trying to keep people thinking as they might have in the time. This mystery also sort of falls into that category. It has a modern attitude within a historical time and space and that makes it fun. And that's by Catherine Schellman. So again, fun, distracting, light. Just what we need.Jess (34:16):Yeah, I I have a book I want to talk about today cause there's something really interesting in it and it's not something that you guys normally read is two things. Number one for the audio listeners out there David Sedaris released an Audible original. It's not a huge deal. Don't get too excited. It's only 30 minutes long. It's called Themes and Variations, but it's essentially him just riffing about the people he talks to on book tour and the things they talk about. I think it was like $1.89 or something like that. But I got so excited when I saw it and I've already listened to it three times just because I needed a little David Sedaris back in my life. But the thing I went and listened to is I saw that there was a new Stephen King coming out and a former guest on our podcast, Ruth Franklin, wrote the review of Stephen King's new book in the New York Times and it's a wonderful review. She's such a great writer. I was like, 'Okay, well if she has a nice things to say, I'll get it.' And it's a collection of novellas and short stories and I'm not going to talk about all of them. I want to talk about just one and there's one called The Rat and I'm not going to do any spoilers here, but if you are a writer who has ever felt blocked in your writing, this story is a truly delightful, dark, dastardly view into the writer's head when they're trying to wrestle with their demons and why they can't get the words on the page.Speaker 3 (36:26):And I was working out in the woods while I was listening to it and there was a giant smile on my face. I was cackling. I'm like, this is so mean. And it's similar to when he channels the writer in Misery, when anytime he's ever talked about sort of what it's like for him to write and to go through that trap door into his basement. And all of that good stuff is in there. All of that stuff from On Writing that we love so much about his reading, about his process that's all in there, channeled through this writer in this story called The Rat. And it's delightful. It really truly is. It would be worth getting the book if you can afford to do it. It would be worth getting the book just to listen to this story really quick. I mean, I've also been comfort listening and I was scrolling through my Audible books that I've been listening to and they've all been books about sort of overcoming hardship. I realized I relistened to Jenny Finney Boylan's She's Not There. And I relistened to Diana Niad's Find a Way, which is about swimming from Florida to Cuba.KJ (37:40):I think you're the only person who's still listening. Audio has just dropped cause nobody's in their cars, nobody is commuting.Jess (39:02):I'm glad we did this cause I actually feel refocused in a couple of different ways and I'm feel good about drawing a line through one of my goals and just saying nope. By the way, go check out the #AmWriting Facebook group if you want some interesting reading about how other writers are handling this time, because that's what really most of the conversation is about right now. Like, how do you handle stuff? Are people still pitching here? What do you think about this? It's a really reassuring and supportive place to be, but until next time, everyone keep your button, the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Megan is back to lead our discussion of Shirley Jackson’s most famous work, “The Lottery” (1948), and hoo boy, do we talk about how mad the readers were when this was published. The New Yorker famously lost like a billion subscriptions and got a grazillion angry letters from their readership of middlebrow prudes, who wondered, “is it based on reality? Do these practices still continue in back-country England, the human sacrifice for the rich harvest? It’s a frightening thought.” Even though Shirley Jackson, in her essay “Biography of a Story,” claims “it’s just a story I wrote,” we discuss totalitarianism, the terror of the rural, the expanded family, and the history of strange rites in literature (and movies for, like, a minute.) We also talk about how we all read it in high school and what a trip it was to read with our peers. We read The New Yorker’s archival version. While there is scant academic writing on Jackson, we recommend Ruth Franklin’s biography A Rather Haunted Life, and suggest checking out Elaine Showalter’s review of it in The Washington Post, where she reminds us that “behind her cheery masks, Jackson was hiding an angry, vengeful self, dreaming of divorce and flight to a place where she could be alone and write,” which is truly our kind of broad. Find us on Twitter and Instagram @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

To get into the Halloween spirit, we’ve invited Assistant Editor Katie Daniels and Editorial Assistant Taylor Curry, the hosts of [Spoiler Alert], our online book club, to interview the literary critic Ruth Franklin. Their October book is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the suspenseful tale of the two Blackwood sisters and the mysterious murder that took place at their house. For a long time, Jackson’s hard-to-categorize novels and humorous parenting memoirs took the backseat to her (in)famous short story, “The Lottery.” That’s starting to change, thanks to film and television adaptations—and Ruth Franklin’s critically acclaimed biography, Shirley Jackson, which argued that her writing is an important contribution to the American gothic tradition.Go beyond the episode:Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for biography (and read our glowing review)Join [Spoiler Alert], our monthly online book club and tune in today at 5 PM EST for a live discussionWatch the spooky trailer for the 2019 adaptation of Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the CastleTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

To get into the Halloween spirit, we’ve invited Assistant Editor Katie Daniels and Editorial Assistant Taylor Curry, the hosts of [Spoiler Alert], our online book club, to interview the literary critic Ruth Franklin. Their October book is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the suspenseful tale of the two Blackwood sisters and the mysterious murder that took place at their house. For a long time, Jackson’s hard-to-categorize novels and humorous parenting memoirs took the backseat to her (in)famous short story, “The Lottery.” That’s starting to change, thanks to film and television adaptations—and Ruth Franklin’s critically acclaimed biography, Shirley Jackson, which argued that her writing is an important contribution to the American gothic tradition.Go beyond the episode:Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for biography (and read our glowing review)Join [Spoiler Alert], our monthly online book club and tune in today at 5 PM EST for a live discussionWatch the spooky trailer for the 2019 adaptation of Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the CastleTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week's episode features highlights of a panel from the 2019 BIO Conference, “Promoting Your Biography,” with moderator Ruth Franklin and panelists Dan Blank, Melinda Ponder, and Declan Taintor.  

This week's episode features highlights from a panel from the 2019 BIO Conference, “Fire Up Your Narrative,” with moderator Linda Leavell and panelists John A. Farrell, Ruth Franklin, Caroline Fraser,  […]

This weeks podcast of Short story Book Club is with Book Critic Ruth Franklin on her award winning biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

The #MeToo movement of recent years started in the entertainment industry, with revelations about moguls such as Harvey Weinstein and CBS’s Les Moonves, and, since 2017, television writers have been grappling with how to address sexual harassment for a modern audience. Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, examined the issue in a recent essay. Some of the shows she thinks are doing the best job are actually comedies, from the strange animated series “Tuca and Bertie” to the deeply cynical “Veep.” “Maybe there’s been a hesitation to deal with this head-on in drama,” she tells David Remnick, “because drama does, to some extent, at least, require sincerity, and sincerity can be uncomfortable in talking about trauma and assault.” One of Nussbaum’s favorites from this “deluge” of plotlines comes on the show “High Maintenance,” where, instead of some appalling revelation of misconduct, we watch a character reassessing a seemingly minor incident with fresh eyes. “He’s clearly thought about this in a post-MeToo way, as ‘Is this the shitty thing that I did that traumatized a woman that I know? . . . How do I take responsibility for it?’ ” Plus, Ruth Franklin on the late poet Mary Oliver, whose spirituality, love of nature, and unusual directness made her one of the most beloved poets of our time.  

Shirley Jackson's stories and novels rank among the greatest weird works produced in America during the 20th century. However, unlike authors such as Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, Jackson didn't cut her teeth in the pulps but among the slick pages of such illustrious publications as The New Yorker. On the other hand, whether because her most famous novel uses the traditional ghost story form or because she was a woman, Jackson only rarely appears in the litanies of weird literature, where she most definitely belongs. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss two of Jackson's short works, "The Lottery" and "The Summer People." The conversation touches on such cheerful topics as human sacrifice, the use of tradition to license evil, and the alienness that can infect even the most familiar things ... when the stars are right. Header image by Hussein Twabi (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Storm_clouds_gathering.jpg), Wikimedia Commons REFERENCES The Weird Studies Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies) Shirley Jackson (http://shirleyjackson.org/) Zoë Heller, “The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson),” review of Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (https://www.amazon.com/Shirley-Jackson-Rather-Haunted-Life-ebook/dp/B01BX7S014) American writer Mitch Horowitz (https://mitchhorowitz.com/) Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Rhonda-Byrne/dp/1582701709) Stuart Wilde, [The Trick to Money is Having Some](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67752.TheTricktoMoneyIsHavingSome) Seymour Ginsburg, [Gurdjieff Unveiled](https://www.theosophical.org/files/resources/books/Gurdjieff/GUNVEILEDFINALWHOLEBOOK1305d.pdf) Randall Collins, Violence: A Microsociological Theory (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8547.html) James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078ZZYR56/) Homer, The Iliad Phil & JF at Octopus Books (https://www.patreon.com/posts/jf-martel-with-25148548) in Ottawa, 2015 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (http://seinfeld.co/library/meditations.pdf) “Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.” David Lynch, Blue Velvet (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/)

This episode, the second in a special three-part series, chronicles Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith's travels to rural South Carolina in February 2018 as a pilot for her second-year project, "American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities." Rob Casper of the Poetry and Literature Center will reflect on the trip along with Tracy K. Smith, Congressman James Clyburn, and Ruth Franklin.

…in which Jess and KJ talk with award-winning biographer, Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, and find out what it takes to write an account of someone else’s life. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Melanie Rehak and Ruth Franklin discuss Franklin’s work as a critic, her acclaimed biography Shirley Jackson: A Very Haunted Life, and how the literary landscape might look different now if women critics had been given an equal playing field throughout the 20th century.

Join us for a special Halloween edition of Stories of Strange Women podcast as we welcome book critic and award-winning Shirley Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin! In this episode we explore Franklin’s epic biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life — discussing Jackson taking her crown as Read More

TWICE a month, the librarians are in, with their favorite recommendations in Two Book Minimum, a toe-to-toe discussion on a book or topic, as well as news from the book world, updates from Lawrence Public Library, and beyond. Bookish News: The 2017 National Book Award shortlist for Fiction Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman The Leavers by Lisa Ko (eBook on Hoopla!) Pachinko by Min Jin Lee Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel prize in literature! Sisters in Crime an organization whose stated mission is “to promote the ongoing advancement, recognition and professional development of women crime writers”—turns 30 this year! Two Book Minimum: Dirty Dancing at Devil’s Leap by Julie Anne Long (2017) Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin (2016) Note: Polli wanted to clear up that, while she called this a memoir in the podcast, it's actually a biography. Sorry, y'all! She definitely DOES know the difference ;) The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (2016) Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (1993) She Said/She Said: ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr (2014) We are actually disagreeing for once! Hear our takes on this Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France. Upcoming Events: FRI OCT 20 @7PM Mic Supremacy #2 at Raven Bookstore: “Mic Supremacy is a POC led and centered open mic night open to the Lawrence community.” SUN Oct 29 @2PM - “Pure Imagination - Music from the Movies” -- Jayhawk Harp Ensemble coming to play music from beloved movies like Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, Beauty and the Beast, etc. in the library Auditorium Show notes: http://www.lawrence.lib.ks.us/2017/10/book-squad-podcast-012-the-one-where-we-finally-disagree/ This episode was produced by Jim Barnes in the Sound & Vision studio. The theme song is by Heidi Lynne Gluck. Please subscribe and leave us comments – we’d love to know what you think, and your comments make it easier for other people to find our podcast. Happy reading and listening! xo, Polli & Kate

This week, Brea and Mallory defend the much maligned term “beach read”, review some weird reading glasses and debate book sharing. Reading Glasses is sponsoring Tonia Thompson’s drive to get copies of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas into the hands of teens. Link below for details! Use the hashtag #TakeBackBeachRead to participate in online discussion on Twitter and Instagram!   Tonia Thompson https://toniathompson.com/fiction/ https://twitter.com/missdefying   The Hate U Give Donation Link - https://toniathompson.com/thug-for-teens/   Banned Books- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/artistic-expression/banned-books   Prism Spectacles- https://www.amazon.com/Prism-Glasses-Eye-Bed-Spectacles/dp/B000RZNBF4   Books Mentioned-   Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781501116841   Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780871403131   The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143038092   The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062498533   Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780399184598   Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374104092   The Hike by Drew Magary https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780399563850

Episode Fourteen Show Notes CW = Chris Wolak EF = Emily Fine The Book Cougars had a great shout out on the Reading Envy podcast: check it out – Just Read – The Impossible Fortress – Jason Rekulak (CW) The Opposite of Everyone – Joshilyn Jackson (EF) You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life – Jen Sincero (CW) (audio) – Currently Reading/Listening – One in a Million Boy – Monica Wood (EF) Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For – Rebecca Schuman (CW) Upstream – Mary Oliver (EF) How to be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up – Emilie Wapnick (CW) Click here for Emilie Wapnick’s Ted Talk – Biblio Adventures – April 28-29 – Newburyport Literary Festival in Newburyport, MA Emily talks about the following authors/books: Dawn Tripp author of the book Georgia Monica Wood author of the book The One In a Million Boy Michelle Hoover author of the book Bottomland Myfanwy Collins, Nadine Darling, Carla Panciera, Holly Robinson Andre Dubus III, Ruth Franklin, Richard Russo Caroline Leavitt author of the book Cruel, Beautiful World Chris participated in Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon Chris and Emily talk about A Quiet Passion – the new film about the life of Emily Dickinson. You can watch the trailer here. Chris gives it a thumbs down and Emily gives it a thumbs up. Independent Bookstore Day – Emily was at Jabberwocky Bookshop. Chris was at the newly opened Bookclub Bookstore & More! – Upcoming Jaunts – May 5-6 – BOOKTOPIA – at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT May 15 – Emily is heading to Powell’s Books in Portland, OR to see David Callahan author of The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age May 24 – Chris is headed back to Bookclub Bookstore & More to see Brianna Dunlap author of Connecticut Valley Tobacco. – Upcoming Reads – The Leavers – Lisa Ko (EF) Into the Water – Paula Hawkins (CW) Connecticut Valley Tobacco – Brianna Dunlap (CW) – Also Mentioned – The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr James and the Giant Peach / Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl Russell Gray blogs at https://www.inkandpaperblog.com/

Epigraph On this episode we becomes best friends with Amy Stephenson, Events Director at Booksmith in San Francisco and co-creator/host of Shipwreck, a competitive literary erotic fan fiction live show. This episode is sponsored by Books & Whatnot, the newsletter dedicated to books, bookselling, and bookish folk. We were too excited about hosting Books on the Nightstand to mention Books & Whatnot on air, but you should definitely check out the newsletter archive here. Follow Books & Whatnot on Twitter at @booksandwhatnot. Introduction In Which We Discuss Sad Sociology Books and Amy’s Twitter Life Coach, and Furiously Take Notes On the Books We’re Recommending Each Other (but oh wait look, show notes!) We’re drinking Manhattans—Amy’s go-to, “I’m fancy on a Friday night” drink—and making jokes about robotripping. We’re Reading: Amy is reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (and Kim & Emma are SO excited) and Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. Kim is reading Necessary Trouble by Sarah Jaffe, The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, and The Revenge of Analog by David Sax—which is her favorite book of 2016. Emma is reading My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris (out from Fantagraphics Feb 14) and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.  Also mentioned: Shirley Jackson’s memoir(ish) essay collections Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons and the new biography on Jackson, Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin. She recommends all the Shirley Jackson book. Because Shirley Jackson is a #bosswitch Emma’s favorite book of 2016 is Trainwreck by Sady Doyle. Amy’s is Evicted by Matthew Desmond (paperback out Feb 28). If Kim were allowed to pick two favorites, her other favorite would be While the City Slept by Eli Sanders (paperback out Feb 7). We’re Excited About: Amy is looking forward to so many books in 2017, but, when pressed, narrowed it down to these six: All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg (out March 7) All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers by Alana Massey (out Feb 7) Alana Massey is Amy’s “Twitter life coach,” so you should probably follow her too: @alanamassey The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn (out April 11) Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki (out May 9) And We’re Off by Dana Schwartz (out May 2)  Dana Schwartz is also the creator of Guy In Your MFA. Amy says, “She’s so talented it makes me angry.” Emma is excited about Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (out Feb 14) Seriously. Read this book. It’s his debut novel and it’s amazing. Or listen to the record-breaking audiobook. What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump's America edited by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians  shout out to Melville House for putting this out with a quickness. Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller the cover is done by the amazing painter Lee Price. And Kim is looking forward to The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker because she’s pretty sure it’s queer. Chapter I [19:50] In Which We Discuss How Kids Book Authors Write The Best Erotic Fan Fic, Dick Jokes, and Shipwreck in Seattle Amy works at Booksmith in San Francisco, California. She is their Events Director, does all their social media, and is their de facto HR dept. Because bookstores.  Booksmith recently celebrated their 40th anniversary and they’re opening a new store called The Bindery—a sort of wine bar/living room space/events annex—across the street. Amy is also the co-creator and host of Shipwreck, “a competitive literary erotic fan fiction live show,” which began in June 2013 and runs once a month at Booksmith (and sometimes travels to Comic Cons). They record ALL the shows so you can enjoy crazy dick jokes from the comfort of your own headphones. They were inspired by the competitive reading series Write Club, which also has  a podcast! Shipwreck is such an amazing concept, that Grand Central Publishing wanted to collect the stories in a book: Fanfiction Parodies of Great (and Terrible) Literature from the Smutty Stage of Shipwreck edited by Amy Stephenson and Casey A. Childers Hey, Seattleites, does this sound awesome? You too can enjoy live erotic fan fiction at Emerald City Comic Con this year on March 2nd. The line-up includes:  Seanan McGuire (whose most recent book is Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day and who wrote for the very first Shipwreck) Peter Mountford (author of The Dismal Science) Scott Westerfeld (who has a graphic novel called Spill Zone coming out May 2nd)  Matt Fraction (who writes Sex Criminals, so you know his erotic fanfic will be excellent).  They’ll be writing fan fiction for Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comics. And their San Francisco performer, Baruch Porras-Hernandez, will be reading for both shows. Buy tickets here. There will be two shows, one at 7pm and another at 9:30pm. BONUS: we, the Drunk Booksellers, will be there selling books and representing Elliott Bay Book Co. Chapter II [40:00] In Which We Reveal Bookseller Secrets and Are Super Supportive of Each Other The book description guaranteed to get Amy reading is: “strong female character written by a women involved in a murder somehow and you won’t believe the twist… bathtub gin reading.” If you need a gateway mystery, Amy recommends Tana French, specifically The Likeness. Her desert island pick is The Comedians by Graham Greene because she already reads it every year. Her Station Eleven pick (aka the world is falling apart, which it kind of is) is Erich Fromm: The Sane Society (NOTE: this is still in print, despite what we say in the episode) and On Disobedience by Eric Fromm Her Wild pick: something Didion “because Didion teaches you how to see the world.”  Bonus bookseller confession: neither Kim or Emma have read Didion. So where do you start with Didion? If you want to read something that’s going to make you cry: The Year of Magical Thinking If you want astute cultural commentary: Slouching Towards Bethlehem Amy’s bookseller confession: she can’t get into Ferrante Go to handsells: Tana French Margaret Atwood’s contemporary fiction: Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride Fred Vargas, who writes police procedurals that are weirdly witty, funny, and entertaining; her newest book, A Climate of Fear is out March 7th go to non-fiction: A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres (who also wrote a memoir called Jesus Land The book Amy wants to champion to other booksellers: Spare and Found Parts by Sarah Griffin, which she describes as “a modern, feminist telling of Frankenstein, sort of” Chapter III [50:40] In Which Our List of Bookstores to Visit and Sites to Check Out Grows Almost As Long As Our List of Books to Read Bookstore Crushes WORD Bookstores  (in Brooklyn, NY and Jersey City, NJ)  Skylight Books (in Los Angeles, CA) Title Wave Books (in Anchorage, AK) Favorite Literary Media: website:  Book Riot—“I think they’re doing the lord’s work out there.” podcasts: Let’s Not Panic: podcast by bookseller Maggie Tokuda-Hall who is spending the year traveling around South America in a Jeep with her husband Adam Wolf. WARNING: it will make you want to quit your job and travel the world. Boars, Gore, and Swords: Game of Thrones-y pop culture podcast by stand-up comics Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott other: Alana Massey’s twitter @alanamassey Maris Kreizman’s tinyletter Drafts, a writing prompt newsletter by Joe Wadlington you can send him what you’ve written and he’ll send you back validation. How awesome is that?? Epilogue [56:39] Amy can be found on the internet as @losertakesall​—a Graham Greene reference, in case you were curious. her personal website Twitter Tumblr Instagram You can also follow Shipwreck on Tumblr and Facebook. And keep up with ALL the hilarity and eroticism by subscribing to their podcast. Having a bad day? Listen to an old episode. Mood = instantly transformed. You can find us on Twitter at @drunkbookseller and everywhere else as DrunkBooksellers (plural). Emma tweets @thebibliot and writes bookish things for Book Riot. Kim tweets occasionally from @finaleofseem, but don’t expect too much.

We talk to author Ruth Franklin about her new biography of Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House.

We talk to author Ruth Franklin about her new biography of Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House.

This week, Vu Tran discusses his debut novel, “Dragonfish”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Ruth Franklin talks about Lucia Berlin’s stories; listeners share what they’ve been reading; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.

This week, Tom Perrotta discusses Kate Atkinson’s “A God in Ruins”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Ruth Franklin talks about Shirley Jackson; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.