Author: Kelley

Shirley Jackson

I just read the post from Venetian Vampire in response to your blog on Oct. 20 about Shirley Jackson. I have always been drawn to her writing and wonder if you care to comment further about her. Thanks either way.

I think Jackson is a wonderful writer. I admire greatly her spareness of language, and the simplicity with which she describes complex, fragile moments between human beings. And she wrote some very shocking things for a mainstream middle-class white woman of her time — “The Lottery” was an absolute scandal, go read the Wikipedia article about it.

I think The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece, and I also like We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although that book seems to be more of a particular taste (sort of like artichokes or anchovies, I suppose). It fascinates and delights me that she wrote stories that were so unabashedly strange and frightening and shocking without having to get all bohemian about it. She lived an apparently satisfying life with her husband and kids and all the responsibilities of a 1940’s/50’s wife and mother, and then she went into her room and wrote Hill House… I would love to have had dinner with this woman.

And you know what else I love about Jackson? She was funny. I’m currently reading her essay collection Life Among the Savages, and there ought to be a tea-snorting warning on the book.

Those essays did for me what perhaps these days blogs do for us: they made Jackson human for me. They showed me the woman behind the marvelous creepy words I have loved for so long. I don’t always like what I learn about artists as people: but I like the sound of Jackson, I like the way she feels in her essays. I like her curiosity and her amusement at the wackiness of the world, and her clear love for her husband and children, and her bemusement at the response to her work.

Maybe it’s naive to say that I think she was a cool person, but I do; and maybe it’s evidence of my own lack of literary rigor that it matters to me, but it does. I would still love her work if I didn’t know anything about her: but knowing a bit of her personal life, and liking what I know, enriches the reading experience somehow for me. I don’t know if it works that way for others, but it’s always been like that for me. I’ve always been fascinated by the person behind the words.

I remember reading Hill House for the first time: the absolute confidence of Jackson’s prose, the small details of Eleanor’s life that told me everything about the howling wind that must live inside her, how glad I was when she escaped in the car and made her bid for freedom… and then the absolute horror of watching it all play out. Theo’s lesbian history revealed with nothing ever said about it, masterful writing. That Jackson is brave enough as a writer to show us the haunting but not the ghost. The effortless way she takes us into people’s heads. And the book scared the bejeepers out of me. That was a great afternoon.

You can start your own conversation now or anytime — just use the “Want to talk?” link on the sidebar or email me.

io9 reviews DS

Many thanks to Charlie Jane Anders for a lovely review of Dangerous Space at io9. I’m especially delighted that she liked “Dangerous Space” (the novella) so much. I love that story, really love it. Practically every big feeling I’ve, every piece of music that’s ever gone bone-deep into me, every ecstatic experience I’ve had is in there in some small way. Sure, I’m in all my stories, every one: but this one is special.

See for yourself. Read the story.

If you’re so inclined, please leave a comment on io9 with your response.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint Archives.

A long and winding road today. I hope you’re enjoying the Virtual Pint posts and the rapid passage of time… we started in 2002 and we’re now in the beginning of 2004.

And in the present day, it’s nearly Thanksgiving. Virtual time isn’t the only kind that flies.

Enjoy your weekend.

My South

Although I will never willingly live there again, I am (as I reminded myself with yesterday’s post) a child of the South. There are certain things that can still instantly transport me to that part of myself, a particular sense of rootedness and home that isn’t really so much about the South itself as it is about a deep part of my from-the-moment-of-birth identity. I may no longer be in those places or cultures, but they are mine, and sometimes I open those internal doors and take joy in revisiting those parts of myself.

What does that for me these days? Hmm… Biscuits and gravy at Beth’s Cafe, although I wish I could find a decent dish of grits in Seattle, I miss good grits. True Blood on HBO (more about which in a later post, because there’s lots to say). The Gulf of Mexico at sunset — big warm sky, big warm water, palm trees rustling in the breeze and everything so peaceful. Southern back roads lined with trees dripping in Spanish moss and fruit stands where men in overalls sold strawberries the size of hubcaps and peaches as big as the world.

And music, of course, so today I thought I’d share this old favorite. Enjoy this trip into my South.

(click here if you can’t see the player.)

Day on

The Platonic ideal I have of “dawn” comes from my childhood in Florida, where the sky is an enormous kid who fingerpaints herself, and she is both exuberant and very, very serious in the focused way children sometimes are; so there are moments of pause, moments of held breath when the sky simply sits still and says Look at me for a while, and then we’ll go on to the next thing.

By my standards there is no dawn in Seattle these days; it’s more that the light simply comes on when it’s supposed to. Blue-black sky, streetlights with frosty halos, an edge of moon and then someone flicks the switch and poof, it’s morning and everything is thin: the translucent pale blue film across the sky; the cold thin sunlight that seems not quite there, as if it’s coming in on conference call; the thin shadows of the people at bus stops, the way they clutch their coats closed and squint into the distance looking for the bus.

I saw today come on through the windows of the gym. I’ve been feeling stressed and just a little beaten down around the edges, and I didn’t expect that looking up from my sore self and seeing a slice of blue sky, crows shaking out their feathers against the few orange and yellow leaves still left on the trees, would make me feel better; but it did. I don’t know why, and I don’t need to. I do know that I found myself thinking of the word daybreak, and realizing it’s the wrong word. There is nothing broken about the day.

Cuffy things

Today I want to go to Musha Cay.

Several years ago, I had an emergency appendectomy. Big drama, midnight surgery… it was odd being wheeled on a stretcher through empty, silent corridors past dark rooms, a bit like suddenly finding myself in the movie Coma, which wasn’t maybe the most cheerful thought to pass out on, but by that point I didn’t care. I just wanted the Bad Stuff out of me.

When I woke up, they brought me Nicola, and then we all went up to a room. The nurse shooed N out the door (it was nearly 3 AM, she was exhausted, and our friend Liz who drove us to the hospital was still asleep in a chair in the emergency room lobby). Then the nurse tucked me up in bed with a contraption that I still, with great fondness, refer to as “the cuffy things.” These are pneumatic cuffs they put on my ankles and calves: the cuffs squeezed my lower legs very gently, alternately, to help keep circulation going and prevent blood clots. They made a gentle wsssh wsssh sound, and the squeezing was like an ongoing massage, and I was warm and full of Vicodin and I knew my dangerous infected appendix was in a dish somewhere far away from me. And I went to sleep.

The cuffy things were unbelievably comforting, to the point they have become iconic for me. Now when I’m feeling tired or stressed, so overwhelmed by all that must be done that it’s hard to focus on actually doing it, I long for the cuffy things. For the feeling of security, of all your problems are somewhere else tonight, you’re safe, just go to sleep.

And Musha Cay is just a Great Big Cuffy Thing for me right now (grin). How wonderful it would be to swoop up a group of awesome people and take us all to a place like this. Where our problems would be somewhere else for a week, where we could play and talk and eat and drink and rest and be alone with the sky and the sea and then be together again.

I figure it’s good to have goals, so Musha Cay is on the list. Until then, I’ll pull out my other comfort strategies. Self-soothing is one of the skills we must acquire early if we’re to survive — we start as kids, with our blankies and teddy bears and all the ritualistic superstitious behaviors of childhood. I don’t have a blankie anymore, but I do:

Cook my mom’s tuna casserole.
Listen to music.
Go to a movie.
Read an old favorite book with a cup of tea and some chocolate.
Take a long hot bath. Sometimes I read in the bath, and sometimes I drink a chocolate milkshake.
Go to the pub. Not so much for the beer as for the journey to the “third place,” where they know me and I feel comfortable, but I don’t have my own problems around me.
Sit by the sea.
Watch the sky.

Those are some of my everyday cuffy things. What are yours? Whatever they are, may they work well for you always, and may you very rarely need them.

For the gender curious

For those who may be visiting for the first time after hearing my interview on To The Best of Our Knowledge, welcome, and thanks for listening.

I invite you to check out some of the content here that may be of particular interest to you:

Stories
You can read two stories of Mars: “And Salome Danced” (from which I read during the segment), and “Dangerous Space”.

Interviews
Speculating Gender at Ambling Along the Aqueduct — a lengthy interview about gender in life and in fiction.
Reality Break podcast — a lengthy audio interview about the collection Dangerous Space, the character of Mars, my novel Solitaire and my recent experience with screenwriting.

Essays
“Identity and Desire” — the genesis of the Mars character.
“The Erotics of Gender Ambiguity” — an online discussion that took place about “And Salome Danced” and the gender ambiguity of Mars.

And just because I think it’s cool
This story vid created by Karina in response to the story “Strings” (which is included in my collection and which you can read here).

Thanks for stopping by.

Dangerous Space is here

Here is the novella “Dangerous Space,” in PDF format as it appears in the collection.

Please feel free to share it or point people to the link here. You absolutely positively may not republish it on your own site, print it in your anthology, or use it in any way that makes money for you. If you want to do any of that, play nicely and ask my permission.

“Dangerous Space” is about music and love and sex, and the relationship between artist and art, and what happens when we let ourselves and other people into the deep places within us. I am unbearably curious (practically panting) to know how other artists — particularly those who live in the world of indie music — respond to the story.

Enjoy this. I’d love to hear what you think of it.