Bennington, deadlines, Let Me Tell You

Updates from the Shirley Jackson files, #6

This newsletter has been quiet lately because I was racing to beat a late-July deadline—and I made it! The bulk of the book is now with my editor. I wish I could tell you I've been relaxing ever since, but instead I'm working on a long book review due tomorrow. The life of a freelance writer ... 

My husband is a writer as well, facing his own deadline, and the two of us took advantage of a few child-free summer weeks to isolate ourselves in Bennington, Vermont—just up the road from Shirley Jackson's longtime home. (My husband, whose book is not about Shirley Jackson, is a really good sport.) We house-sat for a couple who live in Old Bennington, a part of town that dates back to the Colonial era. The house we stayed in is a former schoolhouse built in the late 1800s, right down the road from this impressive structure:

​ That's the old Walloomsac Inn, built in 1770. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison supposedly slept here in 1791, on a tour of the northern states. Believe it or not, it appears still to be inhabited. (It looks a little less rundown from the front; this is a side view.)

Across the street from the Walloomsac Inn is the Old First Congregational Church. The minister there was the first to suggest that a college in Bennington might be a good idea—though his original motivation was to fill his pews come fall, when all the town's summer residents took off. Unfortunately for him, Bennington students turned out not to be such a church-going crowd. The full story is in my book.

In the church's graveyard, where Robert Frost is buried, I wondered if this tombstone might have played a role in the creation of The Sundial, about a family with the same name:

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In other news, Let Me Tell You, a new collection of Jackson's previously unpublished and uncollected writings put together by two of her children, has just been published and is getting a lot of great press. (I wrote the book's foreword, but otherwise I wasn't involved with it.) Some highlights: In The New York Times Book Review, Paul Theroux, whose travel writing I've always enjoyed, revealed himself to be a Shirley Jackson fan. One of my research assistants wrote this perceptive piece for The Millions. And The New Yorker's Page Turner blog published a few of Jackson's lectures on the craft of writing—my favorite part of the new book—including "Garlic in Fiction," with this classic Jackson opening: "Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader." (Not you, dear reader. Not at all.)

All best, 

Ruth

"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."—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House