Ellen Datlow is a renowned science-fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist. She co-edited the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series from 1988 to 2008, and now edits The Best Horror of the Year, published by Night Shade Books. She has recently published When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson. She also consults on short fiction for Tor.com. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and is an advisor for the Shirley Jackson Awards.
Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of eighteen genre-spanning novels and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. With the authorization of Shirley Jackson’s family, she is currently writing a contemporary novel set in Hill House, entitled A Haunting on the Hill.
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts. His novel The Cabin at the End of the Worldhas been adapted for film under the title Knock at the Cabin. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.
“People are always trying to determine how much is fiction and how much isn’t.” An interview with Tom Fels and Jennie Rozycki, organisers of the annual Shirley Jackson Day by Janice Lynne Deitner
I recently had the opportunity to travel to North Bennington, Vermont (where Shirley Jackson spent much of her adult life) to talk to the organisers of the annual Shirley Jackson Day. They are Tom Fels, founder of the annual Celebration, and Jennie Rozycki, Director of the John G. McCullough Free Library in North Bennington.
This interview has been edited for space and readability. Photos by the author, unless otherwise specified.
We started out by chatting about the background of the Shirley Jackson Day event, including when and how the event started.
JR: So, I have no idea how it started! This is a very good question […] How did this start, Tom?
TF: Maybe you should tell her a bit about how it is now because it’s quite different.
JR: What we’re doing now is usually there’s an event. In good times we can hold it in person […] often a few of Shirley’s children read and reminisce, as well as authors from the Shirley Jackson Awards, anybody associated with that. [President of the Shirley Jackson Awards Board of Directors and co-founder of the awards F. Brett Cox] is usually there. And there’s often music, there’s a related art gallery.
TF: There’s music because one of her sons is a musician, so he plays.
JR: So, music, and stories, and art, and laughs.
JLD: So it’s a celebration of all things sort of related to and around Shirley Jackson. That’s wonderful. You mentioned that it has changed. What did it use to look like?
TF: Well, you know, I grew up here. Shirley and her husband were my parents’ generation, so I went to school with the kids, and we stay in touch. I’ve done various things over the years in the arts and humanities, and I was just trying to think “what could happen in North Bennington that would help?” Nobody was doing anything with Shirley. This was like 15, 16, 17 years ago … 2004 or 5. Jennie’s giving a good account of what it is, but generally it was whatever could be done. The first one I just read some things […] But for example, the kind of stuff that I would like to do: there was a new B and B, so I said “why don’t you have this event and we can celebrate your opening” […] I just read some things and the kids came to that. That would be Barry [Hyman] and Jai [Holly], they’re the ones who are local [Jackson had four children in total. Barry and Jai live in the Northeast]. And everybody had a good time. But other times I would get them to read, or when the Shirley Jackson biography came out, Ruth Franklin came when it hadn’t been published yet, and then she came back another time after. There were connections. We haven’t done it yet, but there are movies. There are all kinds of things that you could do. Part of what I would always do with the arts – something had to be sustainable, you had to be able to keep doing it, and I figured there is enough Shirley Jackson stuff that you could pretty much keep going! It’s been different every year. And then suddenly the Shirley Jackson Awards people showed up and they’ve been incredibly helpful and raised it, and then Jennie has also raised it by putting it online […]You know, all her stuff is in print. There’s been this revival, so people have noticed much more than they used to. […] So that’s the short version. It’s just something that could be done for North Bennington. And then the library, that’s the natural home for it.
Tom Fels’ introduction, readers, and art show. Shirley Jackson Day 2016. Left Bank, North Bennington. Photo courtesy of Tom Fels.
JR: Yeah, it’s part of our wheelhouse anyway. I’ve got to admit the last two years, when we’ve been online, we’ve been able to get authors that would never come to a little library event [like Paul Tremblay and Sylvia Moreno-Garcia].
The John G. McCullough Free Library in North Bennington.
TF: Both readers and listeners … It’s global. I mean, this is a big surprise. There are people from Australia, England
JR: New Zealand! I would never get a writer from New Zealand under ordinary circumstances.
JLD: I think online is a useful tool, but in-person is so important…there’s something about in-person events.
TF: I think if you can do both, that’s the ideal thing. Another aspect of this is that people like to come to North Bennington and they like to see the houses, because people are always trying to determine how much is fiction and how much isn’t. They want to meet people, most of whom are not with us anymore, her contemporaries. It used to be that you could come and get a spiel from the guy who ran the local market, and people who really did deal with her all the time. So that’s one part of it. You have the cat, right?
[The cat is a statue, formerly owned by Jackson, which sits atop one of the library shelves. We took a moment here to appreciate the cat].
TF: There are little bits of things. And the two kids…Barry lives about a half hour from here and is a musician and has dabbled in other things. [Jai] was a nurse but she’s retired. If I do anything they want to know about it, and I try to involve them.
Barry Hyman reading from Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson Day 2016. Left Bank, North Bennington. Photo courtesy of Tom Fels.
JLD: You mentioned this sort of renaissance that’s going on right now with Jackson […] I always wonder, “Why now?” Is it because things are back in print? Is it because of events like this one?
TF: I can tell you my theory. I don’t know what Jennie thinks. I started way before any of that. I just thought this was a good thing. But her kids have been working on this for ages, especially the ones in California [Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt]. I think they keep pushing this, and I assume that they’re behind this. I don’t really know. But also, somebody saw an opportunity: here’s a writer that hasn’t really gotten her due. I suspect Laurence and his sister are somewhat behind this. They certainly are now, and they have projects, both books and other media. Ballet! “The Lottery” as a ballet! Next Icecapades, I guess! That’s what I think. Over the years they’ve developed contacts with editors, of course The New Yorker, and all of that.
JLD: And you can see, when you look at the scholarship, when the two posthumous collections were published you see scholarship go up. And I think Ruth Franklin’s book also had something to do with it. But it was coming before that even, this sort of renaissance has been building for a while.
TF: There may be some other secret in there.
JR: I think the secret might be how the speculative fiction landscape has changed so much in the last ten years. And it is driven by women. The kind of emotional sophistication you have with a haunted house story, or a ghost story, you didn’t find that in a lot of horror for a long time. I think just because of the shift to more emotionally complex speculative fiction, which she was doing […] I think that’s what people are interested in […] I love horror, I love speculative fiction, I love these things that were not the most respected genres. I love watching people’s estimation of my intelligence when I’m like, “I really like this ghost story” and they’re just like [plummeting sound effect]. It’s hilarious! But, the older I get, having grown up on all the scaryish stuff, the domestic essays are so fun! So there’s just that whole other layer in there. I think that might be the secret behind why there’s this interest.
TF: Yeah, and she is so complex …
JR: Yeah! Horror’s important because a lot of the time you’re facing up to the really dark things that are in people and the way they treat one another. That’s what the big bad usually is. I love horror because it’s usually a group of very different people teaming up to get the big bad and what is that? It’s usually something that’s a weakness in human character. That’s why horror’s important. You tell dragon stories because dragons can be defeated.
JLD: Regarding genre, I do think it’s changing now, I think you have a lot more interest, and a lot more people like me who are researching speculative fiction and genre fiction in general, and it’s getting a little bit more support. A little bit more. I think you’re right, still sometimes people look at you like “What’s wrong with you?
JR: Right!
The center of North Bennington, viewed from the lawn of the library, including Powers Market, where Jackson used to shop.
JLD: But I do think you’re right. I do think there are a lot of elements coming together here that are contributing to this revival.
Regarding the town, there’s a common critical perspective of Shirley versus North Bennington, the way people read her interactions with the town, and of course a perception of [nearby Bennington College] versus Bennington in general. You see this a lot in a lot of the criticism, and often from people who don’t know the area or who have never been to New England at all. I’m just curious about your thoughts about that sort of take on it, that recurring theme, that unfortunately just keeps being raised.
Bennington College.
TF: The Hymans were outliers. They were really “Greenwich Village North.” As far as the local people here – the kids went to school and she would contribute, you know, being on the PTA or whatever – they were having a hard time with trying to be understood. The kids will say things…I didn’t see it, but they felt kind of put upon as being different. In regard to the college […] Bennington attracts very intelligent, sophisticated people, both in the faculty and the students, and they did not behave exactly the way people did at more traditional places, and they weren’t supposed to! But, certainly, some people would get into trouble and there were issues and so on. What Shirley might have felt about that, which I think was mostly discovered later…I don’t think people really knew…unless maybe her personal friends might have known. I think they just thought, “oh here’s this very intellectual family, they have more books than there are in the library!” That’s kind of the way they were seen […] But she baked cookies, she lived pretty much a normal life, considering who she was! And had to write and do these other things that most people didn’t have to do. My mother was a friend of hers, and she’s quoted in [Franklin’s] book, and she had an interesting relationship with Shirley. They would have lunch or whatever and I think she felt that Shirley was probably brighter than any of the people that she had to deal with […] It was pretty clear that she was dealing with these issues in her life, lots of things, and her parents and trying to live up to her parents’ strange expectations […] So she had personal things on top of being a writer on top of having four kids on top of having a husband who…whatever one thinks, he was kind of accomplished himself. It’s interesting that today nobody reads Stanley, but everybody reads Shirley. I think that was his fear. In his day, though, he was a star, and he had this great course, Myth and Ritual Literature, that everybody sort of had to take at Bennington, and it was a great course. And he was a scholar and all that. The other stuff sort of came up later, pretty much.
JR: And I think in a more not-location-specific way, but the pressures of small-town life are really relatable, no matter who you are, if you are slightly different. Small towns are crucibles. They really really are. Having grown up in a wide variety of small towns, there are different variations on the same kind of horrible. But, it was kind of, we read “The Lottery” in high school, and people were just like, “well that doesn’t seem plausible.” And I was just like, “Are you kidding!?” As the lone goth or whatever in our little high school. It just takes a nudge, guys! I think that’s part of the enduring legacy and how finding the kind of tensions in small town life … if you feel a little, like, “you’re not from around here,” it’s tough! It’s real tough.
TF: It’s absolutely true. And she did make an effort. An example would be when I was [..] at this local school, they said “could you write us a play?” Because there was an annual play. And she wrote this play and people were in it and it was a lot of fun, but then she kind of returned to her life. They were not loath to be involved, especially Shirley. I don’t think Stanley was much involved in local life. I do think she really made an effort, and people did recognize that.
JLD: I think that there is a tendency in some of the criticism to look at, not just her relationship with the town but her life in general, and sort of pave over the areas where things are gray and make them black and white. People look at this small town and the outsiders and say, “that’s what it was like.” Or they look at her relationship with her parents and say, “that’s what that’s like.” And I think that that’s an unfortunate tendency that’s been in the criticism since she was still writing …
TF: Meaning there’s much more gray …
JR: You lose the nuance …
JLD: Yes! And I think in general, a lot of people don’t see the nuance in her writing at all. They’ll sort of decide that this is what’s happening in this story, or that’s what’s happening. I mean, she never even directly states that “The Lottery” takes place in New England, but people assume. I think you have a point there that there’s more going on there than people see or give credit for.
TF: I think “The Lottery” and others of her stories…You have to think, here they were in their different backgrounds, and he was from Brooklyn, and she was from California basically, and they settle in this town that – you know, she wrote that book about Witchcraft. They definitely, or she anyway, understood New England and that tradition […] And she picked up on the “you and me,” the “black and white” that people tend to see, even though there’s a lot of gray. I think that’s partly why it’s so interesting in how it relates to this town. Who knows where else they might have ended up, but it certainly suited her in a way because there was all this historical background that was applicable.
JLD: I think there’s a lot to explore not just with her relationship with the town, but her background that she was bringing to the region and to her writing. I do think it gets seen as black and white.
Bennington Bookshop display. Shirley Jackson Day 2016. Left Bank, North Bennington. Photo courtesy of Tom Fels.
TF: I’ve been fascinated…I wrote a couple of things about her** and I felt as if there was sort of a missing link in there. She comes from California, she goes to school in upstate New York…she did meet Stanley, but all of a sudden it’s myth, ritual, magic…Where did all that come from? You get some idea, but it’s such a stark difference, I think. She was writing stories out west about the navy coming in…this is not the Shirley Jackson that we really know…and then all of a sudden boom! […] Well this does happen to people, you suddenly develop some engrossing interest, but exactly how it happened is not clear to me. You know, it could have been a teacher, it could have been something she read, it could have been Stanley, I don’t know. Definitely there is, it seems to me, a strong change relatively all of a sudden.
JLD: One other thing that I wanted to touch on is the popularity of “The Lottery” versus a lot of the other stories or books that are just now being read. Of course, we had to read “The Lottery” in school, and it was sort of a tradition … the tradition of reading “The Lottery”!! I guess my question is how do we make that stuff better read, how do we spread the word? I guess events like yours. I’m always trying to be a cheerleader for the lesser-known works.
TF: I think getting them into libraries, curricula at different places. […] I do think the kids work on trying to get her out there however possible […] Sometimes things come up and that’s useful, like when the Ruth Franklin book came out […] Jackson’s hundredth birthday – that was kind of amazing, in New York, and people read. But, you know, you can’t really manufacture those kinds of events.
JR: I’m reminded of…there’s a book What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank […] Just reading “The Lottery” – what did that do for you? I think of people’s reactions…how did that end up in curricula? How did that happen? And why does every high school senior or junior have to read that? Why is that required? And why is it relatable? So, What We Talk About When We Talk About “The Lottery.”
TF: Good idea.
JR: But also, I think the Domestic Essays are a better version of the mommy blogs that are out there. There was also that very economical use of language. She could probably get it done in 120 characters! […] Parents were spending a lot more time at home than anticipated in the past year or two years, and I think that’s much more relatable now, being at home with your four kids. Trying to understand yourself as a professional when you have four kids knocking about the house. And I think that that’s reverberated.
JLD: That’s a really good point. You’re ending up trapped in the domestic space in a completely different way …
JR: but you’re still trying to retain…she was a writer, and that wasn’t the first thing people thought of in some ways. It was a person at home with kids, and recently I think a lot of women were trying to wrap their heads around, “If I’m not an executive, but I am, but I’m at home, well what is this?”
We talked a little more here about how to get Jackson’s work read, about her unfinished work and what may be still unpublished in the Library of Congress.
A poster for the 2017 Shirley Jackson Day. Courtesy of Tom Fels.
JLD: I don’t want to take up too much more of your time. I just want to ask one more question. What do you envision the future of Shirley Jackson Day to be? Maybe you don’t, maybe it’s more of a spontaneous event more than something being planned, but I’m just curious about where you see it going.
One of the houses in which Jackson lived. Prospect Street, North Bennington.
JR: Probably keep on keeping on until I really find my feet with getting it done and building on what does exist, but also getting a sense of what people want before I try something new. Things I’ve thought about have been screenings for Hill House or something like that, with a talk maybe, if there’s someone who wants to lead a discussion afterwards. Usually films are a really easy way to get people to engage with something because there are very few barriers to participation. You show up and you look at something and you think about stuff! So something like that […] We get a lot of literary tourism that comes through. They want to look at the cat, they want to know which houses, they ask me if I have any stuff here. There are some signed books, but that’s kind of all the stuff at this point. So building on that, maybe. I just want to get a good sense before I go messing with a good thing, and get a good idea of what Barry and Jai want and what they don’t want in the future.
TF: Once the awards came in, it has just rolled along, and so you kind of hesitate to change things. I mean, who else is going to supply you with four readers? It’s kind of amazing […] and it’s different every time. Sometimes [the Shirley Jackson Award participants] read her, sometimes they read their own stuff that’s been influenced by her.
JLD: so you have a very living event, or a dynamic event, that changes depending on who’s there and what they’re presenting. That’s fantastic. Do you know if it’s going to be streamed?
JR: I hope so […] If we can broadcast it, we will.
I want to extend my thanks to Jennie and Tom once again, for taking the time to talk with me. The facebook page for the Shirley Jackson Day Celebration 2022 contains more information about the upcoming event. More information about the John G. McCullough Free Library in North Bennington is available here and here.
Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century 