Meet Our Contributor:
| Roy Edward Jackson is an assistant professor of education at Goshen College in Indiana with a focus on literacy. He holds degrees in English, Education and School Library Science. |  |
Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works by Roy Jackson
I love Halloween. But this year, I found myself a bit stuck on what to write about. I wandered through my campus library looking for inspiration, yet nothing caught my interest. I scrolled endlessly through my social media feeds, but nothing stood out there either. Then, a few weeks ago at my local public library, I read that my friend and writing mentor had been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. That news sent me spiraling back to my last year teaching high school language arts before moving into higher education.
I had taught at a creative and performing arts high school where my senior creative writing majors were reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a mentor text. We used a PDF version—no doubt a cost-saving measure—but I realized I had never actually held the book in my hands. And a digital PDF, I contend, is nowhere near the experience of holding a printed book. I made my way to the YA section, where I was immediately struck by the fantastic covers of the reissues of Jackson’s seminal works. I gathered a stack and began re-reading her stories, one by one, as if meeting an old friend anew.
My high school creative writers loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The urban public high school came with all sorts of academic, and geographical, freedom. We had the kind of freedom that let us take our learning beyond the classroom walls to the streets of our city. So, we made our way to the Carnegie Central Library and perused Jackson’s collection. Most were shelved in the YA collection. The students choose in partnerships a Jackson short story for a comparative writerly activity. I feared they would find this boring, but the engagement was strong, and they alerted me to stories I’d never read. We culminated the unit with watching the stylistic 2018 film adaptation.
Looking back, there was so much more I wish I had done with my student writers. I could have emphasized Jackson’s role as a female writer in a male-dominated industry, her groundbreaking work as a speculative writer, and the way she masterfully blended the real world with the uncanny. Since these students attended a creative and performing arts high school with a creative writing concentration, I wish I had been more familiar with Jackson’s lectures at the time.
In the collection Come Along With Me, her lecture “Biography of a Story” recalls the day she sent off The Lottery to The New Yorker. Written only three weeks earlier, Jackson herself may not have realized just how groundbreaking the story would be. In the lecture, she describes the flood of letters forwarded to her by the magazine, noting that there were “three main themes which dominate the letters that first summer—three themes which might be identified as bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse” (214).
In the age of social media, students might find compelling connections between those public responses and the way readers react to writing today. Even more striking, those letters were handwritten and delivered through the mail. I can’t help but wonder if my students could truly grasp the impact of receiving such a thing.
Reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle with my high school writers took me back to my only experience with Shirley Jackson in high school. Like most, it was the short story The Lottery, one of the most vivid reading memories from my own high school years. Having been reared on Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Melville, and even Salinger, all taught by mostly white, male teachers, The Lottery was a game changer. It was new to me in both form and genre. While I had read traditional horror novels and novellas, The Lottery was my first true foray into speculative fiction. The gut punch it delivers to first-time readers is jarring and, strangely enough, a special kind of reading experience.
At the time, I did not think much about authorship, but in retrospect, Jackson stands out as a woman writing in a genre long dominated by men, a reality that persists even today. I had been inundated with the white, male dominance of the literary canon, and I wish my teachers had pointed out how rare it was to encounter a female voice in horror, mystery, or speculative fiction.
I think in today’s world of the “new weird,” laying the foundation with what Jackson created is essential for both readers and writers. The Lottery is a seminal work, but so are The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In our educational landscape, where long-form reading and student choice have often evaporated in favor of short, prompt-based writing aimed at higher standardized test scores, I find that not only educators like me but also students are longing for both depth and freedom.
Shirley Jackson feels like the perfect writer to begin with this time of year. Students can enter her speculative world through The Lottery and engage in rich discussions about community and superstition — “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”
They can also consider how little it takes to bend our own world to make it frightening, and how true horror may not lie in mass violence, but in a world so familiar to our own that only the slightest distortion reveals the darkest parts of human nature.
After entering through the most famous of her short works, students could choose among Jackson’s novels like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and find companion short stories such as “The Witch,” “Flower Garden,” and “Like Mother Used to Make.” Discussions of the short form could focus on when and how Jackson so effectively pivots the familiar world into the speculative. Novel studies could take on a book club format, allowing students to guide their own conversations and see what develops organically. I can’t help but wonder if themes like social isolation and persecution, gothic domesticity, and the slow descent into madness through solitude would emerge naturally in their discussions.
All of this could culminate in at-home or in-class viewings of film adaptations. From the 1960s Encyclopedia Britannica produced an almost too realistic short movie version of The Lottery to the less faithful 1996 adaptation, students could see how different directors interpret Jackson’s work. There are also two fascinating adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House (1963 and 1999), along with the visually stunning 2018 film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Lastly, there is the biopic (2020), Shirley, starring Elizabeth Moss that is a great companion piece to her lectures.
This kind of exploration reflects what I loved most about teaching at a public creative and performing arts high school—and what seems largely absent in traditional schools so focused on testing: the creative writing project. Through carefully curated prompts, students could emulate how to bend their natural world ever so slightly to make it weird, horrific, and most importantly, point a lens the way Jackson did on our societal norms that are so weird to begin with.
Reacquainting myself with Shirley Jackson’s wonderfully weird works has been a reminder of the enduring power of her writing: how it challenges us to see the ordinary as strange, to question the rules we take for granted, and to recognize that horror and insight often emerge from the smallest shifts in perspective. For students, for educators, and for readers of all ages, engaging with her work offers not only a journey into the uncanny but also a model for how to make the familiar extraordinary. Particularly when living in extraordinary times when the strange seems to have become the norm.
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