In which I love the literary witchery of Shirley Jackson
It is almost Hallowe’en, so now seems like a good time to say: I love Shirley Jackson.
It’s something I say most months, if I’m being totally honest. My love for Jackson – perhaps most famous for her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and her short story ‘The Lottery’ – and everything she ever wrote is public knowledge. I loved her work when I read it as a teenager (her short stories gave me the best sort of chills), but it became even more important to me in my early thirties, when I was a mother of three still set on writing horror, and practicing witchcraft. And the significance of her fiction in my life continues to develop as I age – now pushing forty, with five children, and sometimes actually writing horror (mostly in poetry form). And, of course, I’m still gliding (or bumbling, depends on the day) along with my hedge-and-house witch ways.
Some have said Jackson was also a literal, practicing witch, but I don’t think we can ever know for certain – and I don’t think we should try to work it out, either. The truth of this matter was, according to biographer Ruth Franklin in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, something that seems to have been left deliberately ambiguous. However, she undeniably had an interest in witchcraft, as well as a huge collection of books on the subject.
image via google
And she was certainly a literary witch, if nothing else. It was and still is only Shirley Jackson’s business if she did or didn’t cast spells, perform rituals, and so on – it isn’t our place to figure it out, not least of all because throughout history and even now, it isn’t always safe to admit these things, so each person’s level of openness about their occult practices is a very personal decision (‘occult’ does mean ‘hidden’ in addition to being related to magic and mysticism). But an enchanted touch and an otherworldly understanding came through in her writing all the same. My own worldview expanded when I came across her work. Her short stories especially involve the very stuff of my early life – small towns and villages, suburbs, families, the mundane – but with sinister twists scratching up from under the surface: strange and threatening conversations between men and small boys on trains, a labyrinthine department store, poison pen letters from an unexpected source.
As a child and a teenager, I always suspected Jackson’s fictional world was the concrete truth about life: the little old lady down the street isn’t as nice as she seems; I wouldn’t be surprised if this village started sacrificing people; and so on. She made it all believable. But as an adult with children, re-reading her work, I saw the horror as a metaphor for life becoming claustrophobic, for the worries that come with adulthood and parenthood and settling into some groove or another. And in them I also discovered there is so much more than horror, or perhaps, what is most terrifying to some people: there is simply a desire to present life more completely, to say ‘this smile you see isn’t everything, perfection doesn’t exist – life is often a mess, people are unpleasant creatures, and bad things happen’.
image via google
Now, when curiosity gets the better of me, I sometimes look up famous birth charts, especially those of famous dead people. (You can judge me if you want, that’s fine – but it is useful for studying astrology.) And when I looked up Shirley Jackson’s chart, it made me happy to see her witchy-writer Leo moon placed in the 8th house. Leo (the sign of the sun) wants to shine; the moon reflects; and the 8th house (a deep water house, ruled by Pluto and Scorpio) will always deal in revelations and transformations. This was the dark beating heart of her fiction: to shine a light into the cracks of everyday life and bring the darkness out.
Naturally I wrote a poem about it. And here, for Hallowe’en, for Scorpio season, I am sharing it to pay my respects to a ‘witch’ I like to honour every year – whether her magic was literal, literary, or otherwise.
•
A fire moon reflected on the water
for Shirley Jackson
When the moon goes to Pluto’s house
for tea they talk about the haunted.
You sit with them taking notes, waiting.
Such unfortunate women, you among
them, raised to keep Hestia’s hearth—
but some are born lucky, with Hecate’s
heart: spotting evil like a smudge on a lens,
from the corner of your eye, sideways
in suburbia.
Mistaken mother, witch alone, giving us
the shadows in familiar parcels; you never
throw a light on when we let them out.
When the moon is in Pluto’s house,
all those black dogs stop howling
long enough to listen
to your conversation.
(first published in Vamp Cat, and my collection The saint of milk and flames, Rhythm & Bones, 2019)
Born in Southern Ohio, but settled in the UK since 1999, Kate is a writer, witch, editor and mother of five. She is the author of several poetry pamphlets, and the founding editor of four web journals and a micropress.
Her witchcraft is a blend of her great-grandmother's Appalachian ways and the Anglo-Celtic craft of the country she now calls home – though she incorporates tarot, astrology, and her ancestors, plus music, film, books, and many other things into her practice. Her spiritual life is best described as queer Christopagan with emphasis on the feminine and the natural world. She believes magic is everywhere.
Find Kate on twitter and IG - @mskateybelle - and at her website.