Writing Place - Shirley Jackson on observation and the always-ness of writing

"a writer is always writing"

When you think of Shirley Jackson, you might not think of “place” in the same way you associate place with Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road) or Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn) or Michelle Tea (Valencia). When you think of Jackson, you probably think of the unnamed village where “The Lottery” takes place. You probably remember a mood, a sense of foreboding, more than you recall details of place in the story.

Like everyone, I read Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” in high school. But we had been living on the Bay Area peninsula for several years before I realized that Jackson spent her childhood in Burlingame, California, less than a mile from our home.

Jackson memorialized Burlingame in the novel The Road Through the Wall, described by Penguin Classics as a satirical exploration of “what happens when a smug suburban neighborhood is breached by awful, unavoidable truths.” Of that novel, in which a thinly disguised Burlingame is called Cabrillo, Franklin writes:

As faithfully as Jackson followed the physical contours of the neighborhood, her novel’s plot boldly clashes with the official version of Burlingame.

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Road Through the Wall, Franklin notes that Jackson was “an uncommonly close observer who speculated, based on details real or imagined, that beneath the sunny surfaces of her neighbors’ lives there lay darker secrets: infidelity, racial and ethnic prejudice, and basic cruelty.”

Jackson gets a nod in my 2021 novel The Wonder Test, which is set in a fictionalized version of Burlingame, because it would be impossible to write a suburban suspense tale set in Burlingame without mentioning Jackson! I’ve driven by her house hundreds of times and find it strange that no one around here seems to know that one of the most iconic and widely-anthologized American writers of all time lived here, went to school here, and launched her career with a book about this very town.

As you consider your own writing in the coming weeks, think about what details you can observe in your own town, or what details you remember from the place you grew up. How might you build a story around that place, both the real and imagined version of it?

I leave you today with some writing advice from Shirley Jackson:

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. - from “Memory and Delusion,” collected in Let Me Tell You, the recently published compilation of previously unpublished stories and essays by Jackson

As always, happy writing!

Michelle

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