Reading:
The entire Shirley Jackson cannon. I refuse to admit how many times I've read her novel The Haunting of Hill House, but I'm still reading it again. One of the few books to ever leave my nightstand. Jackson has a way to take the ordinary and make it uncanny, primarily within domestic spaces, making a reader feel both comforted by the familiar and completely ungrounded by the quiet horrors that eventually seep up through the floorboards. Chase that high with her following novel: We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Then for good measure, send it home with Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dreamhouse—a memoir of essays that combines a dreamscape home-horror with a lyrical inquiry into queer living, toxic relationships, and myth-making. Try and be normal after that triple combo. I dare you.
Fascinations:
I've been studying the history of Victorian mourning hair embroidery in America, reading first-hand accounts of the Oregon Trail, and learning how to hand-sew my own clothes. (While I do these things, I listen to old Americana music by candlelight and pretend I am not living in the twenty-first century. Bizarre and delightful practice in pre-bedtime disassociation). I've also been caught up lately in various media centering young women that navigate personal, whimsical labyrinths (Coraline, Labyrinth, Alice in Wonderland, lore on the Minitour, and Ariadne) and what each reflect about navigating girlhood. I, for one, am a girl all for a maze. I, for one, am a girl currently stuck in a maze. It is dark here. There are less cats than I was promised. What time is it?
- Hannah Lee, University of Montana Nonfiction MFA, Nonfiction Cutbank Editor
