Integrating the Lived and Written: Lessons Learned from Shirley Jackson and Sylvia Plath

Integrating the Lived and Written: Lessons Learned from Shirley Jackson and Sylvia Plath

As writers, our lives and shared histories all serve as fodder for our work. Not only does our medium allow us to immortalize these instances, but to process our feelings, cultural contexts, and preconceived notions. Even still, the act of artistic self-disclosure can often grow far too on the nose, causing your work to lose its literary merit. While this sort of processing can be excellent for the writer themselves, readers may struggle to understand without the additional context or emotional connection of those directly involved. Given the deeply personal nature of mediums such as poetry and creative nonfiction, personal or community-centric content may seem more easily doable. However, this does not mean that reality-based fiction is impossible–far from it! Two specific pieces of literature, widely considered to be canonized, that famously utilize community and personal knowledge are Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman. We can look to techniques used by these classics to see how we can successfully and seamlessly stitch together fact with fiction. While classic American literature is far from the literary end-all-be-all, the sheer scale of scholarly reverence for these two novels further proves that the experiences of oneself and their community will forever be worthy of praise and critical analysis.

Published in 1951, Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson is a gothic horror mainstay following the inner world of Natalie Waite, a college freshman whose time is split between reality and her otherworldly delusions. This bildungsroman is a vital text in the development of the female gothic, showcasing the horrors associated with female gender normativity through the supernatural. Aside from Jackson’s musings on sexual violence, the over-sexualization of young women, and the rigid hierarchies of academia, Hangsaman comments on the disappearance of a real college student. Paula Jean Welden disappeared in Bennington, Vermont in 1946–just one year after the Jacksons moved to a home nearby. Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman, even taught at Bennington College, where Welden was attending at the time of her untimely disappearance. Needless to say, the gravely mishandled disappearance of this young girl shook Jackson and her community incredibly deeply. Hangsaman utilizes oral histories, regional knowledge, and communal grief to weave together to tell both her story and Paula’s. Well-researched stories from your community can strengthen your writing and become the seed for fiction based in fact.

Published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a widely read semi-autobiographical novel that details Plath’s drastic decline in mental wellness, subsequent disappearance, and later re-emergence. The Bell Jar is Plath’s only novel, as her career’s primary focus was poetry. One leaves themselves on the page with autobiographical poetry, exemplified by Plath’s poem “Daddy”, which has been interpreted as a work of autobiography. This all being said, at no point in the novel’s run does it identify as a work of autobiography. At its release, The Bell Jar was marketed as a work of pure fiction. Further still–the book cloaks Plath in yet another mask of anonymity, with the novel’s protagonist and narrator being named Esther Greenwood. Nothing about this character screams autofiction, instead, Esther comes across as the characterization of the writer’s deep and furling mental illness. The book’s autobiographical basis is only revealed through research on Plath’s life as a young woman, as her disappearance resulted in a media frenzy. In fact, with the utilization of a pseudonym, Plath managed to even further separate herself from the horrific reality that she outlined. 

I am in no way suggesting that you change your name, face, and social security number to craft some autofiction, however, Plath’s subtlety does speak volumes. The novel’s graphic self-disclosure hits the audience incredibly hard. Yet, the fictional framing does not distract the reader–leading them to spend more energy interrogating Plath’s life story rather than critically ingesting what she chose to feed them. I feel that this is The Bell Jar’s greatest lesson regarding self-disclosure in fiction: It’s okay to let your story speak for itself. Your writing will not necessarily benefit from the inclusion of overt self-insertion unless its purpose is deliberate and beneficial to the work overall. 

Meet the blogger:

ALEX SIREK is a senior studying English, creative writing, and cultural rhetoric. She is the editor-in-chief of Untold Magazine, a senior columnist at The Oracle, and the president of Hamline University’s Student Media Board. She is also currently interning at The Loft Literary Center. Outside of work and academia, Alex is an avid fan of gothic horror, estate sales, and watching squirrels from her kitchen window.

Interview with Elise Hitchings: An Inside Scoop into Freelance Editing

Interview with Elise Hitchings: An Inside Scoop into Freelance Editing

If you’re like me, then you love the thought of going into publishing as your future career. But you also struggle to navigate the world of literary jobs, especially editing jobs. Where do you even start? Well, to give some insight on freelance editing, I spoke to Elise Hitchings about her career and some tips that she has for those who want to follow in her footsteps. 

Before we get into the interview, here’s a bit of background on Elise. She got her BA in Creative Writing from Augsburg University and her MS in Book Publishing from Portland State University. She offers several different types of editing services which include; content editing, proofreading, copy editing, and line editing. 

Now, for what you’ve all been waiting for!  

MH: What made you choose editing as your career? 

EH: I’ve always loved to read books, but have never had a desire to be an author. Being involved in the process is great, and guiding my authors to create the best book they can is very fulfilling.

MH: How does freelance editing work? 

EH: I mainly work with self-published authors, and get most of my work through Reedsy. Reedsy is a platform with a directory of editors and other professionals authors can hire to help them with the publishing process. Basically an author contacts me, I create a quote, and then we sign a contract. I receive the manuscript, edit it, and return it. I have some consistent clients, as well as some that only write one book.

MH: What made you decide to work freelance rather than for a company? 

EH: When I graduated I couldn’t find a job, so I decided to try freelancing. Then COVID hit and people weren’t hiring. I had always planned to freelance, but after working for a press. But I am glad to have taken the risk. I’ve grown as an editor and learned so much over the almost 3 years I’ve been freelancing.

MH: What motivates you as an editor? 

EH: I really enjoy helping authors put out their best work. An editor is also kind of a cheerleader—you have to help your authors through the difficult parts of revision.

MH: What qualities make a good editor?

EH: Generally, editors are people who just love books and read a ton. Reading a lot and widely is super helpful, just because you absorb so much. It’s also important to be able to multitask, pay attention to detail, and be willing to learn. I’m constantly learning new things through the projects I edit. You also have to be able to work well with clients. Clients can be great or they can be awful. Most clients are great, but there is always the one who is difficult.

MH: What are the pros and cons of freelance editing?

EH: The biggest con is that you have no guarantees. Last year I had enough work to make freelancing my main income, but this year I don’t. But you do get to make all the decisions. If you don’t want to work with a client you don’t have to. You can set your own rates and terms, along with how long you get for each project. I love working for myself, but COVID has hit the industry hard and it’s not going to bounce back for a bit yet.

MH: What advice would you give to people who would want to go into editing?

EH: I think getting some form of training is super important. I have an MS in book publishing, and it made me a much better editor. I learned everything from how to edit to how to work with a client. There are degrees you can get, but there are also professional certifications too.

You can learn more about Elise on her website

Meet the contributor:
MICHAEL HORTON (they/them/it/its) is a creative writing student at Hamline University. They have a passion for writing and helping others write. They one day hope to have a career in editing or writing podcasts. 

An Athlete’s Guide to Creative Writing

An Athlete’s Guide to Creative Writing

Being a creative writing major, one could expect me to be writing five days a week. Instead, I get punched in the head five days a week. I’ve been training Muay Thai for the past year and a half and recently had my first fight. There’s a level of guilt I hold for not being uber passionate about my major, but I also submit to the idea that passion needs to be cultivated. I haven’t always been passionate about Muay Thai—it typically intimidates me—but my dedication to it has made giving it up a disservice to myself. Reflecting on the effort athletes put into sports is useful for athletes with a taste for writing and for writers with a taste in athletics to develop methods to hone their craft. 

The intention isn’t to look like Stephen King in the boxing ring nor Mike Tyson at a writing seminar. It’s to craft ourselves into Decathlon athletes who are really good at a variety of things. Translating what we do best into other areas is the true mark of versatility and an embodiment of our growth and adaptability. 

Here are some things I do as an athlete that can translate to good writing practices:

Discipline and Routine: It would be silly for anyone to expect their first time stepping onto a Judo mat to become a champion. I know that in order to succeed, I need to be in the gym as often as possible. As practitioners, we have to make a commitment to our arts in order to improve. Establishing discipline and routine into our writing can bring consistency in our improvement. Kind of like muscle memory. Train often enough, notice the combos coming consistently. Write often enough, notice the solid writing coming consistently.

Stretching: It’s hard to imagine throwing 720 Hook Kicks without stretching. Our minds and bodies need to be limbered up before we practice. I make sure to show up 30 minutes before training to stretch which increases flexibility and in turn leads to more space for success. I also feel like my focus readjusts to the task ahead instead of other happenings of the day. Writing before thinking about writing can come out as rusty or difficult to start. Why not take a few moments to free-write, or do a butterfly stretch before writing? Don’t forget to stretch after exercising as well. Hard work can be exhausting on the mind and without a cool down, we might not be prepared for tomorrow.

Working Together: During every Muay Thai class, we’re always training with someone. Whether it’s having a partner hold Thai pads or focus mitts, asking for advice, or sparring, it’s a group effort to improve. The same should be said for writing. Writers can have another set of eyes look over their writing. Not only can a partner catch errors that have gone unnoticed, but they can help identify what you’re excelling at. Just important as critique is the recognition of what is working in your routine. 

The Showcase: All of our work needs to be put towards something. I don’t bang my bruised shins on heavy bags just to labor myself. I want to be recognized as a hard-worker and a talented fighter. In that same vein, writers shouldn’t write just for good grades. The intention is to be excellent at what we do. I’ve fought in a Smoker to see if I was cut out for a fight. Though it wasn’t everything I had imagined (judges’ score said I lost), I learned so much on what it meant to be a successful fighter. Participating in workshop groups can be a Smoker for writers before submitting their proudest writing to contests and journals. Maybe the piece isn’t the most well received, but through this low-stakes display, we’re given a chance to make it better.

I’m not the strongest writer, nor am I the strongest athlete. But effort matters. If I want to be a successful writer, I have the ethic to craft it.

Meet the blogger:

CODIE OLSON is a struggling writer who struggles to write. Though he cannot physically juggle, his life is quite the juggling act. He intends on graduating from Hamline University in Spring 2024 with a BFA in creative writing.

American Wallpaper: Misrepresentations Through the Decades

American Wallpaper: Misrepresentations Through the Decades

Being an adopted Korean in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the peak of boy bands and sparkly pop princesses was, for a lack of a better word, hard

Sometimes, I would cheer for the white brunette just to feel relevant. While all my friends drooled over Justin Timberlake, I fancied Chris Kirkpatrick due to his non-conventional dreadlocked brown hair and shorter stature. What other choice did I have? There were no faces like mine in the sea of popular media. In fact, faces like mine were basically non-existent, if not being mocked.

My friends and I discovered teen movies from the eighties while we were in junior high. Watching in awe, Sixteen Candles played out every preteen’s fantasy of being the girl who pulls the unattainable senior. While all my fair-skinned friends chattered about could-be’s and would-be’s, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by the character, Long Duk Dong, and how the only Asian student in this suburban Chicago school was only comic relief. It made me wonder: do people see me as some sort of joke? A caricature of some foreign person, and no one to take seriously? 

It was easy to paint myself as a background character. I didn’t want to be front and center but rather, a trusty sidekick to my white friends who gave more main character vibes. I was thirteen years old.

For my friend Sarah’s fourteenth birthday, we went and saw Snow Falling on Cedars in the movie theater. It was a bit of a strange movie choice for a dozen young teenagers, and the rest of my friends were distracted and disengaged. They giggled at the slow build of the story and wondered what the point was. 

I was the only one who probably remembers that movie. It was the first time I saw a white male lead in love with an Asian woman. While my friends thought Ethan Hawke was status quo handsome, they were dismissive of the rest of the cast amidst the fierce racial and legal conspiracies where a Japanese man was victim in a post-World War II setting. It was the first time I didn’t feel invisible in a long time. 

My friends growing up usually forgot I was Asian. The only times I was reminded how different I looked was when I saw how Asians were portrayed in movies. The affected representation or the lack thereof gave very mixed messages. Did people view me as an embarrassment? Or was I enigmatically sexy? How was I supposed to know that a co-existing Asian person could walk amongst Hollywood, when big screen entertainment and literature only showed people who looked like me as being either mysterious or awkward?

The first mainstream Asian woman in a blockbuster movie was Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels. I was fifteen when it came out in 2000. Lucy Liu’s character, Alex, was dating a white man. She did not speak with any sort of accent. To a Korean girl from the suburbs, there was never a movie character that resonated so much. Finally, someone who shared the same hooded eyelids and thick black hair who seemed to fit in, rather than be a wordless shadowy figure or cultural fixture. It was shocking no other characters in Charlie’s Angels even acknowledged Liu’s character was Asian. 

Gedde Wantabe, who played Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles, later told interviewers he didn’t realize how problematic his portrayal of Asians was. He enjoyed making people laugh. This was the precursor of emasculated and ridiculed Asian men in popular media, especially in the 2000’s. While watching American Pie, I couldn’t help but cringe at the way John Cho said his infamous line:“MILF. Mom I like to fuck.” Maybe it was my own insecurity, but I swore I heard the stunted dialect between each exaggerated word. 

In the next decade and well into a different season of womanhood, Jenny Han, author of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and more recently, The Summer I Turned Pretty, seemed to finally bring Asian Americans to the spotlight in a more realistic approach. Like my children, the main character of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Lara Jean, is half-Korean. She is a full-dimensional girl, bursting with strange quirks and deep emotional hurdles. When this book was made into a Netflix movie, the producers wanted to cast Lara Jean to a white actress. Jenny Han put her foot down and said no. I’m happy they let the main character be a person of color and still had confidence the content would sell. 

I personally prefer John Cho as Hikaru Sulu than MILF Guy #2. I loved seeing Simu Liu go head-to-head as a Ken Doll against Ryan Gosling to show the Asian community can still take a joke, as long as we aren’t the only butt in the room. I enjoyed watching Bong Joon-Ho win Director of the Year, when his Korean film Parasite swept the American Oscars. 

Back in the early 2000s, even my adopted mom, who is a white school teacher and an avid reader of all New York Times’ bestsellers, didn’t purchase a copy of Memoirs of a Geisha for her book club. But in recent years, my mother is telling me to watch Minari due to the bone-shaking themes and how much she recommends reading Crazy Rich Asians, in-between her regular endorsements of Lessons in Chemistry and Where the Crawdads Sing. It shouldn’t be two separate categories, and it finally feels like it isn’t.

Asian culture is seeping through the cracks of mainstream entertainment. People who share the same facial features as me – features that used to make me uncomfortable – are getting a bigger slice of representation. My children can turn on the TV and see not one, but two K-pop bands perform on the 2023 MTV VMAs. I just bought my daughter Jenny Han’s books to read along with her requested Colleen Hoovers. My son watched Simu Liu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings without thinking it was weird to have an Asian lead. 

It makes me wonder if that girl growing up in the 1990s-2000s misunderstood assimilation. To her, it was pretending to be white and fade into the background. But now, in the midst of motherhood, it’s become apparent that all that girl wanted was to be herself and fit in, without having to laugh at other Asians to do so. Better yet, that girl and all girls who look like her, can now start to step away from the wallpaper. As Lara Jean famously says in To All the Boys I’ve Ever Loved Before, “I was used to being invisible, but now, people were looking at me.”

Meet the blogger:

The writer is standing outside wearing a bucket hat and smirking, looking directly at the camera. There are clouds and trees behind her.RACHEL KRAUS is currently working towards a double major in Creative Writing and Anthropology at Hamline University.

Disability Representation Across Literature: What Can You Do?

Disability Representation Across Literature: What Can You Do?

I have very weak hands, and I mean that quite literally. For one, I didn’t learn how to tie my shoes until the ripe age of twelve. Even as a college student, I’m dropping things left and right and frantically trying to cool off my fingers when they swell from holding plates and books. Opening bottles is a whole other adventure in itself. It’s safe to say I am envious of people who have functional, strong fingers. It’s uber-safe to say when I read a book series featuring a character with a paralyzed left hand, I emphasized hard with him. This character was Alex Stowe from the middle-grade series The Unwanteds, written by Lisa McMann, which I was (and still am) very much into. It was so cool to see a character that also struggled with opening doors and buttoning buttons. I was in heaven.

And then he dies.

He dies quite terribly, frantically trying to defend himself from an enemy with his other, non-dominant arm in the second saga of books. The characters mourn him and his role in the story is ultimately given to his abled younger sister. Life goes on.

Disability representation in literature has long been mixed. Rachel Petri, a disabled student contributor of Clearwater Press, once summarized that stories featuring disabled characters should strive to be real and hopeful and honest and encouraging. Petri brought up the differences between the book Wonder and the book Me Before You. Me Before You featured a story where Will, a disabled character, did not aspire to keep living, and as Petri describes, sent a message that living with a disability is not a life worth living. Wonder featured a story in which young Auggie, a boy with a facial deformity, realistically faced ups and downs, finding a support network.

Before Alex Stowe died, he struggled with implied PTSD and depression. He had nightmares for years about the woman who ultimately killed him. He drove himself away from his family and friends, becoming a shell of his former creative personality. One has to consider what message it sends to kill off a disabled character, especially one struggling with mental health.

Ultimately, The Unwanteds still holds an important place in my heart. I love the world, characters, and story and appreciate that the author was willing to take responsibility for potentially causing harm to her disabled readers. Over the past few years, I have gotten the opportunity to know McMann through a Saint Paul signing and a fun Italian dinner in Arizona; I consider her a dear friend of mine. I have begun to see myself in Lada, a disabled character with cerebral palsy from McMann’s newest series, The Forgotten Five. When writing Lada, McMann found a sensitivity reader in Stacy McNeely, a friend of McMann’s who has cerebral palsy. Lada is fun, intelligent, relatable, and showcases how variable disability can be. Sometimes she needs her wheelchair, sometimes she doesn’t.

So, what can we, as readers and writers, learn from characters like Alex Stowe from The Unwanteds and Will from Me Before You? Fay Onyx, a disabled contributor to the publication Mythcreants, has written quite a few articles on the topic of disability representation. In one of Onyx’s articles, the author discusses the ideas of challenging ableist language, researching harmful tropes (such as the villainous disability or inspiration porn tropes), and even suggests hiring a disability consultant. Another disabled contributor of the blog Metaphors and Moonlight shares similar thoughts. The author, identified as Kit, brings up how important it is to consider one’s reasons for bringing a disabled character into the story and to put research into portraying a disability accurately. Kit ends their post stressing how essential it is to go beyond fictional works and listen to disabled people in real life.

When writing a disabled character, remember that whatever you’re writing can greatly influence your audience and readers. Representation doesn’t have to be perfect but should reflect thoughtful research. The world around us is filled with accessibility barriers and harmful stereotypes, which are important to deconstruct when writing a disabled character. When in doubt, ask yourself if the representation you’ve written reflects careful consideration of disability, and how disability impacts the character in the story.

Meet the blogger:

The author has long hair that has been curled. She is wearing a plaid shirt and posing with her chin turned over her left shoulder, smiling at the camera.ABBIE SUNDICH is a senior and aspiring author majoring in English and Communications with an Editing, Publishing, and Writing Concentration who will graduate in the spring of 2024 from Hamline University. Abbie enjoys reading, writing, drawing, photography, napping, and watching Netflix. She hopes to find a job with a publishing house or a nonprofit after she graduates, and specifically wants to write a few animal fantasy novels.

 

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