Obsessions & Pet Peeves: Writing About What We Love and What We Can’t Stand with Kristopher Jansma

About the Event

If you’ve ever felt the pain of editing a piece while staring desperately at the published books on your shelf, wondering how they got from where you are to where they are – you’re not alone. In his book, Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers, Kristopher Jansma explores the work of beloved writers and the processes they went through to produce the stories we hold up as genius texts today.

Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House and “The Lottery,” loved to write about her obsessions like witchcraft and the occult. But she was often driven to write about the things she hated the most: the small college town where she lived, everyone who lived there, and her controlling husband, Stanley.

In this Friday Night Salon, we’ll join author Kristopher Jansma with a look at Shirley Jackson’s methods of using both her obsessions and her hatreds as inspiration for her work, and explore how we can use the same to get our own passions (positive and negative) onto the page. Join us for an inspiring session of camaraderie and creativity as we write together and embrace the process of revision.