Public Service Announcement: Do not try to adapt Shirley Jackson Stories into Illustrations.

About a million years ago I did the Ghost Shrimp Illustration workshop. For week 4 the task was to complete a double-page magazine illustration. I had listened to The Lottery and Other Stories and like many authors of the 1940’s time, her stories often appeared in magazines so it seemed like a perfect prompt. So why the public service announcement? I have learned time and time again that it’s extremely hard to do a Jackson story any justice through illustration.

There are two key elements to all my favourite Shirley Jackson Stories (The Haunting of Hill House, The Intoxicated, The Witch, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Banality of Evil) The first is a protagonist suffering from any kind of social disorder, usually extreme social anxiety. Particularly the feeling of being unwelcome in a location, which brings me to the second element. The transformation of a location, particularly the home, from a comforting space into an unwelcoming or hostile space.

I had a few very ambitious aims with this piece: I wanted to recount the story as true to Jackson’s descriptions as possible without using any words. (I did take a few liberties to get the layout to work.) I wanted to capture the shifting power dynamic between the characters and I wanted to show the transformation of the space.

Probably not surprisingly, I wasn’t able to complete this piece in a week and, like several of the illustrations from that workshop, it sat in the back of my mind for over a year. Getting the layout right was too much of a tall order. It wasn’t until I did some Risograph Printing in January that I had the essential lightbulb moment for this piece. Big thanks to Paper Tree Gallery for their great work printing this piece. I have 20 A3 prints that I’m not totally sure what to do with.

Risograph printers are limited to 2 colours and that limitation seemed like a great way to show the contrast between the space, the characters and how the space could be transformed. I also wanted to try making so comics with Risograph printing so it seemed like a good way to get a creative pipeline in order.

I won’t recount the story of Like Mother Used to Make because, like many of Jackson’s stories, the monster you are dreading never arrives, but I HIGHLY recommend reading it.