Writer’s Desk: Keeping the Demons at Bay

Shirley Jackson considered herself an odd person. This hardly makes her unique among writers. But see what she had to say about its relationship to her writing:

The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich worl...