#002 Evidence of the Essay “Haunting Houses” by Jacqueline Doyle published by New Ohio Review in Spring 2018
What kind of essay is this: Argumentative; Descriptive; Expository; Critical; Narrative; and/or Historical; etc? I would describe “Haunting Houses” as a segmented lyric essay. Lyric essays depend on poetic devices (imagery, sound, repetition, fragmentation) rather than logical development.
Can you describe the step-by-step process of researching and writing this essay from beginning to end; including dates when you began writing the essay and when you finished the essay? The initial inspiration for the essay was David Lowery’s movie “A Ghost Story.” I was startled by the opening scene: a woman lies in bed with her husband and tells him about her childhood practice of writing little notes and hiding them in houses before her family moved away.
A Ghost Story: Official Trailer
When I was very young, my best friend and I did the same thing before she moved away. The essay starts there and wanders, as lyric essays do, with references to the movie, to Virginia Woolf’s story “A Haunted House” (which Lowery uses in the movie), and texts I already knew well: Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, an Emily Dickinson poem (“One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted”), a Henry James short story where the narrator returns to his empty childhood home and encounters a ghostly double (“The Jolly Corner”).
Click below to read “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf
https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/full-texts-of-classic-works/a-haunted-house-by-virginia-woolf/
Click to purchase THE POETICS OF SPACE from Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Poetics-Space-Gaston-Bachelard/dp/0807064734
Click below to read “one not need to be a chamber to be haunted” by Emily Dickinson.
https://poets.org/poem/one-need-not-be-chamber-be-haunted
Click to read “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James
https://shortstoryamerica.com/pdf_classics/james_the_jolly_corner.pdf
As far as I can tell from my files, I started the essay as a series of fragmentary notes after seeing the movie (A Ghost Story) in July 2017. The first draft of the essay itself was much shorter than the final draft, and didn’t include the Winchester Mystery House. I worked on it fairly steadily for several months. Usually I go through an orderly series of numbered rough drafts, but I see a lot of separate fragments in my files, and a lot of reshuffling of segments in the essay.
Where did you do most of your writing for this essay? I do most of my writing on my desktop iMac on a walnut table in my study. The room is small but cozy, crammed with bookcases and stacks of books and file folders. There’s a view of a lemon tree in the backyard from the window over my desk. I can see lots of birds and squirrels and occasionally deer.
What is the thesis statement or the main idea of the essay? A lyric essay builds through images and repetition and usually doesn’t start with a thesis, but I think this statement near the end expresses the main idea: “Our houses haunt us during our lives. After our deaths, we haunt our houses.”
Can you give us a short excerpt that you feel is the best evidence to prove your thesis statement or main idea? I particularly like the very last paragraph where the images come together. But this earlier paragraph suggests how houses are haunted by their previous owners: “I imagined the first owner of our house as I peeled away the oilpaper lining the cabinets and open shelves in the kitchen—much older than I expected. The second owner would surely have used contact paper in the Sixties, so the oilpaper must have been from the first owner. Did she stand on a stepladder as I did? Was she young and eager, starting a new life in this new place? When I pulled out the cabinet drawers to paint them, I discovered that the wood came from old packing crates, with addresses penciled in spidery, elegant handwriting by unknown senders. I think of them often. They feel like whispered messages from the past.”
Here’s my author website
https://www.jacquelinedoyle.com
