Celebrated experimental writer Carmen Maria Machado is back in Iowa City this fall. The Allentown, Pennsylvania native earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2018, and is back as a visiting associate professor in the Workshop teaching a very October-friendly graduate course, “The Art of Haunting.”
Machado has written three books, including the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, a graphic novel The Low, Low Woods and a story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She’s won a number of other prizes including the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize.
Little Village caught up with Machado this spooky season to discuss her fascination with haunted houses, why women star in so many great horror stories, and the ways Iowa City nurtures writers.
This fall, you have returned to Iowa City and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a visiting faculty member. What thoughts does this return bring up for you about your earlier years in Iowa City and your education as a writer at the Workshop?
It is funny being back, because when you return to a place where you used to live, you’re wrestling with a past version of yourself, or you’re confronting that person in some way. So I’ve been having this odd experience, because last time I lived in Iowa City, I was a student, and now I’m teaching, and I’m having a lot of thoughts of being on the other side of the desk and what it means to be a teacher, and also thinking about the education that I received here. So it’s this weird time-travel experience, since I never thought I’d be back in Iowa City. And I never thought I’d be back here, two or three books (depending on how you define them) into my career. It’s really surprising.
And it’s haunted in its own way. For example, I’m now on the street where Tony Tulathimutte used to live, so I’ve been walking down the street and pointing out to my girlfriend, ‘I used to live there, and Tony used to live there.’ Tony hasn’t lived there for a decade or more, but I think of it as Tony’s apartment. Or I’m remembering what happened to me at certain restaurants, or I’m like ‘Oh yes, I cried over here on this corner, about something or another.’ There are a lot of encounters with ghosts of a past self. [Iowa City] is a haunted space, which is true of any space that you’re from that you haven’t lived in a while — it’s like encountering a ghost of yourself that you’re running into all the time.
How do you think about the town of Iowa City as a city for writers, now that you’ve lived in Philadelphia and Brooklyn?
I really love it here. I think that it’s a place where it’s quiet and easy to live, which is helpful for writing, and it obviously is a place that really nurtures writers. Writers come here to study and to teach and to stay, and it feels like a space that has nurtured its own literary energy, and so it makes sense that writers would gravitate here. It’s a really wonderful literary space. It’s really nice to be a writer here — not just a student of writing, but a writer.
You’re teaching a class called “The Art of Haunting,” a graduate seminar at the Workshop in which the class reads and discusses literature that “explores(s) the idea of the haunted house both literally and laterally.” What interests you about haunted houses?
I think that there are so many metaphors bound up in the house, including a lot of metaphors that really interest me. So for example: gender, and the domestic; who we associate with the home; childhood; domesticity; not just heterosexuality, but also one’s distance to or from heterosexuality; things that happen behind closed doors. There are a lot of good and bad, very rich metaphors tangled up in the house. So haunted houses, whether they’re like literally haunted in the sense of ghosts appearing — in this class, we’ve read books where ghosts have showed up, and [books where ghosts have] not showed up physically — but either way, the way a space is haunted across time, and the way the past returns or butts up against the present. And so it’s about time, and the past, which will assert itself against the present, and the result is that we don’t exist in untouched space. Wherever we are, someone has walked before us, or lived before us, experienced life before us, experienced pain and joy and sorrow and birth and death, and those things all exist in close proximity to us, both in space and in time, and I think that haunted houses are a really interesting way to dive into a lot of those questions. So it was really exciting to get a chance to teach a class and get to talk to smart people, who are also interested in the subject, about their feelings, and about how texts are approaching the question of the haunted house.
In your own work, you write about haunting. For example, in your short story “The Resident,” the narrator finds herself in a haunted house. Who are your literary predecessors and do you feel haunted by them?
Absolutely, I am a thousand percent. Even people who don’t like horror are always haunted by their literary predecessors. The reality of being an artist is that other artists come before you, and they tackle related questions or experiences, and you’re always going to be grappling with that. And a lot of them are still alive. But as we know from my class, you don’t have to be dead to haunt something. Obviously, there are writers like Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson, who came before me. Then there are writers like Kelly Link and Kathryn Davis, George Saunders, Karen Russell and Sofia Samatar, who are still alive and well, and writing brilliant work I’m really obsessed with, that is really helpful to me as a writer. There are a lot of living writers whose work I find so bracing.
So many of the classic haunting narratives (such as The Haunting of Hill House, Rebecca and Beloved) feature protagonists who are women. Do you think that haunting is particular to the female experience?
Yes and no. Like I said before, because houses are tied up with home, because home is tied up with the domestic, and we have established, historically, the domestic as “the realm of women.” So I think there is a reason that women’s experiences and bodies have been so often cast against in the gothic structure and the haunted house structure. And that feels tied up with this question about, what do we associate with the home, and what are the metaphors that we are bringing to bear on that idea? I think that’s often why women end up at the center of these stories.
In your opinion, why do people love to consume work that frightens them?
It’s the same reason that people want to go on the roller coaster. It’s the same reason for doing any dangerous, adrenaline-pumping thing that is also safe and controlled. It’s a way of experiencing excitement and thrill while also being in a safe setting.
Halloween is coming up. So much of your work inspires and is inspired by the speculative, the supernatural and the form of the tale, in which these subjects are often told. Does Halloween have a special meaning for you as a person? a writer?
At Halloween, I’m at the height of my powers. I can move things with my mind. Obviously, I’m kidding. I read and write spooky stuff year around, but during Halloween everyone else is also getting into it, so it’s nice. It’s a moment where people get to let that piece of their interests really shine. It’s a time of year that feels very lovely to me. Not scary, just lovely.
If you could set a Halloween story anywhere in Johnson County, where it be?
I might set it in the first house in Iowa City I ever lived in, which had a room in the basement which was painted entirely red. We called it the murder room. We had no explanation of any kind for that room. But it always felt very spooky, and I’ve always wanted to put it in something. Also the Dey House. I think I should set a story here. It’s a place that is both in conversation with its own past and future, since you have the old part of the building, and then the newer part of the building, but that always houses books of graduates that constantly updates — so it’s a building that in acute conversation with its past and its present and its future, and there are so many stories and histories nested in this building, so it just feels like a perfect setting.
Are there any new or old books you would recommend to Iowa City readers that are related to Halloween?
Bennett Sims’ new book, Other Minds and Other Stories, is wonderful, and is coming out soon. That’s definitely spooky. When I read it, I found it incredibly unsettling. It was very, very, very spooky. I read it in one sitting, at a bar, and it was so creepy. You also can’t go wrong with The Haunting of Hill House [by Shirley Jackson]. It’s a classic, perfect novel.
Tai Caputo is a junior at City High School in Iowa City and writes for The Little Hawk student newspaper. She won a Top Ten Emerging Journalist Award this spring from the Iowa High School Press Association.
