"I went up to Bennington, to the writing seminars, with my husband to give a talk. And while I was giving the talk, I sat in on some of the graduate lectures that the writing seminars MFA candidates have to do. And I got in the car to drive home, and I said to my husband, “I want to grad school. I want to go there.” And I had already published two books at that point. I really, there was no logical reason I would be going to grad school, but I had always sort of thought that there was something that I would be more comfortable with if I went through a grad program. So six months after I gave that talk, I was in the next class at the writing seminars. And it’s a low residency program, so you develop a reading program with your mentor and you exchange fiction and annotations on the books that you’re reading, all semester long, for six months. And so in the very first meeting that I had with this writer named Rachel Paston, she said, “What is it that you’re interested in learning?” And I said, “I really want to write about domestic things, but with a twist, with some kind of magic in them.” And she said, “Have you ever read Shirley Jackson?”" Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is a film starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine. · www.susanscarfmerrell.com · www.creativeprocess.info