Greetings, book-lovers!
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
Phillips.Macey is a Cincinnati writer, teacher, and the author of the Theories of Haunting by Macey Phillips substack, where she is writing a book from scratch and documenting the process.
Here, she shares a wonderful essay on a book she’s read over and over again, one that’s helped her understand certain truths about life. Enjoy!
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I have recently become interested in hauntings.
The literal kind, yes. Ghosts and graveyards. Spirituality and spirits. Our ancestors who seek us out in the form of robins and speak to us in our dreams.
I’m interested in the theoretical kind, too. You know: the things that haunt us from our childhood or that relationship. Our fears and failings. The things that follow us—whether we like them to or not—throughout our lives.
I was in high school the first time I read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I was seventeen. Do I need to tell you I knew nothing? I was from a small town, a strict religion, and a stricter household. I went to church and got straight A’s.
Except, that isn’t fair to say. That I knew nothing.
Janie, the sixteen year old protagonist, “knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, ‘Ah hope you fall on soft ground,’ because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.”
She was from a small town, a strict religion, and a stricter household.
And she knew things. She knew how to listen and how to interpret what she heard. She had a sense of the world that she might not have been able to explain, but that she knew to be true nonetheless. Like how to be kind. Like how life could be hard, torn down in an evening. Like how it could be rebuilt again. And again.
My little seventeen-year-old heart, the one that was being crushed by high school bullies and under the enormous weight of perfectionism, an abusive religion and relationship, and the kind of constricting expectations that left it clenched painfully—it was the first time I can think that literature spoke so clearly down the pipeline of my own life.
I knew things. Important things. Put another way: my thoughts, my interests, my talents, my experiences, my life, though very young and inexperienced and naïve, mattered. And if I messed up (how I wish I could go back and hug that sweet, young, terrified girl), life could be rebuilt.
The second time I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was in a high school classroom again, but this time, I was the teacher. It was a new job. I was newly married. And in love with everything—my husband, my students. I started to creatively write around this time. Little stories. Things that happened at school, at home captured in a piece of flash fiction.
I remember the day when my fifth period class of juniors cracked open their books and we just admired Hurston’s language for a whole class period. No themes, no motifs. None of that close reading analysis that takes the life out of literature. Just letting ourselves delight in the language, let the sensory experiences wash over us. My students weren’t the only ones coming out of class that day with their eyes open and hearts full.
I continued writing during this time—bigger things this time. I received my first publication from a literary magazine. Then another. I eventually quit teaching and applied for grad school.
I took a year off to write a novel. A messy thing about marriage and friendship and memory and chickens. I was young and new to writing. Hurston haunted my days. She wove so many things together, big things like racism and gender expectation and love and little things like the dust-bearing bees visiting flowers in spring and the heat of the sun across a set of shoulders while picking beans. The echo of a pistol and rifle shot in unison. The tension of who was still alive at the end of the smoking guns.
It is rumored that Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in just seven weeks. I have a sneaking suspicion that it will take me my whole life and a few more after that to come even close to Hurston’s ability to capture her characters and her readers.
The third time I read Their Eyes Were Watching God was in the throes of the pandemic. I had rolling panic attacks every day. I couldn’t eat—I lost so much weight. I was terrified, the most scared I’ve ever been in my life. A shell of myself. The world was big—too big. Death was sweeping across it. And the world was too small, shrunken to the two rooms of my apartment, the bed I had a hard time leaving and the couch I collapsed on, a book in my hands to try to distract myself.
To say that reading the book brought me comfort would be a lie. Hurston doesn’t promise comfort in this book—in fact, she promises the opposite. There will be difficulties. Bad relationships, bad people who will hurt you in countless ways. Your life is not in your control—there are forces working against you at every stage, as a young girl who has a lot to learn, as a new wife whose newness is a threat against her, as a woman who has the world stripped violently from her, torn down every evening.
Another promise Hurston makes?
A new world will be built by sun-up.
Again. And again.
Macey Phillips is a Cincinnati writer and teacher. She is the author of
on Substack, where she is writing a book from scratch and documenting the process. She is a copywriter by day and a new mom, cook, gardener, and dog-walker the rest of the time. She recently graduated from Ohio State with her MFA in creative writing. Her work has appeared in Story, The Pinch, Broadkill Review, J Journal, and elsewhere. Check out her website to learn more: maceyphillips.com. And be sure to subscribe to her Substack—she releases a new chapter every Thursday at noon!P.S. For more ways of getting your writing in front of new readers, consider becoming a paying subscriber today.
This was lovely. Thank you.
Artfully written, Macey! Way to zoom in on a hopeful passage for others to remember.