fascinated by the way constance blackwood’s life revolves around food after the death of most of her family and her very public trial for their murders. the way all of her books from the library are about cooking, the quiet respect with which she handles the groceries, the tradition of the blackwood family of making preserves, her attention to the vegetable garden, especially the way that merricat isn’t allowed to handle food in their household anymore. it’s the one thing she had no control over before and look what happened. it’s the thing that dictates her entire life because it changed it once forever in a way that she never gets to come back from. i also think there’s something to the way we obsess over the things that are the most frightening and dangerous to us, maybe the things that have done the most damage to us. and when you need that thing to survive, there’s something kind of inevitably intriguing about it especially when it can give and take away life at the same time. like how the difference between medicine and poison is dosage. and then after the fire, the townspeople bring her and merricat food as a way to apologize. but at the same time, they start rumors that they poison children and eat little girls. for the blackwoods, food is always wrapped up in violence or hatred in some way
I decided to draw a fanart for this book because first of all : it’s amazing, and second of all because I wanted to see something else than just people thirsting over Sebastian Stan-
I’m easing into fall/spooky recipes with a simple one: pecan and rum pound cake with blackberries! Inspired by We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The sugar on the blackberries (probably) contains no arsenic.
[Image ID: A 2-tone black, grey and white linocut/ relief print. The print has lines in black and a dark, cool grey.
The print depicts two hands holding a silver sugar bowl. The sugar bowl has the reflections of silhouettes of people in the bottom half of the body broken up into thin lines. On the top left of the body is a spider. The spider has white and black stripes on its legs and two white curves in the middle of its body and head.
The background is a button-up shirt with a periodic curved horizontal lines on it. In the top are two braids.]
Finished my ‘We Have Always Lived in This Castle Print for my class! I like how it turned out! Might experiment with doing multiple shades of grey with the same design sometime just b/c that sounds cool.
[Image ID: An Illustrated book cover with the back on the left and the front on the right.
The Left side features a silver sugar bowl in the left corner with three silver dollars next to it and a golden watch chain with tight links in the right corner next to it is a large black book with a hole in the center. Over the book is a barcode with mock publisher information. The the Center of these objects is text that reads: “My Name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf. because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.” Under these images is a wooden looking background.
In the middle is part of the black book and a gradient into a tree with the text: ‘We Have Always Lived in this Castle’ and ‘Shirley Jackson.’
The left side has a rectangular house. In the middle of the house is a section built outwards which has a small roof, a window with a silhouette of Merricat in it between the blue curtains with a gold-purple color in the background. Under the window is a porch with two columns with a brown door in between it. There are steps in front of the porch. On the top window to the right of Merricat is a silhouette of Constance shutting the curtains. In the back portion of the house are two windows on either side of the middle section, with the far window having a rectangular awning. Under these windows is a large rectangular window with shutters on each side of the house, It has dark yellow curtains that are mostly closed. On the far right side are two more windows. At the top of the house is a black roof with five chimneys with varying heights. Two are on the left side of the house and three are on the right side.
There are yellow reflections of the windows on the lawn and text that reads: ‘We Have Always Lived in This Castle.’ The lawn has a gradient that goes from grey-brown into green into navy blue.
In the bottom of the left side is a barbed fence, with three posts and a black cat’s tail over the far right post. In between the wires is text that reads: ‘Shirley Jackson.’
In the background there are several dark green trees, the moon, and the sky is violet. end ID]
I’ve been rereading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, one of my favorites. The rhythm of the first paragraph caught me, so I drew it.
(I wasn’t sure which Richard Plantagenet Merricat is referring to—there are a lot. Wikipedia somewhat arbitrarily says it’s Richard of Eastwell, who does seem he might be interesting to her, but Richard II might also appeal to her sense of drama. I chose Eastwell, though.)
