Short story author Antonya Nelson opened the River City Writers Series spring program Wednesday night with a reading from a collection of stories that will be released sometime next year.
The selected reading, "Dick" from her collection "Some Fun," is filled with imagery that blazes as brilliantly as a sun, a "giant peach" of a sun that "burned toward the horizon," according to Nelson. The reader encounters the main character pondering the "daily LA paradox, this toxic beauty," and is taken on a somewhat disillusioning journey as this mom wages war against the drudgery of a loveless marriage and clashes with her children.
The New Yorker pinned Nelson as one of the "twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium." With four short story collections and three novels, including "Talking in Bed," "Nobody's Girl" and "Living to Tell" under her belt, she was a prime candidate for the Writers Series.
Thursday, Nelson presented advice to University of Memphis students and members of the community in a mid-morning interview session and afternoon workshop. K.K. Fox, a fine arts graduate student, said Nelson is one of her favorite contemporary writers and the "wisdom of her experience" was a great example for aspiring writers. Fox was one of two students who interviewed the author.
"Everyone's a writer. They just have to discover their voice," said Fox.
The Writers Series was funded as a way to expose students to some of the best writers in the nation. "I hope the series provides advice students can use in their work and inspiration they can use throughout their careers. We want students to come, ask questions and talk one-on-one with professional writers," said Series Director, Cary Holladay.
MFA student and aspiring fiction writer Glen Ivey said he learned a lot from Nelson in terms of her publication advice.
"It's one thing to write and another to actually get published. It's nice to hear stories about people who have made it," he said. "Nelson's writing style talks about human conditions in a localized way. Her stories confront bigger issues the way a real person would."
Those bigger issues are rooted in real life events that color Nelson's world and seep into her work.
"Most recently, I have teenage children so I'm interested in their lives and in the lives of their extended relationships with their friends," Nelson said.
She takes notice of events that are "just charged, like when lightning strikes randomly there has to be a receiving element on earth that makes lightning hit."
Except when life's lightning strikes Nelson, she uses her charged senses to capture the essence of life in about 20 pages of a short story. She said her inspiration is charged, "when something poses a question that I think I can answer through creating some sort of fictional world."
A common virus that strikes writers is the infamous writer's block. Nelson's advice: "I just don't do it," she said. "I'll go months without writing. I've learned to make my peace with the whole process."While all writers face difficulties when trying to squeeze their creative juices onto a tangible medium, other obstacles hinder short story writers in a difficult writing industry.
"People don't know how to read short stories very well. I don't think people are as willing to get into another world for 20 pages and have it end abruptly," she said. "They would much rather indulge in 300 pages of a novel. A good novel is a great pleasure. It's human impulse to get caught up in another world for a long time. All that being said, I still love short stories."
Nelson notes that writing is not a profession to immediately jump into if you are only looking for fame and fortune.
"The real pleasure in writing is writing. If you think it's about the celebrity status, you'll be disappointed," she said. "A story that really satisfies you really is the pleasure."
One problem that haunts student writers is that "they haven't read enough. They are trying to enter an art form with which they are not very familiar," she said. Her advice? "Read more."
The River City Writers Series was founded in 1977 and has since featured such notable authors as Eudora Welty, John Updike and Literature Nobel Prize winners like Seamus Heaney from Ireland and Czeslaw Milosz from Poland.
This year's spring schedule includes Stephen Dunn, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and John Dufresne whose first two novels received honors as the New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Ivey said the upcoming Writers Series is a "wonderful opportunity for U of M students in the artistic industry. Art is art. Learning about the creative process is just valuable."
He said while authors like Dunn and Dufresne may not enjoy the social fame of authors like Stephen King, "these authors are highly respected in their field. Money is not always the clearest indicator of a great writer. They are people that have a reputation for being the best at what they do."
Besides possessing a growing reputation for being the best at what she does, Nelson said another primary motivator for writing is her sanity.
"If I wasn't writing, I'd be going crazy right now."
Students who experience this same connection to writing or just have a desire to expand their knowledge about the written word should check out the Writers Series website.
