Antonya Nelson Doesn�t Twitter

 

But she does watch �The Simpsons.� A former student asks Nelson who makes her laugh.

 

Her stories take place in the most ordinary settings: a hotel bar, a sterile housing complex, a high school gym. Over the course of three novels and five story collections, WW MFA faculty Antonya Nelson has been lauded for fiction that is unsentimental, unflinching and � despite the familiarity of her domestic settings � always surprising.� In her fictional universe, desire and despair coexist with flashes of dark comedy. Her newest book, Nothing Right: Short Stories, bristles with Nelson�s spiky wit and flair for offhanded heartbreak. It is peopled with characters who, as the title implies, really can�t do anything right. They sleep with the wrong people. Their plans fall apart. Their families inevitably disappoint.

 

The book has earned a glowing review from the New York Times, which praised Nelson as a writer who �values insight over epiphany.� The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Nothing Right: Short Stories as �unforgettable� and observed that Nelson, �witty and sympathetic, articulates our pains and troubles better than we do.� Recently, Nelson�s former student Diane Arieff (fiction �06) asked Nelson about how she goes about inventing trouble for her characters.

 

You have a knack for creating vivid teenage characters and adults who yearn in for the power of their younger, rebellious selves. What is it about adolescence that draws you as a subject? 

 

Adolescence looks a lot like middle age, to me. When I realized that my daughter was going through an identity transformation that resonated very profoundly with my own identity transformation (the simple fact that one never does, actually, get over high school business), I had a lot of work to do fictionally.

 

From the first page of Nothing Right, the characters are tangled up in a web of complications. You make it look easy, but creating such layered, believable lives in a dozen or so pages is anything but. Are the complications you invent for your characters usually present in the first draft? 

 

I like to do what I call �texturizing� of stories and situations.  For me, it's layering on detail or extenuating circumstances that start making a scene or character come to interesting life for me, their author.  One hopes this same experience might happen to the reader, later.  A friend once told me that she was saving her really complicated characters for her novel.  I bristled, privately vowing never to �save� anything big or deep for the novel, but to spend it always, all at once, in stories.

 

There is a wry, mischievous energy in all of your stories. The female characters are sexually alive to men, but clear-eyed and unsentimental about them. The men can be hapless, impulsive, or dishonest, but they are redeemed by their vulnerability and their capacity to seduce. What response do you get from readers about your treatment of men, women and sex?

 

Mostly people either identify with these flawed beings, or decide that I�m pretty cynical.   Which seems fair.  The most recent book has been described as having not one sympathetic man in it.  It took me aback to hear that, as I have enormous sympathy for all of my characters.  I don't think I could write about them if I didn't.  But I also am amused by them, and as with real people, being amused goes a long way with me.

 

Let's talk about your sense of humor. There�s a line from the title story of your new book in which you are describing the homecoming from the neonatal unit of a premature infant. You write, �The baby weighed six pounds, like a brisket.� I marked it because it was emblematic of what I think of as your sensibility: tart, smart and unsparing, with a shot of tenderness. It�s a good example of how attuned you are to the comic qualities of words, like �brisket.� Who are the writers who make you laugh? 

 

There are so many!  And they remain my beloveds.  Those laugh-out-loud moments of reading before I could read myself (Dr. Seuss or Dare Wright, bratty Eloise at the Plaza) were probably the moments that made me want to figure out how to recognize the words on the page, get in on the joke.  Salinger's Nine Stories, McCullers' Member of the Wedding, Drabble's The Millstone, Forster's Passage to India � all of these books charm me because of their senses of humor, the small insight or delivery of a line that illustrates the gentle ironic voice informing the scene.

 

You�ve said that some authors you appreciated best when your own age corresponded to the age of the writers at the time they wrote their books, probably because you shared some of the same preoccupations and life experiences. How is your own fiction now different from what you were writing 10 or 15 years ago?

 

I suppose my characters have become parents of teenagers, after having been teenage protagonists. But the deeper insider knowledge must have something to do with my feeling that the terrain is more two-sided now.  I can more authentically occupy both situations, child and parent.  Next? Dementia!

 

In the text of a craft talk you sent me a few years ago entitled, �Me and Madame Bovary,� you wrote, �For me, the writing is going best when I find myself in the completely paradoxical position of telling myself a secret.� Elaborate on that a little bit.

 

Anybody seduced into writing has experienced the moment when a mystery becomes chillingly more mysterious, or alarmingly (unexpectedly) solved.  For me, I can recognize a story's sureness when I come upon an insight inside of it that I did not know I knew.  I will be writing along, sort of like digging a hole with a spoon, and suddenly I'll find a quarter, or the jaw of a mouse, or a wedding ring.  It's been there under the ground all along, but the fact that I was digging in the right place is the real miracle.

 

Everyone has read news accounts that depict fiction readers as an endangered species, or as some precious, dwindling subculture, like the Amish. Is the decline of reading evident in the students you teach?

 

The decline in common reading material is evident. I think they read, but they're not all reading the same thing (although Harry Potter is a good lowest common denominator). I often resort to television shows to illustrate a point (The Simpsons remains the best touchstone).

Do you ever set specific challenges for yourself as a writer � ones you are conscious of from the outset, whether they pertain to voice, structure, scene length, point of view, or some other explicit goal?

 

I set challenges for myself very consciously. Once, I decided that I would write about a dead grandmother and not make her a sentimentalized figure (Living to Tell). Once I told myself that the whole story would take place over the course of a phone conversation ("Stitches"). The story I�m working on right now is going to take place in three scenes, each of them moving inward (one outside, one in a public interior, one in a private space). These are incredibly useful devices and prompts, for me. And I'm also prepared to jettison the idea if the story demands some other course.

With the election of Barack Obama, we now have a president who is also a writer. Do you think language will play a different role in public life than it did during the Bush years?

 

Maybe we'll grow very accustomed to grammatically correct speech making. Maybe we'll never tolerate inelegance again. For all of what Bush called plain speech, his content was very difficult to parse. Ideally, it'd be like the reader who has suddenly discovered a real work of literature (as opposed to the junk he was reading before) and never be satisfied with anything less.

Which is potentially the more irritating trend, Twitter or Kindle?

 

Twitter. By leaps and bounds. At least Kindle involves writers.