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Fall 2009 Letter from the Director Here in Tucson, we’re beginning to creep out of our shady and AC-cooled lairs to enjoy the desert’s beauty and to participate in various iconoclastic-city adventures (like the All Souls Procession, coming up November 8th). And of course, the MFA program’s fall semester is in full swing and filled with highlights. Earlier this month we were thrilled to welcome back alums Robert Boswell (’84) and Antonya Nelson (’86) for a reading and colloquium. Both of them have new books out this year (respectively, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards and Nothing Right). While they were here, they were kind enough to do an interview on their experiences as writers and at the University of Arizona (see alumni profiles, below). What talent has come out of this program over the years! As part of our Writer as Citizen initiative, this summer we launched the first Biosphere 2 Creative Science internship. Current MFA student Esmé Schwall Weigand has spent many hours now experiencing the Biosphere, reflecting on the experience, and interpreting it as a layperson/writer. She reports back in a blog, as well as a final project, which she will be presenting at the end of the semester. As a response to difficult financial times here at the University, the Creative Writing faculty has instigated a benefit series to raise funds for our graduate students. On Monday, November 2, Fenton Johnson and Ander Monson will conduct a benefit workshop called “The Inspirational Fact: The Role of Research in Writing Creative Nonfiction.” Find out more or register now. Or read a Q&A with Johnson and Monson. If you can’t make the workshop but would like to support the program in another way, a giving form may be downloaded. Thank you for any and all support. Alums, we are putting together a listing of Alumni News for our next newsletter in the winter/spring. Please submit your recent publications and other career news to Marlene Cooksey, Program Assistant, at mcooksey@email.arizona.edu. Warm wishes,
Alumni Profiles: Robert Boswell, MFA '84, and Antonya Nelson, MFA '86 By Liz Warren-Pederson (MFA '11) “People create different narratives for their lives,” says Antonya Nelson (MFA ’86). She is the daughter of English professors, and was an English major herself at the University of Kansas, where she earned her undergraduate degree. She suggests that what some people see as fate may merely be chance. “There’s a randomness to it,” she says. In college, she took an arbitrary jazz class and started dating a guy from that class who convinced her to take a fiction workshop.
“I took the path of least resistance, but there was also an element of chaos and luck,” she explains. “I can create several different narratives from that sequence of events, and I could believe in any of them thoroughly. If I hadn’t had that boyfriend… who knows?” After a moment, she adds, “Though, I wouldn’t have predicted such a life for myself. It didn’t seem possible. To me, writers of books were rock stars, and I could not imagine myself making a novel.” Her husband, Robert Boswell (MFA ’84), agrees. “I always wanted to be either a writer or a baseball player, and I couldn’t hit a curve ball, so…” he deadpans. “To be a writer seemed like a childish thing to aspire to, not so different from wanting to be a shortstop in the big leagues. In my family, for good reason, we had to think about how to make a living. I figured I’d have to write on the side.” He earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Arizona and began a counseling career in California. “I was making a good living. I had an apartment on the beach in San Diego. I had a sports car,” he says. “And I was miserable.” Many of his clients were in the throes of a mid-life crisis. “I would ask them, ‘Well, what do you really want to do? Why aren’t you pursuing the thing you love?’ Ultimately, I was forced to take my own advice, and I can honestly say I’ve never had a moment of regret.” Boswell entered the creative writing MFA program at the University of Arizona. In 1983 — his last year in the program and Nelson’s first — they met in Mary Carter’s fiction workshop. “We had five years of crossover in the program,” Boswell says. That crossover created a wider-than-usual network of writing colleagues, which includes such writers as Richard Russo, Tony Hoagland, Karen Brennan, Emily Hammond, Christopher McIlroy, Steven Schwartz, and David Foster Wallace. Nelson and Boswell married in 1984, and their careers took off on parallel paths. Boswell won the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction in 1985, then published a short story collection, Dancing in the Movies, in 1986, and his first novel, Crooked Hearts, in 1987. Nelson won a contest in Mademoiselle before publishing her first story collection, The Expendables, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990. Her first novel, Talking in Bed, won the Heartland Prize in 1996.
Until recently, the couple shared a faculty position at New Mexico State University; they now share the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Both also teach in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. “We found jobs fairly easily,” Boswell says, “but it’s harder to find teaching jobs today.” The job of teaching writing has also changed. “The writer’s role in the university has undergone a cultural shift,” he says. Nelson agrees. “MFA programs have grown up, pedagogically.” The most difficult thing to teach, she argues, is sensibility. “Students have to read widely and deeply,” she says. Boswell adds, “Professors can’t teach sensibility, but literature can.” He becomes animated talking about Chekhov. “Chekhov suggests that an artist is someone who can distinguish good testimony from bad,” he explains. “I think he’s talking about recognizing useful material and claiming it in your work. Writers tend to mine their lives, looking for good testimony. Luckily for me, I worked a whole slew of stupid jobs when I was young, and I have an endless supply of material. Writing fiction is a means by which to make the idiocy of my youth pay dividends.” Splitting faculty positions allowed the couple time to raise their two children while still working on their own writing. “In the MFA program, I figured out that if I would write six or eight drafts, I could be one of the better writers in the workshop,” Boswell says. “Maybe I wasn’t a thoroughbred, but I could be a helluva plough horse.” He plows through at least thirty drafts of every story. “I don’t recommend this method if you’ve got another way,” he adds. “It’s exhausting, but it works for me.” “My process of revision is about layering and texturizing,” Nelson says. “If I’m working on two thin stories, for example, I might combine them into one.” Both Nelson and Boswell are noted for their abilities to shift back and forth between short stories and novels. “Every project is a short story until it proves otherwise,” Nelson says, adding that she is prefers working in the shorter form. “The thing I wish I’d learned earlier was my temperament as a writer. The sooner you find out your temperament, the better.” Novelists, she observes, tend to be people who clock in and write day after day, while short story writers tend to have short bursts of productivity followed by dry spells. “It’s the difference between a sprinter and a long distance runner,” she says. Boswell says he often switches back and forth between multiple projects. “I’m working on four books right now,” he says. “Writing a novel is like walking a tightrope, only you can’t see the other end. You can’t even see if anyone’s holding up the other end.” Boswell’s latest short story collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, was selected for Oprah’s summer reading list in 2009. Nelson’s collection of stories, Nothing Right, also released in 2009. Between them, they have published twenty books, and stories in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review, as wells as in anthologies such as Pushcart Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. “My brother was a sociologist,” says Boswell. “Once he told me that the best measure for predicting the success of a marriage is how much you’ve got in common. I figure we’ve got it made.” He laughs and adds, “We’re lucky that we get to do what we really love to do.”
MFA Alumni and Faculty News of Note
Get the latest Creative Writing MFA Program information at cwp.english.arizona.edu. |
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