Antonya Nelson
Bear with me. I’ve known Antonya Nelson for a while now — she was my teacher and thesis advisor at New Mexico State University — and to disclose that fact and then go on and write some boring article about her as if we’d never met would be, to use one of her favorite expressions, “lame.”
I have known Antonya Nelson to occasionally indulge in the socially smoked cigarette. What distinguishes social smokers from regular old anytime smokers is their keen awareness of context. “What?” you’re saying. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Social smokers are a different breed; they are always weighing their options, observing the makeup of the crowd around them. What you might do with friends at a seedy bar you wouldn’t do in front of your mother, say, or your children. And this is the light in which I view the characters of Nelson’s unsentimental fiction, attentive as they are to the intricacies of family power and loyalty. It’s all about context. And like social smokers, her characters are attracted to and flirt with behavior they know is bad for them.
Not yet 40, Nelson has put together an impressive body of work, consisting of three novels and three short story collections, which is even more impressive when you realize that her entire output has appeared in a mere 10 years. She’s collected numerous honors along the way, including the Flannery O’Connor Award, the PEN/Nelson Algren award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was included among the ranks of The New Yorker’s “Twenty Writers for the 21st Century.” Her most recent novel is Living to Tell, a saga of the Mabies of Wichita, Kan. Like much of her work, Living to Tell atomizes the modern family and lets the particles fall where they may. Her characters don’t exactly suffer from “dysfunction,” that abused word, since that conjures up the sad sacks on Jerry Springer and their cartoonish problems. Nelson’s work is refreshingly old-fashioned; her characters deal with the pain and grief any of us might feel, and they have the decency to keep their suffering private.
Thanks to the Guggenheim, which has allowed her to take a break from her teaching duties at New Mexico State, Nelson has been busy this fall polishing off a collection of stories that should see stores in early 2002. She’s also at work on a new novel about the contemporary West set in Telluride, Colorado, where she’s spent her summers since childhood. Musing on the difference between novels and stories, Nelson says that while novels offer perhaps greater freedom, they also pose more risks. “If you’re navigating a city you can only get so lost; but let’s say you’re navigating a whole country — you can get really lost.” And speaking of navigating a city, Nelson definitely won’t be driving around Austin this weekend. “Three tickets my whole life, they all took place in Texas,” she confesses. “Everything everywhere else has been a warning. They’re hardasses down there.” Hardasses, eh? Men unmoved by sentimentality and displays of sham emotion? Sounds like they’d feel right at home in one of Antonya Nelson’s books.
Antonya Nelson will be a panelist on “The Craft of Fiction” panel on Saturday, Nov. 11, at 11:45am in the House Chamber. She will also give a reading on Sunday, Nov. 12, from 2:30-3:15pm in the Capitol Extension Audiorium.
This article appears in November 10 • 2000.