Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelsonis an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 January 1961
CountryUnited States of America
abstinence beauty capture characters girl hypocrisy perfect preaching seem
Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.
among anybody columbia faculty faulkner thesis university william writers wrote
My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.
complete constant course curriculum entirely family leave life links meet people stages stopped sure time whereas
I'm not entirely sure why I write about family, but I do know that it hasn't stopped interesting me. You meet and leave other people at different stages of your evolution, whereas family is made up of people who are constant links in your life, who know you over the course of time and have your complete curriculum vitae in their heads.
characters hesitant indulge kinds labeled life resist work
I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.
best block level people talks whether
I think what I like best is that when people give talks or workshops, it doesn't really matter what level you are as a writer - whether you are a beginner, or you've been around the block a bit; there's something that you can take away from every session.
dramas elevate frame groups insight maybe minor operate poems single smaller stories ways
I think maybe short stories operate in some of the same ways that poems do. They frame single or small moments and elevate those. They give you insight into more minor dramas maybe, dramas between smaller groups of people.
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I think about and study people. I think I make people uneasy sometimes by being so curious as to why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about this fairly obsessively, and I can't stop until I've found an answer.
capable form individual insular novel pair short social sort
I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
approach fiction gives hearing notes people taking talk work writers
I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.
became brothers brought english exact four natural people third three writer
I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.
embrace guess hardly impulse original ought revise revising trust work
I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn't work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.
english family grew hung people professors returned since state
I grew up with parents who were English professors at Wichita State University, and we were more liberal-minded as a family than most of the people I hung out with in Wichita. During summers, we went off to Telluride, Colorado, where I've returned every summer since I was born.
advise finding learned revision strongly time younger
Finding pleasure in revision is the thing I would most strongly advise to people. It's not something I did as a younger writer; I learned it over time.
feels stems
Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.