Residency #136
OCTOBER 12 – NOVEMBER 1, 2009
Application deadline: May 22, 2009

ANTONYA NELSON, fiction

Antonya Nelson is the author of six short story collections, including Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009), and three novels (Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books of 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she was named in 1999 by The New Yorker as one of the, “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.” She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships. Nelson teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico and Houston, Texas.

Residency Statement

I am fascinated with the chains of influence that inform fiction, and would like to pursue an investigation of source materials that result in contemporary work. As an example of my interest, I could cite William Shakespeare’s dependence on fairy tale to create his tragic story of King Lear. Later, Akira Kurosawa re-told the tale in his film Ran. Jane Smiley took a shot at the same materials, reinvented and re-imagined to suit her own place and time in the novel A Thousand Acres. My hope is that the three-week residency would include writers available and compelled by a wide range of influences, literary or otherwise. Our mutual project would be to brainstorm and critique, reaching outside the narrow confines of the autobiographical and the purely topical into the larger realm of the ubiquitous and archetypal.

Application Requirements

I would like to read a sample of your fiction (say 10 pages) and also hear, in a paragraph or so, what potential source materials you might pull from (whether Jungian mythos or hair metal rock bands; I am utterly entranced by the way artists synthesize the eclectic elements of their imagination and experience) in creating a new work of fiction.

*For more information about Antonya Nelson please visit http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=8282