November 12, 2010
Friday

Antonya Nelson’s description [in her short story “Falsetto”] of clutter as history and mystery washes over me like a wave of warm water. Her long sentences with strings of details probably went through dozens of drafts. She took the time. She lavished on her prose the care her characters deserve of the words that tell their story. I can do this, I told myself. I can do this.
                   — Margaret DeAngelis, b. 1947
                        American fiction writer and essayist
                        from “Strata,” a post to Markings: Days of Her Life

I was supposed to be here at the Vermont Studio Center this time last year. I applied in 2008 and was awarded a spot for these same dates in 2009. And then came my stay at Hambidge in Georgia, and my acquiring of an interest in and financial obligation toward studio space at home. By the time Bread Loaf 2009 came around, I knew that I had neither the head nor the heart nor the purse to undertake a residency at VSC so soon. To top it off, I learned that Antonya Nelson would be a visiting writer during the same period in 2010. I approached the administration of VSC, and to my unending gratitude and appreciation, they allowed me to defer my award for a full year. In other words, they gave me exactly what I wanted.

Antonya Nelson was born in 1961 in Wichita, Kansas. She appears to be one of those people who knew from birth she was a writer. Her education was a straight shot through grade school to her MFA in creative writing at the age of 25. She teaches, she lectures, she publishes. According to a profile published by the Rea Award, which she won in 2003, “The Washington Post Book World called her ‘a formidable writer. That is, she’s a woman of piercing intelligence, a first-rate stylist, an explorer of language who questions all its customary uses while fashioning evocative descriptions and incisive phrases.’”

I was first exposed to Antonya Nelson at Bread Loaf in 2006 or 2007. I can’t remember the title of the class, what the subject of it was supposed to be. I just remember sitting in the subterranean space known as “Barn A” (a room in the stone foundation of the big 19th century barn that is Bread Loaf’s classroom building) while she talked about developing a story from a brief newspaper item that had caught her attention. In the fall of 2007, just before I went to my first residency, at Jentel in Wyoming, I read “Falsetto,” published in the fall issue of Glimmer Train. It’s the story that made me fall in love with her work, that made me choose her as a workshop leader for Bread Loaf 2008.

The workshop she led will always be among the top echelon of my experiences at Bread Loaf. It was the most intensely craft-based one I had ever been part of. The story that she read and commented on and led others through a useful discussion of was “Bad Girls,” and when I finally addressed revisions to it this week, I had the marked-up copy in her handwriting to guide me.

She arrived this morning, after a missed connection in Newark and a night in the Ramada there. So she gave her craft class this afternoon instead of this morning. The visiting writers give their classes in the Mason conference room, at the same table where I have been sitting each morning for my C&C. When I arrived, she was sitting at the head of the table, and I could see over her left shoulder the copy of her novel Nobody’s Girl that I had finally found in the hodgepodge of books and reshelved in its proper slot with the Ns just yesterday.

She looked at me, smiled, said hello, and remarked that my hair looks different.

Antonya Nelson remembered me, a wannabe writer she knew for an aggregate of ten hours in workshop two years ago. I thought maybe I could leave right then, because nothing more awesome was likely to happen.

And yet something did. Toni (she wants to be called “Toni”) chose to outline her process for revision in this class. Revision. The very thing I have been working on. The very thing I most need to learn to do. It was a practical, useful, utterly worthwhile session with a gracious, intelligent, sensitive writer who is also a consummate teacher.

When it comes to Antonya Nelson, I am an unabashed fan. I worship her, I’ve said, calling her Mighty Antonya Nelson the way Emily Dickinson referred to “gigantic Emily Bronte.” I have named a character after her — Tonya, a real estate novelist who becomes the first love of Andrew but who must end their relationship for his own good.

At VSC we are permitted to send ten pages of work for the visiting writer to have a look at and discuss. Ten pages isn’t much, and I’ve sent work which is in a very early stage. What I’ve learned about revision this week, from my own efforts and from Toni Nelson’s class this afternoon, coupled with a private critique session with her on Monday, should go far to help me make something of the two brief stories we’ll talk about.

Earlier this week I read “DWI,” from her most recent story collection, Nothing Right. In it, a woman seeks respite from a psychological blow. It is not emotional trauma that sent me from my home three weeks ago, but a desire to learn and grow as a writer. Yet I see myself in Sadie:

She’ll leave for a month . . . with a conviction that she will be better on arrival home. She’ll turn off the lights and lock doors knowing she will switch them on and unlock them a new woman, a woman who has come from there to here, cured.

I’m a new woman already, a new writer, cured of my fear of revision. And I have a whole week left to keep on.

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