About Antonya Nelson

Ask most writers about their craft, and they'll likely talk about character, setting, and narrative arc—the simple rise and fall of dramatic action. Ask Antonya Nelson, and she'll surprise you with the structures and schematics she refers to as shape.

Her story "Loaded Gun," for instance, tells of a teenager's mounting frustration with her family life, but Nelson explains that it's actually written in the shape of a gun. "Each little secret, of which there are six," she says, "is being loaded into the chamber of a teenage girl's barrel or mind, until she's ready to discharge—at her mother."

Or consider her current project, a novel about a woman's search for solitude, which Nelson says takes the shape of a word game she likes to play with her son. The object of the game is to change one word into another by adjusting only one letter at a time, morphing, for example, "call" into "home" in the fewest moves. The impact of this shape on her fiction? "It's really become a story of acquisition. Each scene introduces another character, rendering this woman a step further from solitude every time."

Forget Nabokov. Such playfully intricate operating systems recall the sharp-minded antics of Hollywood's most enchanting serial killers. But these so-called shapes are primarily clues for Nelson and her writing process, not for her readers. In fact, she prefers that the reader not detect them at all. "I like stories best when I can't discern the shape in the first reading—but I can feel its effects working on me." To her credit, one could read "Loaded Gun" a hundred times without ever detecting the six-shooter design. Yet even though this structure is invisible, one can't help but feel the inherent mounting tension, the accumulation of ammunition and power. Both the explicit work of the narrative and the implicit structure conspire to make the story resonate in ways the conscious mind can't even understand. With her piercing insights, dogged characters, and sinewy prose—and the oddly affecting suggestions of shape—Nelson's fiction both engages and haunts.

For this work, among many other honors, she has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Rea Award for the Short Story, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the "twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium" and by Granta as among the "best of the young American novelists."

Nelson was born in 1961 in Wichita, Kansas, and grew up there as the middle child of five siblings in an intellectually stimulating household. Both her parents were English professors, her mother also a writer, and family lore has it that Allen Ginsberg, in one of his poems, refers to a young Antonya sitting on his lap during a visit to her family's house.

Nelson was always a bookworm. Even in her earliest writing, she found she had a good phonic sense, and postulates that if someone had steered her toward poetry, she probably would have gone there. Instead, she found herself in a fiction writing workshop at the University of Kansas and realized that "this was where I feel the most comfortable, working with the malleable text, shaping it rather than criticizing it."

After earning her M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1986, her story "The Expendables" was selected by Raymond Carver as a first-prize winner for the journal American Fiction in 1988. A collection by the same title won the Flannery O'Connor Award and was published in 1990, followed by two more story collections, In the Land of Men (1992) and Family Terrorists (1994), the title story of which was a novella, paving her way to the longer form. She then published three novels, Talking in Bed (1996), Nobody's Girl (1998), and Living to Tell (2000), and returned to stories with Female Trouble (2002).

Despite the success and acclaim of all three novels, Nelson still feels most at home in the short story form. "The novel is daunting to me still. I still feel very much a beginner at it. I don't want to write a slack novel," she says. She finds validation in the fact that all three of her novels began as short stories—and resisted—proving that the scope of their content simply couldn't conform or be contained.

Since her publishing debut, there has been a steady drive forward, Nelson producing a new book nearly every two years. "I don't tolerate boredom well," Nelson says. "I have to constantly change things up—buy a new pet, repaint. I am always busy doing shit." In addition, Nelson owns up to a competitive streak—not against anyone in particular insomuch as she is challenged by a potential project itself. "I was a drag as a child, too critical, too perfectionist. It made me want to try to do things—and try to do them better."

In addition to writing, Nelson also teaches, dividing her time between New Mexico State University and the University of Houston, where she shares a chair with her husband, the writer Robert Boswell. She gets immense pleasure from teaching because, she says, it keeps her engaged with questions of writing and because she likes being around students. "They're funny and lively, and generally at a point of transition."

Her latest offering, Some Fun, is a collection of stories forthcoming in March 2006. The title refers to both a line from the John Prine song "Illegal Smile" and one at the end of the Flannery O'Connor story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," ironically layering the former's wry nothing-to-lose optimism with the latter's deranged and inevitable defeat—yet another instance of Nelson's harrowing wit and attentive brand of play.

Clearly, there is very little lost on Nelson; her attentiveness is palpable just being in her presence. She is nimble with chitchat and pop culture (as often evidenced in her comic dialogue), a good drinker and laughter, and you can feel her ease with the momentum of hanging out and storytelling with a group. Yet even in the throes of such social exuberance, her writerly eye is still at work. To view a group telling jokes through the lens of her keen psychological awareness is like watching stories almost write themselves. She says, "A lot of inspiration comes from noting the gesture or expression that's most often missed. The one that doesn't quite line up with what's happening in the moment. Often there is a story there."

More often than not, Nelson writes about families—big Midwestern families similar to the one in which she was raised, and similar to that which she heads up with Boswell (they have two children, Jade and Noah). Some of her stories grow out of fictional projections of actual dynamics—which makes having another writer in the family a relief. "Robert understands what fiction is and what it does to facts, so we have developed a certain necessary immunity." But Nelson can find inspiration for her stories and novels anywhere. She can recite details of the most tawdry tabloid dramas from memory, puzzling over the fictive shape a given salacious conflict could take—and searching for the place it intersects with her life. "I just have to find something—the smallest or largest aspect of the dilemma—that has to do with me."

In the stories from the forthcoming Some Fun, Nelson forges a rugged and acute exploration across a wide terrain of family, adultery, and unhinged youth. Whatever the particular contours she had in mind while writing, these stories seem to spread out from their central protagonists, the impact of any given action echoing to the very edges of a group, lending an empathic omniscience to even a third-person limited narrative, and most often rendering these complex characters as forgivable as they are forgiving. In "Dick," a woman ponders if her decision to move her family from Los Angeles is ultimately responsible for the disappearance of her young son's friend: "She feared that [her son] would utter her own suspicion, that it had been their departure that set events in motion. That in some skewed way she, Ann, was directly responsible for the boy's sorrow, for the reverberating despair of everyone who knew him."

While Nelson might claim that the short form engages with an individual while novels take on a community, in these stories she often manages to wrestle with and illuminate both at once. With her savvy, her prose, and her abundant empathy, there is surely no individual Nelson couldn't capture. Yet the effects one feels of these stories go beyond the individual, as if, in the writing, Nelson is moving outward from each character in concentric circles, mindful of that individual's bliss and torment—and of everything left in its wake.

Perhaps it's such an obsession with this scope that inspired her to take on the writing of another novel. Or perhaps she's just demonstrating that in the right hands, with the right shape in mind, what can be done with the two forms is not so very different after all.

Merrill Feitell is the author of the story collection Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, which won the 2004 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Best New American Voices, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel and a screenplay. Visit www.merrillfeitell.com.