An Interview with Antonya Nelson

AN INTERVIEW WITH ANTONYA NELSON ANTONYA NELSON Antonya Nelson is the author of three short story-collections, The Expendables (a Flannery O'Connor Award winner), In the Land ofMen and Family Terrorists. Her first novel, Talking in Bed, won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award for fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was her second novel, Nobody's Girl. Living to Tell, her most recent novel, was published in 2000. Ms. Nelson teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico and the Warren Wilson MFA program. She divides her time between Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Telluride, Colorado, with her husband, the writer Robert Boswell, and their two children. Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais interviewed her in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on February 12, 2000. An Interview with Antonya Nelson/Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais Interviewen You've been called a master of the domestic drama because most of your work focuses on problems anchored in the family: adultery , illness, anxiety. Why have you, throughout your career, tended to explore family situations? Nelson: Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty. In my life, as is the case with many people I know, the most uncertain things are relationships with those I'm close to. I have family members in the small nuclear unit, as well as the larger unit, toward whom I have a great deal of affection, and there are others toward whom I have tremendous antipathy. It's typical in family situations to be forced into contact repeatedly with people you don't particularly like. You work out your future social abilities and relationships based on what you learn when you are young. For me, these relationships have always been familial. 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. Interviewer: How is this related to the family as our main battleground, as you've called it? Nelson: People question this subject matter because young workshop writers often write about their families and homes. This is because the family is where they've experienced conflict. American kids aren't being recruited into guerrilla armies at the age of thirteen. In some other countries, drama exists elsewhere, outside the house. Most often in America, the trouble seems to come from within the household. The Missouri Review · 67 Interviewen In what way have you been called upon to defend your work on a specific level—as a woman writer, for instance? Nelson: There are plenty of men who write about family, but when I'm asked to explain what I do, it often seems there's some implicit suggestion that novels or stories that tackle political or societal drama are more serious. It's not necessarily that the treatment of characters in these works is a masculine one. It's just that the terrain outside the home is considered more important. I don't think it is. Interviewer. Much of your fiction is written in third person. Of the first-person stories, many are told from a male point of view. Nelson: Even in third person, I feel close to a male point of view. Most of the time, the narrator in my first-person-male stories is in a state of confusion about his relationship with a woman. It's not often that I write in the first person, but inhabiting the third-person point of view of a man doesn't seem to me strikingly difficult. People occasionally say, "That must be quite a challenge, to write from the other gender's point of view." I think there are larger challenges that have to do with class or age. Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways...