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An Interview with Kent Nelson
- The Missouri Review
- University of Missouri
- Volume 11, Number 1, 1988
- pp. 107-132
- 10.1353/mis.1988.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
AN INTERVIEW WITH KENT NELSON Kent Nelson An Interview with Kent Nelson / Susan Emrick Robertson A vigorous man in his early forties, Kent Nelson has an easy manner and a ready smile. He is thoughtful and forthright, a man of considered opinions. He is also a prolific and gifted writer, the author of The Tennis Player, a collection of short stories, Cold Wind River, a novel, and over forty-five stories which have appeared in such magazines as Southern Review, North American Review, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Mademoiselle. Two of his stories have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories (fifteen others have received honorable mention either there or in Pushcart), and two have been selected for the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project. In addition, Kent's fiction has earned him an Emily Clark Balch Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and an Ingram Merrill grant. At the time of the interview, an afternoon in February 1986, Kent lived on a small farm just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the rolling Georgia hills. He worked in a back room. His desk, a make-shift affair of brick and board, faced an uncurtained window. Piles of manuscripts, some loose, others bulging from boxes, dog-eared magazines, books and notes cluttered every available surface including the floor. The one bookcase was over-full, rickety and ready to collapse. Kent was wearing Levis, frayed and faded almost white, a turtleneck, and a flannel shirt. As we talked, he sat before his IBM Selectric typewriter, swiveling in a turn-of-the-century oak desk chair, binoculars handy, his feet warm on a rubber heating pad. Kent now lives in a duplex apartment in Exeter, New Hampshire. He is a nationally ranked squash player and his life list includes 654 birds. In the bathroom he uses as an office, he is at work on a novel. Interviewer: I understand your formal education has been in political science and law. Nelson: Going to law school was a function of my parents, a way of living out their expectations. There was such momentum in the river that by the time I could get out to shore, I was already three years downstream. The Missouri Review · 209 Interviewer: When did you start writing? Nelson: I took a course my senior year at college called Daily Themes. It required a 300-word story every day for eight weeks. Forty of them. After two weeks I used up every idea I'd ever had, and there were six weeks to go, with thirty stories still to write. That's probably the best lesson to learn as a writer starting out. It isn't easy. It's walking pavement for five hours to get an idea and then trying to get it down in some kind of shape, day after day after day. You start looking through newspapers, you start seeing characters, you start putting together different dramatic situations, and gradually you're not as panicked. You start understanding what makes a story almost by instinct. You learn by doing it. I was fascinated by the process, but then I got into law school and was sidetracked. Interviewer: What happened then? Nelson: I developed a spinal tumor and almost died. That was a kind of liberation. It made me aware that under no circumstances should I live my life the way other people wanted me to. I saw so many people come to law school who wanted to be poets or writers or artists or photographers, but when they got out of law school they were lawyers. They weren't writers or artists or photographers anymore. The difference for me was that I'd spent those months in the hospital. I think that gave me the extra strength to jump over the edge. Interviewer: Did you pass a bar exam? Nelson: Yes, in Colorado. Interviewer: I bet that felt good. Nelson: Especially since I hadn't taken a review class. I took a week 210 · The Missouri Review Kent Nelson "I had read a hundred novels my last year in law school, a whole bunch when I was at the prison, and I just keep on reading at...