English Professor Wins Top Writing Prize for Short Story Collection
Randy Nelson
|
11/22/2005
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
by Jonathan Crooms ' 04
Randy Nelson, Davidson's Virginia Lasater Irvin Professor of English, has received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for his short story collection, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men.
The award is regarded as one of the nation's most prestigious literary honors, and is presented each year to two book-length manuscripts chosen from a pool of more than 900 submissions. Past winners include Ha Jin, Gail Galloway Adams, Antonya Nelson, Peter Meinke, and Nancy Zafaris. It includes a $1,000 cash prize and a contract from the University of Georgia Press to publish the chosen works.
“Any association with Flannery O'Connor, no matter how distant, is an honor, and I am amazed and humbled by the talents of previous winners,” said Nelson. “I'm grateful to the judges and editors at the University of Georgia Press, but I'm also reminded at the same time of how many writers never get the recognition they deserve.”
The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men is a collection of stories that are thematically related, but not connected by plot or recurring characters. The “mechanical men” are people who have been disenfranchised, ignored, devalued, marginalized, demonized, or somehow left behind by contemporary culture. As they search for meaning, relevance, spirituality, and respect in their lives, they find that the absolute certainty of one reality fades into the doubts and dreams and threats of another.
Nelson said that this collection is a set of thought experiments about values in conflict. “I'm interested in stories, characters, and situations that ask the imagination to accommodate something bigger, further, deeper,” said Nelson. “Under the right circumstances, the human imagination can still find affirmation and spiritual triumph even in the unlikeliest of places.”
It is Nelson's first collection of short stories, though he has written many short stories, three books, and a number of journal articles. His most recent short story, “Breaker,” which explores the legal and moral issues surrounding the dangers of the ship breaking industry, is expected to appear this fall in the magazine Glimmer Train.
Professor Elizabeth Mills, chair of the English Department, said that Nelson makes places, people, and conflicts in his stories seem real through his attention to detail and imaginative reach. “When you read his stories, you find that same fine attention to craft that you recognize in the great American writers,” said Mills.
Born in Charlotte and raised in Mooresville, Nelson was initially interested in landscape architecture as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University. However, several English professors, particularly Allen “Big Al” Stein and Sidney Knowles, inspired him through their intellect and passion for literature to study writing. “I wanted to be able to think as fast, as well, and as imaginatively as they did,” said Nelson. “They demanded that their students find imaginative solutions to literary problems.”
Nelson earned a B.A. in English in 1970 and an M.A. in Restoration and 18th Century Literature in 1972 from North Carolina State University. He pursued further graduate study in American literature, earning an M.A. in 1975 and a Ph.D. in 1976 from Princeton University. Nelson wrote his dissertation on “Probing the Great Dark: Dream Features of Mark Twain's Late Works.”
“I was attracted to Twain's use of language and his imagination, which became increasingly creative as he grew older,” said Nelson. “A lot of writers will grow more conservative as they grow older, but Twain seemed to open up. I really thought that there was a gifted imagination at work there.”
Nelson taught in the English department of the University of Louisville for a year before joining the Davidson faculty in 1977. He teaches a variety of courses on American literature, including “The Art of Prose,” “Introduction to Literary Analysis,” “American Literature Surveys,” “Short Prose Fiction,” and “The American Novel.”
Nelson said that he loves teaching because of the opportunity to change lives and share his love of American literature. He said, “I hope that my students will take away an ability to recognize great literature and great thoughts when they see them, an attention to detail in their own thoughts, and a confidence that they can both formulate and solve interesting problems about literature.”
Although he has dedicated his career to literature, Nelson continues to nurture a passion for architecture. He enjoys reading Architectural Digest and Architectural Review, and following architectural competitions. He encourages writing students to embrace the architectural concept of the “elegant solution,” in which all available materials are used to create a simple, original solution to a problem. In his class on “Short Prose Fiction,” he has been known to assign students the task of building a bridge strong enough to hold the weight of a brick using only 250 toothpicks, a bottle of glue, and 36 inches of string.
Nelson's favorite writers are Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Steven Millhauser, and George Saunders. His favorite short stories include Millhauser's “The Knife Thrower,” Joyce Carol Oates's “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Margaret Atwood's “Death by Landscape.” He said, “One of the reasons that I admire some of these writers is that they pose literary problems for themselves, and then solve them in a way that is simple, beautiful, stunning, and original.”
In addition to the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Nelson received the Carson McCullers Award in 2000 for his short story, “Cutters,” which tells the tale of a girl who cuts herself with a piece of broken glass as she acts out a traumatic event in her past, and the Frank O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction in 2000 for his short story, “River Story,” which follows two white men who salvage and raid wrecked river barges on the Congo River in Africa.
During his upcoming spring semester sabbatical, Nelson will begin work on his second short story collection.
Nelson and his wife, Susan, reside in Davidson, and have three grown children, Miles, Ian, and Matthew.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its founding by Presbyterians in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine. Davidson has recently completed “Let Learning Be Cherished,” a $250 million campaign in support of student financial assistance, academic resources, and community life.
# # #
|
