An Indiana Writer I Just Learned About

I was scoping out Nuvo since I have returned to Indiana and ran across The landlocked imagination: an interview with essayist and fiction writer Susan Neville. I never had heard of her and then reading this I wish I had and now want to track down at least one of her short stories:

I have a hard time using a word like “boring” to describe Susan Neville, who wrote over seven books, started one of the best visiting writers’ series in the country, and now has retired, after teaching at Butler University for 37 years. 

As one of her students, I’ve benefited tremendously from her autodidact-like mind and devotion to turning the lens toward her origins and community. Neville’s short stories and essays expand and reshape what it means to live in Indiana. Neville’s fiction borders on the fantastical, the spiritual, and even the violent, like in her short story, “Night Train,” about the murder of Madge Oberholtzer. 

Not that many know of how Madge Oberholtzer's death brought down D.C. Stephenson.

I have heard Philip Roth say much of the same thing during an interview on NPR's Fresh Air:

TAYLOR LEWANDOWSKI: In “The Apprenticeship of Flannery O’Connor,” you talk about how a “student in any workshop or an artist in any studio learns: that everything has to be relearned,” what have you had to “relearn” over the years? 

SUSAN NEVILLE: God, everything. I’ve written three or four, if you include Indiana Winter story collections. And just last week, I was asking myself, “What is a story? How does it work? Why is this really a story?” There are certain things, like dialogue, but you’re constantly doing something differently and filtering new things, so I’ve had to relearn what a story is, what an essay is. Telling and not showing. You always tell yourself, “Go to the scene,” and you also have to tell yourself, “You don’t always have to go to the scene.” Look at Poe’s stories that are like essays written by crazy characters. It’s about finding the best way for the character to speak their truth. I’m constantly relearning everything that I thought I knew and when I teach, anything I say. There are so many exceptions, so many ways you can do it. You’re always trying to discover something.

And now I find more unknown Indiana writers:

 LEWANDOWSKI: You quote Marguerite Young in your interview, “Where the Landscape Moved like Waves”, “All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.” Marguerite Young works “in the realm of the surreal; the illogical is logic.” How does Young inform your own writing? 

NEVILLE: It’s funny because over the last few weeks I’ve been typing up my notes I have from when I interviewed her. Maybe I said part of this in the essay, but I discovered she even existed when I was living in Champaign-Urbana and was reading Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin. Nin had written a book called The Future of the Novel, which was mostly about Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and I thought, “What? This person is from Indianapolis? She went to Shortridge High School, not only that, but she also went to Butler?” So weird. 

This was before Google, so I tracked her down from an article in the Village Voice then contacted her publisher or the journalist who did the piece. And somehow from detective work, which I can’t remember how that happened, I found out she came home, because her doctor told her if she stayed in New York, she would die. So, she came home to stay with her niece who lived close to Butler, not Butler-Tarkington, but off Cold Springs Rd. She was so excited to have somebody visit her and ask questions, so she’d go on and on. 

It was kind of amazing. The only writer from Indianapolis I ever heard of was Booth Tarkington and [James Whitcomb] Riley, then was ecstatic to find out Vonnegut was from here, and there were these incredible women, who no one ever talked about. Marguerite Young, foremost among them, but also Janet Flanner, who wrote in The New Yorker as Genet, and Margaret Anderson, who founded the Little Review, that was the first publisher of James Joyce, and a really good poet named Jean Garrigue, who was actually from the Evansville area and a good friend of Marguerite Young’s. She was amazing and the sad thing, so many sad things. Marguerite Young was such an important writer and one of those important writers no one reads ...  At her funeral there were only nine people. The front row were her life-sized dolls. She was so brilliant, as was Jean Garrigue. 

There is much more, so go read the whole of the interview. If you are living in Indiana and wanting to be  a writer, then you must read this. One of the many things that kept me from writing for decades was the belief that Indiana did no longer produced writers, that there was nothing about Indiana that could produce writers. What I learned in prison was that is not so. There are stories here to be told. We can even tell them without going to prison (not a good career move, I can assure you of that.)

NEVILLE: Well, I hope so … I want to take back what I said about Indiana being interesting to people from Indiana, because I think it’s the opposite. You get really excited about all these layers, this sediment, of history and place. Most of those stories are buried in the sediment, so it’s wonderful when somebody says I’m here, this is my place, and dig into it and try and figure it out, because right now I have on my desk Marguerite Young and for different reasons I have Kenneth Rexroth’s autobiographical novel. He was a great poet, born in Indiana. And all the weird, crazy, wonderful stories. When Carlos Fuentes came to Indiana, he was fascinated with the John Dillinger Museum and all this weird great stuff you have here. You look at it suddenly with different eyes and it’s fascinating. We don’t see it, because we tend not to respect ourselves and say, “Aw, shucks, Hoosiers!”