Susan Neville was born on January
4, 1951, in Indianapolis,
to John Frederick, a businessman, and Patricia (Pointer),
a secretary. In 1973, she married Ken Neville. The year she
was married, she also received her B.A. from DePauw University.
In 1976, she earned an M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University.
Neville has been an instructor at several colleges, including
St. Petersburg Junior College (St. Petersburg, Florida), Ball
State University (Muncie,
Indiana), and IU—East (Richmond,
Indiana), before settling into her professorship in the English
department at Butler University in Indianapolis.
Neville’s work reveals,
and simultaneously celebrates, the history, despair, and sameness
involved in the lives of Indiana residents and those of Midwestern
people in general.
Neville begins
her book, Indiana Winter (1994),
with a preface in which she explains the origin of the short
stories she has written for this collection: “I wandered
through Indiana with a question that was very quirkily mine,
and which, for good or ill, drew certain types of images and
stories from the people and the landscape as though it were
magnetized” (xii). Although much of this book has to
do with winter's seasonal effect on fictional characters,
Neville does include some descriptions of the natural surroundings,
or in this case the natural underground, of Indiana:
My home is a harbor. It floats
on limestone high above the Ohio. Underneath our
feet, acids eat away the stone and there are underground
rivers and caves and, I swear it, if you were small enough
and didn't mind tight black places, darker than any dark
you could imagine, and you could crawl through slime and
rushing water through tunnels that could end with any step
in a cavern so deep you would never stop falling.... (1)
Neville explores
the effects of the Indiana landscape on fictional characters
in her later work In the House of Blue Lights
(1998), which won the Richard Sullivan Prize from the University
of Notre Dame. It too is a collection of short stories, many
of which are based on true events. As in Indiana Winter,
Neville focuses more heavily on descriptions of desolation
and solitude, rather than on environmental issues. However,
many of her stories, at one point or another, focus on an
element of Indiana's environment. For example, in the story
"The Increasing Distance," the narrator comments
on the effects of urban
sprawl and
deforestation in Indianapolis:
Just west of the new strip
mall is an entire neighborhood recently made from a golf
course which was recently made from the farmland which was
recently made from a forest
so dense it echoed the darkness of the sky when the carrier
pigeons made their northward migration. (149)
Neville’s
latest book, Fabrications: Essays on Making Things
and Making Meaning (2001), explores manufacturing
in Indiana. Neville also deals with the nostalgia
associated with pieces of Indiana's history that have been
replaced by something new. For example, in the short story
“Silo Dreams,” Neville describes the feelings
she faces when she learns that a silo she
had previously visited is now nonexistent, just one year later.
She discusses the “plans” for the silo’s
space:
The new plan for the area
centered around images that had no inherent connection with
Indiana’s past, but rather to its place in the future,
a future that would privilege fiber optics and virtual experiences,
and electronic connections between the park and the citizens
of Indiana. (206)
Neville thus draws connections and disconnections
between the historical and present landscape of Indiana. Here
and throughout the collection, she focuses on the way the
"constructed" or "manufactured" is counterpoint
to the natural world.
So it goes with much of Neville's
work, which often deals with the way the natural environment
fits into the historical landscape and the lives of Indiana's
people.
--NSS
Sources:
Neville, Susan. Fabrication: Essays
on Making Things and Making Meaning. San Francisco: MacMurry
& Beck, 2001.
---. Indiana Winter. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana UP, 1994.
---. In the House of Blue Lights.
Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1998.
---. Personal interview. 14 October
2002.
Image:
"Susan Neville." Author
Profile. Macadam/Cage Publishing, San Francisco. 22 Oct. 2002
<http://www.macadamcage.com/sitefiles/AuthorDetail_new.
asp?au_id=12>.
Links:
Interview
with Susan Neville
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