The Writer Profile Project Acquires the Accomplished Bonnie ZoBell
(reprinted from: Kelly Spitzer)
Bonnie ZoBell has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She’s held residencies at Yaddo, McDowell, and other colonies, and currently teaches at a community college in San Diego, where she is the Creative Writing Coordinator. She’s the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Her story “This Time of Night” was selected for inclusion in American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in such print journals as The Bellingham Review, The Greensboro Review, and Cosmopolitan, and online in such zines as juked, Boston Literary Magazine, and Word Riot.
How did you find out you’d won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing? At what point in your writing career did you win this award?
That was a wild evening! I came home from teaching night school, and my then-husband said that the National Endowment of the Arts had called. Right. He wasn’t a writer and mentioned this rather off-handedly, not understanding the implications. I put all my book bags down and tried to rationalize why they could have called. True, I had applied every year for years just on general principle. But there was no way I could have won. I tried to remember whether I had applied that year. What had I sent?
Nah. Probably the NEA was looking for donations, like all literary ventures have to. I casually told my husband that the NEA gave huge fellowships, but that it was probably nothing.
Still, I’d never heard of the NEA calling people and asking for donations.
In the morning when I returned the call, the nice man on the phone told me I’d won a fellowship! $20,000! It really did take some hours for it to truly soak in. Coincidentally, I’d just been approved for a one-semester sabbatical for the following semester from the community college where I teach. With this grant, I was able to take the entire year off and write and go to writing colonies and things I generally never have time to do. My then-husband turned out to be pretty generous about helping with the bills, too.
I’d been writing for about ten years, so it was the perfect time. I was in the middle of projects and had lots of ideas, but absolutely no time. In California when you teach at a community college you teach five classes a semester, which is a lot of classes. The NEA really was wonderful in terms of writing time.
This was actually the same story, the NEA story. But the story was rejected 47 times before I won the NEA Fellowship for it, so I was thrilled to finally get the darn thing published in this anthology! I never got to meet or correspond with JCO, but I was duly honored.
Your novel “Bird Songs and Animal Voices” won first place in the Capricorn Novel Award. What does this award bestow upon the winner? Can you tell us about the novel and its current status?
There again, I’d submitted to the contest and then sort of forgotten about it. Apparently about two years had gone by, and I received either a phone call or a letter from The Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York saying that I’d won and that I would receive a check. There I was teaching my evening fiction workshop, and since I was excited about winning, I told the class. One of the men in the class said, “Oh you’re who won.” He knew more of the facts than I did and had been checking regularly on the contest. Apparently the contest had gone defunct and hadn’t been judged when it was supposed to be and now they were trying to make good on it. Long story short, I did get some money out of it, but I didn’t get the all-expense paid trip to NYC where I would have a reading at the Y and be introduced to important New York literary agents. From what I see online, though, the contest may have started back up again.
I thought getting the novel published would be a cinch after winning that contest, but despite some near misses and getting some excerpts of it published as stories, it’s never been picked up. This summer at the Tin House Writing Workshop I’m going to have a mentorship with the novelist Jon Raymond. I’m exciting he’s going to read and critique this book. I’m considering breaking it down into stories.
“Bird Songs and Animal Voices” is an unusual love story about a girl, Caitlin, who has some unwanted intuitive powers and a boy, Joe, for whom she sees danger in his future. Del Mar, California, is the Eden-like setting and takes on a character of its own, especially since it was still rural in the 1980s, when the novel begins.
Caitlin is able to communicate with animals, though she wishes she couldn’t, and is therefore ostracized by the rest of the kids and called Dog Girl. Joe, on the other hand, is popular, his family as redneck and backwoods as many others in the area at the time. The two grow up and discover two weeks after they marry in the 80s that he is HIV positive. He insists on keeping it a secret because he’s Catholic and ashamed, not to mention that this was a time when people thought you could get AIDS off toilet seats. Caitlin is able to communicate with him better than anyone else partly because she’s been ostracized all her life and partly because of her intuitive abilities. Joe’s compulsive gambling spirals out of control because it helps him escape his disease. Caitlin, deeply alone because of his addiction and shame, has an affair, and Joe catches her. Somehow they are able to find a way to live together with the disease even though at this point in history he would be expected to die at any time.
You recently completed a second novel, titled “Bearded Women.” This manuscript was a semifinalist in the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and an Honorable Mention in the Heekin Group Foundation’s Novels-in-Progress Contest. How did you find out about these contests, as well as the Capricorn Novel Award? What are the benefits of entering novel contests?
Honey, there are two other novels on the top shelf of my closet that we’re not even talking about. Let’s not start counting how many.
I hear about contests the way most people do—through the announcements in Poets & Writers and the AWP Chronicle. I think there are a lot of benefits to entering novel contests. Some of them are only for people who have never published a book, so it’s a chance for someone new. Some don’t include publication, and winning should help you get a book published (at least so you’d think ; ) For others, even if the publisher isn’t huge, you get a lot of notoriety for having won the contest, so more people are apt to buy it than, say, if it was at the bottom of the list of a big house that wasn’t putting any money into publicizing your book because they have a Newt Gingrich book to push.
What is “Bearded Women” about? What are you working on now?
I’m still rewriting “Bearded Women,” though I’ve “finished” it quite a few times.
Here’s my three, er, five-line pitch: “Bearded Women” is a quirky love triangle with dark humor balancing serious psychological issues, in the vein of THE GIANT’S HOUSE by Elizabeth McCracken. Holly, severely depressed, meets Evalene, a free-spirited and eccentric electrologist. The women fall in love with the same man, who is dangerously like Holly’s father, and they have a huge falling out. Over¬whelmed, Evalene is in a devastating car accident and smashes her leg, and Holly is finally hospitalized for depression. In the end, Evalene drags Holly into a revival meeting where both are “healed.”
This summer I’m also trying to pull all my short stories together for a collection. I’m rewriting and polishing not only new stories and stories I never got published in the past, but even old published stories since I see so many flaws in them now, and my writing has changed so much.
Tell us about the story that won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and was later read on NPR. Also, since I couldn’t find much information about this award, can you give us the scoop?
“The Palomar Account” is a short-short based on twin women in their eighties who used to come into the San Francisco I. Magnin department store when I worked there. The women dressed identically, wore very expensive clothes and furs, and had exact replicas of lap dogs. They fascinated me for two reasons. First, what their background could have been that allowed them to bring their dogs in when no one else could. And also how they could get to be that age and still pretend to be exactly alike. I wanted to explore what it was they had to give up to maintain this level of alikeness.
The reason you haven’t heard about this award, dear Kelly, is because you’re such a youngster. The PEN Syndicated Fiction Award ran for at least a decade, and I think it ended in the early 2000s. Far more illustrious writers than I won them. Here are some I just found Googling: Maura Stanton, Rick Bass, David Shields, Lydia Davis, Lee Smith, Julia Alvarez, Meredith Sue Willis, and Jack Driscoll (he won five!).
This was a contest that was run by PEN for short-shorts. More than one person won them at a time, and if your story got an award, PEN would syndicate it to all different newspapers and magazines across the U.S. It was a nice program for writers because the periodicals had to pay at least a little something to the author to be part of the program.
Some of these stories were then given a dramatic reading on NPR’s “The Sound of Writing” by actors. It was fun to hear my story by an animated professional actor.
I see on the PEN American Center’s site that these fiction awards are now called The Sound of Writing awards and are no longer administered by PEN. An address in Washington, D.C. is given if you want to find out more about it.
You have an MFA from Columbia. What was the most important thing you learned while studying there?
Yikes, that’s a hard one. There are craft things I learned while in the program, but maybe equally important life and publishing things I learned since I’d never been east of Utah before going to Columbia.
I learned all about important craft and technique, which I desperately needed to learn. I feel strongly that you have to thoroughly learn these rules before you can break them, which I do with pleasure these days. I also finally got some good constructive criticism on my work from working writers and publishers who lived and worked in NYC. I had part-time jobs in publishing when I lived there and learned a lot that way. I think my writing and reading sensibilities were strengthened and made more sophisticated.
But I have to tell you that just living in NY was an enormous learning curve for me. I arrived at night in a cab to the graduate dorms. I’m not sure I’d ever been in a cab before. Mind you, not only was I coming from San Diego, but I was coming from Ocean Beach in San Diego—a very beachy enclave where your entire wardrobe could consist of a few pairs of cut offs and tank tops. When I looked out the window of my graduate dorm the next morning, I saw that every single student was wearing a suit. At that moment, I realized that I would not be able to attend Columbia after all because I didn’t own any suits and couldn’t afford to buy any. Finally someone on my floor explained to me that that was the law school I was looking at, not Columbia itself, and the law students had a tendency to dress like that, especially if they were being recruited by law firms.
With tremendous relief that I would still be able to attend the university I’d traveled so far for, I dressed in my jeans, took the elevator down from the 11th floor of my dorm (!), and was just about out the front door when the doorman (whoever heard of living in a place with a doorman?) stopped me and told me I really should go put some shoes on. In retrospect, he was right—shoes are fairly necessary in New York—though I thought he was a little bossy at the time.
I loved Columbia because it was so stimulating to be in a big place full of serious writers after leaving San Diego, when there weren’t many at the time. There were some people in the workshop—like any other workshop—who hated it and left. But I was enthralled.
Maybe another thing I learned to do was to aspire to a life in which writing was a major component.
You’ve held residencies at quite a few writing colonies. Which have you been to? Tell us a bit about your experiences there. How do they compare?
I’ve had fellowships at Villa Montalvo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, Yaddo, and MacDowell. All are wonderful in that you get some uninterrupted writing time, though I will say that to have that free month or so, you spend at least that much time preparing to be gone that long—what you’re going to do about bills, animals, your antidepressants, and so on. I haven’t been to any of them in some years—it gets a little harder when you have a mortgage. So some details may have changed since I was there. All but Montalvo prepared dinner for the residents. Most also offered breakfast. A few actually dropped off lunch in a picnic basket at the door of your studio so as not to disturb your work. (Whoever heard of such a thing?) I remember at Yaddo there was the chattery breakfast table for those who liked to talk in the morning and the silent breakfast table for those who didn’t want to interrupt their subconscious dream state before writing and therefore did not want to talk.
I loved meeting not only writers from different parts of the country and world, but also meeting different types of artists, musicians, painters and the like, who I don’t run into very much in my regular life.
Maybe MacDowell was my favorite. New Hampshire is such a different place to live than San Diego. I enjoyed getting to stay there a month and seeing what it was like. I loved all the rustic little cabins the writers got to work in. Leonard Bernstein completed his Mass in my studio. Then there were always funny stories about famous writers of yore who’d been particularly inebriated and taken a sled down the elegant stairway at the Yaddo mansion, had affairs, or rearranged art on the walls at MacDowell. Most of the rooms had a place to carve your name into the wall where you could see everyone who’d stayed in that room for decades.
You teach at a community college in San Diego, where you also hold the position of Creative Writing Coordinator. What does a Creative Writing Coordinator do? What do you like best about this job?
I do the scheduling for who gets to teach the creative writing classes at my school. However, we’re a friendly group and get together and make sure we’re fair about it since there aren’t that many creative writing classes to go around. I’ve written a lot of the curriculum for creative writing at my school, helped write up a Creative Writing Certificate of Completion students apply for, invited local writers into my classroom, researched other colleges to get ideas and expand our offerings, and so on. I also teach grammar, which I like quite a bit, and some composition.
Who is your favorite fictional character?
I honestly don’t think I can pick just one. I like Alice Hoffman’s characters a lot because most of them get to have at least a touch of magical power. Not only is this fun, but somehow Hoffman’s work isn’t fantasy but a kind of realism in which the characters use their minds more than we do and tap into powers I think more of us might have if we weren’t so steeped in reality and what we accept as possible. I like the magical reality Marquez gets into his characters for the same reason and Toni Morrison in some of hers.
I like it when I get to be particularly close to a character and really experience what another person goes through. Anne Tyler’s characters are normal middle class folk, yet we get to see the quirkiness inside. Raymond Carver’s genius blue-collar types seem like those people living in the apartment building down the street and you’re finally getting the real story about what’s up with them. I was so sorry that I wouldn’t get to meet up with Cal Stephanides daily anymore when I finished reading Middlesex that I could have quit my job and just listened to him forever. Dorothy Alison’s character Bone in Bastard Out of Carolina is so poignant and able to voice traumas others can’t without once getting whiney. I love the whole group of characters that inhabit one of my all-time favorite books, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. These are genetic abominations, albino hunchbacks, Siamese twins, Aqua Boy, born with flippers instead of limbs, carnival freaks all heartbreakingly human because of what they’ve had to endure in their lives.
I’m sure I’m forgetting other great characters, but I better stop.
