Creative writing alums cultivate conjoined creativity
CU Boulder alumni David Gessner and Nina de Gramont have succeeded both as authors and teachers
For a couple of writers who also happen to be a writing couple, David Gessner and Nina de Gramont admit theyâve got it pretty good.
Gessner (MA, Englâ98) is professor and chair of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and published nine books, including the New York Times bestseller .
De Gramontâwho began her masterâs degree in the University of Colorado Boulder creative writing program and completed it at UNCWâis an associate professor in the same department and has published eight works of fiction for both young adults and adults, including the novel .
âWe are lucky to be where we are,â says Gessner.
But the couple, who have also lived on Cape Codâthe subject of Gessnerâs highly praised âconfess a sneaking desire to return one day to their favorite place.
âBoulder is still our shining city on a hill, despite the real-estate prices,â Gessner says.
But for now, they are content to visit for a month each summer with their teenage daughter, Hadley (âYes,â de Gramont answers, anticipating a question before itâs asked, she was named primarily in honor of Ernest Hemingwayâs first wife, Hadley Richardson), where they relish riding their bikes up actual hills.
Gessner and de Gramont met in CUâs creative writing masterâs degree program in the 1990s. They acknowledge that the programâs somewhat experimental emphasis didnât quite match their own, more traditional narrative approaches, but they found their places nonetheless.
âI tend to be a very obedient student, so I started writing things that were really out there. It was helpful for me to have that, actually. When I returned to what came more naturally to me, I had a better grasp of how to use language and how to use form,â says de Gramont, who cites Marilyn Krisl and Suzanne Juhasz as influential faculty members.
âIt was sort of a mismatch for me, very experimental. (Program faculty) tended to turn their noses up at any whiff of narrative,â he says.
Gessner cites Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams and Philip Roth as early influences: âAbbey was one of my earliest models. I liked the way he could re-create his personality on the page. You canât wave hands or use voice to create that. Itâs an underrated ability.â
He gravitated toward three faculty members whose work focused more on place and nature, writers Reg Saner and Linda Hogan and English professor Marty Bickman. He also reveled in his life in Boulderâand publishing a cheeky comic strip, âThe Ballad of Boulder,â in the Boulder Weeklyâin the wake of recovery from testicular cancer. Gessnerâs early memoir, , explores his new life in the West, what Stegner called, âthe geography of hope.â
Abbey was one of my earliest models. I liked the way he could re-create his personality on the page. You canât wave hands or use voice to create that. Itâs an underrated ability.â
âIt was about my awakening and coming back to health, having time to write in a stunningly beautiful place, Eldorado Springs,â Gessner says. He knocked the book out in a month and a half, setting a pattern for future writing projects. âI build, build, build, then blast them out.â
With the pending publication of A Wild, Rank Place in 1997, Gessner decided that âit wouldnât do for a Cape Cod nature writer to be living in Colorado,â and the couple moved to his motherâs empty house on the Cape.
âThat was both a romantic time and a crazy-making time. People think Cape Cod is all about Kennedys and rich folk, but in February, itâs more like the Arctic,â Gessner says. âFor us, it was a great and fruitful writing period.â
De Gramont sold her first book while living on Cape Cod, the short-story collection , winner of the Discovery Award from the New England Booksellers Association. Gessner, meanwhile, was writing , judged a âclassic of American nature writingâ by the Boston Globe.
Gessner also began commuting two hours to teach in the extension and summer writing programs at his alma mater, Harvard, where he would later create the schoolâs creative nonfiction writing program. When he was named to a Briggs-Copeland Lectureship at Harvard, the couple moved to Cambridge, taking up residence in the apartment of the late Irish playwright and poet Seamus Heaney and welcoming Hadley to the family.
In 2002, following the success of Return of the Osprey, UNCW invited Gessner to interview for a job in its Creative Writing Department. He got the job, and the couple has lived there ever since.
âWeâre always angsting a little bit, âWhy arenât we out West? Why arenât we up North?ââ Gessner says. âBut we have two really good jobs in the same program. This is where our daughter grew up. And my writing has grown being hereâthe fact that Iâm not writing book after book on âI love this placeâ; Iâm not trying to write âWaldenâ three times in a row about Boulder and Cape Cod.â
De Gramont recently submitted a new novel to her agent, and Gessner is working on a book entwining the stories of Theodore Roosevelt and Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. In 1906, Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act, which gives presidents the authority to create national monuments on federal lands to protect significant natural, cultural or scientific features. Bears Ears has become a political battleground between factions that want to either preserve or exploit natural landscapes
âI spent basically two months out there in Bears Ears this summer to experience it,â says Gessner, who also blogs at Bill and Daveâs Cocktail Hour. âThe book will be a history of the Antiquities Act woven together with the biography of a very charismaticâand potentially racist toward Native Americansâpresident. ⊠I want to bring readers to the subjects through the prism of my own, more limited self, getting to the bigger issues through a human conduit.â