susan neville

Selected Works

Magazine article

Mystic vs. Maniac
The mystic vs. the maniac: every day atrocities are committed in the name of faith. But as Susan Neville reminds us, it's possible to distinguish between the fires of fanaticism and the abiding glow of our better angels. Oprah Magazine: May 2007

Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land
Calling on the image of the Midwest's vanished inland sea, this collection of essays ponders the writing process and the "landlocked imagination."

Creative nonfiction

Iconography: A Writer's Meditation
Memoir and meditation on writing

Indiana Winter
"Susan Neville is defining the emerging genre of the new nonfiction. The stories she has to tell in Indiana Winter are tales of great emotion and stunning insight."--Michael Martone

FABRICATION: ESSAYS ON MAKING THINGS AND MAKING MEANING
We are a nation of consumers. In this meditation of manufacture, Susan Neville journeys to factories in the heart of the midwest, looking for the sources of things.

Short Fiction

Invention of Flight
Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

IN THE HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS
"Susan Neville's language shimmers like light coming through colored glass, and her subtle words uncovered the inarticulate longings that burn the hearts of the most ordinary citizens. Susan Neville is one of the finest short story writers in the country." Maura Stanton

Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land

May be ordered through Indiana University Press.

Sailing the Inland Sea invites us to explore the possibilities the Midwestern landscape offers to writers--its sacred spaces, its rivers, even its weather. Interspersed with personal narrative and meditations on the craft of writing are Neville's interviews with such luminous Indiana writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Scott Russell Sanders, and Marguerite Young, as well as conversations with such literary giants as Salman Rushdie, Ray Bradbury, and Toni Morrison.

Sunrise in New Harmony, Indiana. St. Francis stands on a brick pedestal by a blue-black/olive pond, and he flings his birds toward the sky in salutation. He's made of iron, but his robes seem to flow like water. And those birds! They're arranged in an arc above his head as they're they're both separate and at the same time originating from the saint's loving hands, or rather, like the saint is a Samurai juggling two dozen miniature swords that have transformed and taken flight. The real geese along the pond, this day, have all gone mad.

St Francis in New Harmony, Indiana

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