Marilyn Nelson
Lutheran connection: raised at First English Lutheran Church, Sacramento, Calif.; first full-time job was with Lutheran Campus Ministry; served on the hymn text committee for the Lutheran Book of Worship; taught at St. Olaf College, North- field, Minn.
Genre: Poetry, young adult books. Titles: Twelve books, most recently The Freedom Busi- ness: Including a Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa (Front Street Press; 2008) and Snook Alone (Candlewick, 2010). Bio: Nelson is professor emerita of English at the Uni-
versity of Connecti- cut, Storrs;
founder
and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony; and former poet laureate of Connecticut.
I read some- thing years ago that said if you look at a poet’s first book you will find the themes that will occupy
her for the rest of her career. In my first book there was a section about roots and family background and a section about spirituality and spiri- tual questioning. I was writing about being black, about how to negotiate an African-American identity in the 20th century, and I was writing about being a woman and trying to negoti- ate that identity. And I was writing about being a human being in the universe and asking: What are we? What does it mean to be alive? What is required of us? I think those issues have remained my issues ever since. I’m really interested in history. I
like learning something as I write. I like teaching something through my work.
I am not much interested in writ- ing about my own personal life, and I discover more and more that I am not much interested in reading about other people’s personal lives. “I got up this morning and had rye toast with Cheez Whiz and thought about life”—I’m not interested. I don’t want people to come away from my work knowing about Marilyn Nelson. I want them to know about something bigger, more important.
David Oppegaard
Lutheran connection: Graduate of St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn. Genre: Science fiction. Titles: The Suicide Collectors (St. Mar- tin’s Press, 2008), a Bram Stoker Award nominee; Wormwood, Nevada (St. Martin’s
Press, 2009). Bio: Oppegaard lives and writes in St. Paul, Minn.
The wonderful thing about science
fiction is that it allows you to play in strange terrain and gives you space to flesh out one big idea—like, what if the majority of Earth’s population decided, individually, to just give up the struggle of living and pass away? When I started writing The Suicide Collectors, 9/11 was still a recent event and the world ending didn’t seem to be such a farfetched idea, and I just wanted to come up with a fresh take on it.
My second novel, Wormwood,
Nevada, fed off The Suicide Col- lectors’ dark energy but ended up a wholly different beast, like a strange flower emerging from radioactive soil. Since the two books have come out, however, I’ve moved on from the end of the world and have started concentrating more on the darkness and light inside individual souls, and how these battles play out in the “real” world.
For someone with reclusive incli- nations, I sure seem to be fascinated by people—the more messed up the better.
Philip Bryant
Lutheran connection: Graduate of and now English professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minn. “I call myself a naturalized Lutheran, by marriage,” he said. As a student at Gustavus, Bryant met a generation of Lutheran writers who
influenced his poetry. Genre: Poetry. Titles: Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse (Blueroad Press, 2009) and Sermon on a Perfect Spring Day (New Rivers Press, 1998).
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