Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306060207
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`You just hear all these voices in your head,` she finally admits. `And you can't shut them off. They wake you up at night. At a certain point, you just have to get them down on paper.`
She hasn't been capturing her chattering characters on paper for all that long: She's in her early 30s now and her first story was published when she was 25. But the characters she has captured are sharp and quirky enough to have won her this year's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
The seven stories in "Mother Rocket" (reviewed above) were "my body of work" when she entered the contest; although her first published story is not included and one she'd put in the manuscript has been deleted from the book.
Word of the prize came on Election Night. "It was about 7:30 and I hadn't been to vote yet," she says. "People kept calling to remind me to go to the polls. So when the phone rang, my husband answered, `She's on her way to vote right now!' And this Southern gentleman from the University of Georgia said, `Well, Ah don't think this is about votin'."
Ciresi was pretty excited. "You know those commercials on television for the Publishers' Clearinghouse where people scream and say, `I can't believe it! I can't believe it!' That's what I did."
She did make it to the polls. "But not until I'd screamed my head off."
Ciresi grew up in New Haven, CT, and attended New College in Sarasota, FL. She went on to Iowa's infamous writing program, but left Iowa for Penn State - an atmosphere she found less intimidating - where she finished her MFA in literature.
She worked for a few years as a science reporter at Penn State, while completing the stories in "Mother Rocket." The Flannery O'Connor Award, she says, is what enabled her to get the teaching position she's held at Hollins College since August.
"It's a great perk of winning the contest," she says. "I'd not be here, in academia, without a book to my credit." And academia, she says, is where most writers are "able to make a writing career."
She thinks contests are a short-story writer's "only venue into publishing" (she'd entered the O'Connor three times before winning); so now she's working on a novel.
Which she's found great fun. "With stories, there's all this fitful starting up and closing, starting up and closing. You can stick anything in a novel."
In hers, she says, she's exploring "how people react to their families, how they're influenced by their parents and by the cultural background that parents provide. It's fun, because I'm working on characters I know better."
For her, it's always the characters. "The characters and their voices are what drives my fiction," she says. "At least, I hope that's what it is." She greatly admires Philip Roth's work - "He has such a strong sense of people's foibles" - and Alice Munro's - "Such a sharp eye for motives! She's relentless."
But her parting advice to young writers, she says, "ought to be obvious. Although I really didn't realize, until a teacher told me: You have to work every day. There's no such thing as great bursts of inspiration. Writing every day, that's what gets the book written."
She's grateful to that teacher, whoever it was.
by CNB