Happy Miscellany Monday! This week, two of our editors, Amanda Mosborg and Julia Johnston, interviewed Natalie Marsh, this year’s winner of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) 49th annual Nick Adams Short Story Contest. From Glencoe, Illinois, Natalie is scheduled to graduate from Carleton College this spring with a major in Religion and a minor in French. She is also a member of the Cross Country and Track & Field teams at Carleton. After her graduation, she plans to pursue a Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School and hopes to develop skills for community organizing in faith-based contexts.
Her story is called “Underwater, I am Weightless”
View a full list of the ACM contest winners.
Julia: What got you into creative writing in general?
Natalie: I’ve always loved writing in one form or another, but I always felt as if I couldn’t sit down to write a story, because of just the sustained effort that it takes, without having the structure of a creative writing workshop. Taking creative writing workshops at Carleton was an important part of starting to write. I had dabbled with creative writing before – writing poetry is something that I’ve always done to process the world around me. But I think that the format of fiction actually feels more intuitive to me as a writer, and I realized that when I began taking workshops at Carleton.
Julia: When did you first come up with the idea for this story?
Natalie: I wrote it for a fiction workshop that I took in the fall: Short Story Workshop with Greg Smith. The writing for it happened then, but the idea had been building up all of last year. When it came time to write it, it felt like it was already there. Throughout all of quarantine, I was thinking a lot about bodies, and changing relationships to bodies throughout that time. Obviously the story itself was set in a much different time period and a much different context, but I wanted to capture some feelings from this past year of quarantine, chronicling how your relationship to your body can shift in intense and sometimes scary ways.
Julia: What made you think that you wanted to tell the story through short, segmented chapters?
Natalie: I think that the format made sense to me because I wanted to focus on transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and it felt right to me to do little vignette pieces to capture what it’s like to move through that period of several years. So that’s why I settled on that style, but I also liked the idea of being able to convey specific scenes really vividly and have a sense of the progression, with the time period being longer.
Amanda: I have two questions. Why did you set your story in the 1970s, and why did who choose to make your protagonist a swimmer and not a runner? I know you are a runner yourself.
Natalie: I wanted to practice writing short stories in a way that felt more distant from myself. When I first started taking creative writing workshops at Carleton – and I think this was true for the people around me too – there’s a tendency to write pretty autobiographically. I am not convinced that that ever goes away, because I think you always write from your experience, to a certain extent. But I wanted to experiment with inhabiting the mind of someone who wasn’t quite me. I think that this story is really psychological in nature, and because it’s written in first person, it explores Lou’s inner word without it being me, journaling. Choosing a different time period and a relatively unfamiliar sport came with that. As a distance runner, obviously I can relate to the experience of a female endurance athlete, and this was important for the writing of the story. But I was also thinking about how things would have been different for Lou. By setting it in the 1970s, I was thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in a female body, and how it might have been different for me than it was for my mom. But also how it might be similar.
Amanda: I have a question about the contest in general: how did you hear about it, and what was the nuts and bolts process of it?
Natalie: That’s a really good question for me, because I actually tried to apply to this contest my sophomore year, and missed the deadline by around 5 hours. So knowing the nuts and bolts of the process is key! This year, I was familiar with the submission process. First I submitted my story to the Carleton English Department, along with any other interested students. Next, a handful of professors at Carleton decided on four stories to send to the ACM office. Then ACM chose 6 finalists (out of the 36 stories submitted) and one winner.
Amanda: You’re not an English major or a Creative Writing minor, and you’re going to divinity school, so do you see creative writing as a skill that you’re going to continue after Carleton, or do you think it’s limited to having that structure of a class?
Natalie: I definitely want to keep writing, and I think that with taking Creative Writing classes at Carleton, I’ve just barely started to learn about what it is to try to write a short story. So I think having seen the tip of the iceberg, it would be really cool to get plugged into some kind of structured creative writing class, because I don’t necessarily trust myself to write stories on my own in my free time. It’s also kind of my dream to get an MFA in creative writing, but one degree at a time. I think divinity school is a really interesting place to be a writer, or to be thinking about creative writing, because there are so many different types of people at divinity school, and definitely a lot of writers. The nexus between studying religion and creative writing is pretty interesting to me, so that’s something to explore in the future.
Amanda and Julia: Thank you for your insights, Natalie!