Our Lady Of The Prairie by Thisbe Nissen

This complex arrangement going on and me observing it. It was observing how my mother had orchestrated the placement of this dinner, like where people were sitting, where my father was, who could help him and his struggles through the meal, her flirting with some other man at the table. 1 Phoenix Garden.” It was a story rooted in a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York with my parents when my dad was in the earlier stages of the Parkinson’s that he had. It turned into the first piece of flash fiction I ever wrote or published which is called “At the No. The very first piece of flash fiction I ever wrote I actually wrote as a poem and then I realized that if I took out all the weird line breaks I’d imposed on it, it was just a short story and not a poem at all. I’m taking these family stories or observations of my parents that I wrote as fiction.

It's funny because right now I’m in the process of doing that backwards. So I don’t actually really remember anymore what I’ve made up and what I haven’t. I think over time I started to forget what actually happened and what was fiction that I added on to it. Thisbe Nissen: Very interesting…what is my process there? I feel like it’s always different, you know? I have often worked this way, starting with real things and then building them into other things and I think earlier on I was closer to the real events. The Fourth River: What is your process as you arrange real events and characters into fiction? I spoke with Thisbe Nissen in September of 2021 to discuss How Other People Make Love and her writing process which she compared to quilting, collaging and yoga. She currently teaches undergrad, MFA, and PhD students at Western Michigan University.

She has been the recipient of fellowships from the James Michener-Copernicus Society, The University of Iowa, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the MacDowell Colony.

Thisbe Nissen, the Chatham MFA Program 2021 Melanie Brown Lecturer, is the author of three novels, Our Lady of the Prairie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), Osprey Island (Knopf, 2004), The Good People of New York (Knopf, 2001), and two story collections, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night (University of Iowa Press, 1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award) and How Other People Make Love (Wayne State University Press, 2021).

Our Lady Of The Prairie by Thisbe Nissen