Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
November 15 LITM: Nina Schuyler
Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. Her novel, Afterword, won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary and the PenCraft Seasonal Book Award for Literary and Science Fiction. Her novel, The Translator, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. Her books How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal are bestsellers. Her short stories have been published by Zyzzyva, Fugue, Nashville Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Writing Salon.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Aggeliki Pelekidis: As a young girl, probably eleven or twelve years old, I checked out from the library the classics in BIG PRINT. These books were physically huge, or so it felt to me, though they were probably 8×10 ten inches, but it seemed like 24×24. I think they were published for older people who were losing their eyesight. I devoured Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, on and on. I read them all and forgot them, so later had to read them all again.
Recent favorites: Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter. What he can do with a sentence! I finally got around to reading The Moviegoer by Percy Walker. Walker writes psychologically deep characters with complicated, messy motivations. I’m going to read it again.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Pelekidis: I feel late to the game. I was an avid reader but utterly intimidated by the great writers. How could I possibly . . . I couldn’t. I started as a journalist and learned to write under pressure. I had no time to criticize my writing because the deadline was a knife. On the off hours, I started writing little made-up scenes in a notebook and discovered it immensely pleasurable, one of the most pleasurable things around. I refused to deny myself the pleasure of the imagination.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Pelekidis: In This Ravishing World is a short story collection, and it’s also novelesque. Nine interconnected stories, with dreamers, artists, activists, and escapists unfolding a kaleidoscopic view of the climate crisis. I also included the voice of Nature, leaping to inhabit what seems unhabitable. I hope the book speaks to the heart; I hope the book holds a compassionate mirror so readers can see themselves in the characters and Nature, too. I hope the reader feels something profound inside shift so they care deeply about our ravishing world. One more hope: this deep care moves the reader to act.
Rumpus: Is there a favorite Rumpus piece you’d like to recommend?
Pelekidis: I’m a big fan of Lidia Yuknavitch’s work so I loved the interview with her. I mean, listen to her:
“We live by and through the body, and the body is a walking contradiction. I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.”
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Author photograph by Bryan John Hendon
