Paula Closson Buck
Photo by Rachel Clarke
Bio
Paula Closson Buck is the author of a novel, Summer on the Cold War Planet (Fomite 2015), and three books of poems from LSU Press, most recently You Cannot Shoot a Poem (2018). Her short stories and poems have appeared in such magazines as Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Review. She has been the recipient of individual artist grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and in 2013 she spent six months on a Fulbright in Cyprus, working on a collaborative project with two Cypriot visual artists. In addition to teaching at Bucknell University as professor of English, she has served as director of the Creative Writing Program, editor of the literary magazine West Branch, and director of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. She is currently finishing a second novel and at work on a collection of short stories.
I love the feeling of being a writer at large in the world. But when I got the news about the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, I didn’t plan my research trips and writing getaways for the next two years. I didn’t weigh the advantages of returning to places I’ve already written about—Cyprus, Venice, Greece, India, Berlin—against those of following my quixotic desire to new territories for my fiction.
Instead, in a bloom of government-sponsored creative energy, I began to tend to my writing. That night I made breakthrough revisions to my completed novel manuscript, which I’d started sending to agents. Feeling the superpower of validation, I excavated from my desk a dormant manuscript of short stories in progress. I reread the story that I stalled out on a year or so ago and vowed to finish it over the winter break. I laid out a timeline for writing the remaining stories in the collection over the next year or so—stories that will tackle ethical and environmental conundrums in a rapidly changing world.
The NEA means that I will be able to go wherever those stories take me—existentially and geographically. It has come at a moment when our expendable family income has shrunk, but more importantly, at a time when I very much needed to know that a handful of super sharp readers out there were reading and nodding their approval.