McCABE, Nancy 1962-

PERSONAL:

Born November 10, 1962, in Wichita, KS; daughter of Bill (an electrical engineer) and Lucille (a teacher) McCabe; children: Sophie. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Wichita State University, B.A., 1984; University of Arkansas, M.F.A., 1989; University of Nebraska, Ph.D., 1995. Politics: Democrat.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Bradford, PA. Office—University of Pittsburgh, 300 Campus Dr., Bradford, PA 16701. E-mail—ngm4@pitt.edu.

CAREER:

Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, instructor in English, 1989-92; University of Nebraska, Lincoln, instructor in English, 1992-96; Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC, assistant professor of English, 1996-2001; University of Pittsburgh, Bradford, PA, director of writing program, 2001—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pushcart Prize, 2000; two awards from Prairie Schooner.

WRITINGS:

Making Poems: Writing Exercises for the Classroom, Arkansas Writers in the Schools (Fayetteville, AR), 1988.

After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening, Purdue University Press (West Lafayette, IN), 2003.

Meeting Sophie: A Memoir of Adoption, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 2003.

Work represented in anthologies, including Best American Essays, 1998, and 1999.

SIDELIGHTS:

Nancy McCabe told CA: "As a child, I was an avid reader who thought in stories and was fascinated with words, and writing was a natural extension of that—a kind of play. Although I write seriously and, as a single parent with a full-time teaching job, require a great deal of organization and discipline to get any writing done, my best process retains that sense of fun, that spirit of play.

"I studied fiction writing in college and always read and wrote poetry, but no form really clicked for me until I decided that I was, at heart, a novelist. After writing three unpublished novels, I started reading creative nonfiction and remembered something I'd once heard writer Tobias Woolf say—that he wrote fiction when he needed to dramatize reality, but nonfiction when reality was dramatic enough. At the time, much of the material I was trying to write was based very closely on extremely dramatic events in my own life, and recasting them as fiction was inadvertently draining them of their inherent drama. When I tried memoir, the form clicked.

"I still voraciously read novels and am working on one, but I'm also in love with creative nonfiction. I know I need to write fiction when I'm dying to just tell a story that necessitates making stuff up. My fiction starts with situations and conflicts, human behavior and interaction that can't be easily summarized or encapsulated. My nonfiction tends to start, instead, with questions I need to find answers to through exploring my own stories, or the experiences of others, in my own voice. The answers are often complicated, difficult ones, but in creative nonfiction there's a little more room to discuss and comment in the process of trying to make sense of my world."