Spencer, Brent 1952-

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SPENCER, Brent 1952-

PERSONAL:

Born September 23, 1952, in Bethesda, MD; son of Robert Cornelius (a commander in the U.S. Navy) and Patricia (a sewing machine operator; maiden name, Pittman) Spencer; children: Nora Anne. Education: Wilkes College, B.A., 1974; University of Michigan, M.A., 1975; Pennsylvania State University, Ph.D., 1982; University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, M.F.A., 1984. Politics: "Liberal Democrat." Hobbies and other interests: Reading, film, travel.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Omaha, NE. Office—Department of English, Creighton University, 2500 California Plaza, Omaha, NE 68178. Agent—Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing, 1988-91; Creighton University, director of creative writing, 1992-96, associate professor of English, 1997—, codirector of graduate program in English, Creighton University Press, editor, 1994—, Creighton House, resident director. Worked as a farm worker, truck driver, day laborer, construction worker, and a false-twist operator; also taught at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, and elsewhere.

MEMBER:

Associated Writing Programs (board member, secretary), National Organization for Women.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pushcart Prize nomination, 1979, 1992; research grant, Pennsylvania State University, 1979-80; James Michener Award, University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, 1984-85, for The Lost Son; Wallace Stegner fellowship, Stanford University, 1987-88; special mention, Pushcart Prize, 1993; summer research fellowship, Creighton University, 1994; individual artist fellowship, Nebraska Arts Council, 1995; Editor's Choice Award, Atlantic Monthly, for the short story "The Small Things that Save Us"; Artist's Fellowship, Nebraska Arts Council, 1995; Are We Not Men? chosen as one of best books of 1996 by editors of The Village Voice; U.S. West fellowship, Creighton University, summer, 1997; artist in residence, Yaddo Artists Colony, February-March, 2000; fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony.

WRITINGS:

The Lost Son (novel), Arcade Publishing (New York, NY), 1995.

Are We Not Men? (stories), Arcade Publishing (New York, NY), 1996.

Contributor of short stories to the Atlantic Monthly, Missouri Review, Poet & Critic, Epoch, GQ, American Literary Review, and the Antioch Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Borderline: Life on the Edge of America, a nonfiction book about the U.S.-Mexico border; All I Ever Wanted, a collection of short stories; Rattlesnake Daddy, a novel.

SIDELIGHTS:

In some ways Brent Spencer's own life paralleled the hardscrabble life of the characters depicted in his 1995 debut novel, The Lost Son.Spencer, head of the creative writing program at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, grew up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. This coal-mining community, Spencer explained in press material released at the time of his novel's publication, had seemingly never mended from the ravages of the Great Depression and was populated by realists unable to temper their world view with any optimism. Spencer was raised in a single-parent household after his Navy commander father abandoned the family, and the young writer himself left home after high school, becoming the first in his family to attend college. After receiving a B.A. from Wilkes College in 1974, he attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a master's degree, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Penn State in 1982. In between these academic pursuits, Spencer worked at a number of physically demanding jobs, including unloading trucks and running a farm much like the one he depicts in The Lost Son.

In 1982 a friend dared Spencer to apply for a spot at the prestigious writers' workshop at the University of Iowa, and he spent the next two years there, working toward an M.F.A. He honed his writing skills, enjoying the single-mindedness of purpose demanded—and frank feedback provided—by the workshop's often eminent roster of instructors. Spencer became a contributor of short stories to such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and the American Literary Review, and he also taught creative writing at Stanford University before accepting the position at Creighton. The Lost Son was his first novel and garnered positive reviews. It is the story of a dysfunctional makeshift family comprised of Nick, a sixteen-year-old; his mother, Ellen, a woman with a weakness for alcohol and abusive men; and Lloyd Redmond, with whom Ellen has had a turbulent twelve-year relationship.

The Lost Son begins with Nick and Redmond living in mutual animosity on a tenant farm in rural Pennsylvania. Ellen has fled town after a particularly violent row with Redmond, and the teenage Nick and his mother's ex-lover have been left to fend for themselves. Repairing a fence on the property, Redmond is accidentally electrocuted—but not fatally—when Nick turns the power back on too soon. To retaliate, Redmond nails the boy into the chicken coop. Nick escapes, pierces his ear in an act of rebellion, gets beaten up at school for it, and eventually finds a soul mate in the person of Chase, a girl just as eager as he to get out of town permanently.

Meanwhile, Ellen has reached California but has turned back, deciding she needs to sort things out with both her abusive mate and her abandoned son. Her flashbacks of their past life together as she sits on a bus headed back east are interwoven through the main plot of The Lost Son. Redmond's own father, a former naval officer and blowhard, has unexpectedly reentered Redmond's life in another subplot of the novel. The tenuous relationships between all of the men and their attempts to deal with the ramifications of years of bad decisions, harsh words, and abandonment are the focus of Spencer's book. Michael Harris, reviewing The Lost Son for the Los Angeles Times, praised Spencer's "ear for dialogue, his feel for the region, his spare but exact prose and his rich characterizations." Maggie Garb, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Lost Son "a taut exploration of dysfunctional relationships and dreams gone sour" that "despite a sometimes flat tone… conjures up a powerful vision of alienation and lost love."

Spencer's second book, Are We Not Men?, is a collection of thirteen stories that explore some of the same themes as The Lost Son. The title is taken from a chant by a tribe of beast-men in the 1932 "B" film Island of Lost Souls, an H. G. Wells adaptation. The blue-collar men in Spencer's stories are lonely and angry, and they spend their time in bars, prisons, hospitals, on run-down farms, or in derelict apartments attempting to escape failed relationships through drink or fantasy. The character in the lead story takes refuge in second-rate movies as his marriage falls apart. The impossible push-and-pull between these men and the women and children in their lives lead the reader through despair, hope, tears, and, in spite of it all, humor. The collection includes "All I Ever Wanted," "The Last of the Nice," "The Small Things that Save Us" (winner of an Atlantic Monthly Editor's Choice Award), and "Haven't You Ever Seen Cary Grant?"

Jim O'Laughlin of Booklist observed that the women in Spencer's stories fail to cater to the men; they make their own plans and go their own way and are far from perfect, causing the men to "be nearly thwarted at 'being men'." Yet, O'Laughlin found, some of the men are "more complexly aware of those around them." A Publishers Weekly contributor compared the stories to those of Raymond Carver and said that Spencer tells his tales with "rueful wit and a gritty photo-realism." The reviewer found some of the stories too sentimental but said that as a whole they convey "a harsh and wrenching agnosticism."

Spencer once told CA: "I grew up in a single-parent, working class family in the coal-mining region of northeastern Pennsylvania. I've been a farm worker, a truck driver, a day laborer, a construction worker, a false-twist operator, and too many other things for me to remember. I'm the first and only member of my family to go to college. And though I've taught creative writing at the university level for several years, my strongest ties are still to my working-class origins."

"When I was young I wrote stories about wealthy people on vacation in exotic places, places I had never been. I thought that was what fiction was supposed to be about. Whenever people like me showed up in the stories I read, they were either dumb brutes or icons of injustice. I've been influenced by many great writers, but when I read Raymond Carver's Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, I felt as though I were being given permission to write about the people I knew best."

In an interview with Amazon.com, Spencer said he was also influenced by T. C. Boyle's Descent of Man and by such writers as Tobias Wolff, Joy Williams, John Cheever, John Updike, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Ron Hansen, Anton Chekhov, John L'Heureux, Isaac Babel, Robert Stone, and others.

Spencer continued, "My fiction is about people in trouble, people who face difficult forces and yet survive in spite of them. It's fiction (I hope) that doesn't provide easy answers but represents the world as it is and human nature as it is—essentially good-willed and good-hearted."

" The Lost Son is a book about men. I wrote it to try to understand why love is so difficult for so many men and why it's so hard for them to talk about. I wanted to explore the terrible silence many men share—men I've known and men I've been. I wanted to understand where that silence comes from and how we can love in spite of it. I don't know if I've succeeded, but I hope I've at least traced the shape of that silence."

In the Amazon.com interview, Spencer said that he wrote Are We Not Men? in an attempt to understand "why it's so hard for them [men] to reach out to women and to each other with anything except the desire to dominate." However, he said, the difference between the two books is that "in the collection, I'm able to explore the theme through a variety of situations, settings, and voices, some comic (I hope) and some, I hope, tragic."