Students, professors and community members gathered Thursday evening in the Knight Library Browsing Room to hear Scott Nadelson speak about fictional strippers in New Jersey.
“The girl started moving her hips again. I realized now why her teeth seemed so long. They didn’t have enough gum around them and seeing her smile was like getting a glimpse of her skull through a hole in her face,” read Scott Nadelson from “The Headhunter,” the last novella in his book “The Cantor’s Daughter.” Suddenly looking up from the text Nadelson added in, “God that’s awful!” His audience laughed as he reminded them to picture a “balding, New Jersey tough guy” as the narrator.
Nadelson’s reading, part of a yearlong series presented by the University’s Creative Writing Program, focused on the odd friendship between two men: Howard Rifkin, a research chemist, and Len Siegel, the narrator, who is a recruiter for the pharmaceutical industry. The two come from very different worlds and Siegel never fully trusts their friendship. Rather than live in distrust, Seigel sabotages the relationship by betraying Rifkin.
Nadelson, who believes that students often view writing as “old and stodgy,” knew he needed an excerpt that would grab their attention.
“As soon as I got in (the room) I knew … I was going to read this strip club scene,” Nadelson said.
“The Headhunter,” has underlying humor that adds life and tension to the story.
“It’s really hard to do humor well, and that always impresses me when someone can write humor, and not just straight up comedy,” said Thomas Watson, a graduate student studying poetry.
Assistant professor in the Creative Writing Program, Cai Emmons, pointed out a characteristic of Nadelson’s writing that might explain his consideration of the young audience.
“He’s very observant about human nature and the human condition in general,” Emmons said.
Nadelson grew up in New Jersey and he attended graduate school at Oregon State University. He has two collections out: “Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories,” which won the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and “The Cantor’s Daughter,” which is currently a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.
At Oregon State, Nadelson studied under Ehud Havazelet, who is now an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon. Because he’d lived in Scotland before going to graduate school, Nadelson tried writing stories about Scottish people.
“Ehud pushed me to write closer to my experience and I set out to prove to him how dull my experiences were and that I couldn’t possibly write fiction about it,” said Nadelson.
But his attempt backfired. It turned out his “dull experiences” made intriguing stories about complex relationships, mingled with wry humor.
Now, “Most of the stories that I write start with some small nugget of autobiography and then I invent around that,” said Nadelson.
All of Nadelson’s fiction is set in New Jersey and relates how American Judaism has a strange way of “having one foot in the dominate culture and one foot out, always keeping a distance,” he said.
The middle ground between these two is a point of interest for Nadelson because it’s a place he often finds himself in.