UVa professor among those winning MacArthur grant

Deborah Eisenberg, an acclaimed short stories author and University of Virginia creative writing professor, was named one of this year’s 24 recipients of the prestigious “genius grants.”

The five year, $500,000, no-strings-attached grants are awarded each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to individuals who have demonstrated exceptional creativity in their fields and show promise of continuing their creative work.
Along with Eisenberg, this year’s round of MacArthur Fellows includes luminaries from the fields of computer science, evolutionary biology, photojournalism, ornithology, art, mathematics and more.

Eisenberg is one of several UVa faculty members who have received the grant in recent years. Others have included Terry Belanger, a professor emeritus and founder of the nonprofit Rare Book School at UVa, in 2005; Janine Jagger, epidemiologist and research professor of neurosurgery, in 2002; and Brooks Pate, a chemistry professor, in 2001. Local blues musician Corey Harris was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.
Eisenberg, who splits her time between New York City and Charlottesville, said she was initially confounded when she received the call a week ago notifying her that she had won the award.
“They didn’t say right away, ‘You have won a MacArthur Fellowship.’ It was, ‘This is the MacArthur Foundation. Do you know about our grants?’” she said Tuesday. “I thought, why are they calling me? Do they want me to nominate somebody? Do they want me to serve on a committee? Do they want me to give them money?”
As she began to understand that she was one of the recipients, she was floored. “It was amazing,” she said. “I was just flabbergasted.”

Grant recipients are notified several days before the announcement is made public, but are allowed to tell one person. Eisenberg called her “sweetheart” and longtime companion, actor Wallace Shawn, who is most famous for his role in “The Princess Bride.”
The MacArthur Foundation selected Eisenberg, 63, for her short fiction that presents an “unusually distinctive portrait of contemporary American life.”
“Her exquisitely distilled stories often depict men and women coming to terms with their personal relationships and grappling with the changing social context in which those relationships occur,” the foundation says of Eisenberg on its Web site. “Through her deft use of dialogue and point of view, she captures subtle shifts in consciousness and makes observations that readers recognize as both true and strikingly original.”

Eisenberg’s collections include “Twilight of the Superheroes,” “All Around Atlantis,” “Under the 82nd Airborne” and “Transactions in a Foreign Currency.”
In a 2006 review of “Twilight,” novelist Ben Marcus wrote in the New York Times that Eisenberg proves that short stories are a legitimate art form.
“It’s rare to find a writer as beguilingly abstract as Eisenberg working in the literary tradition of familial angst that the stories of John Cheever defined so vividly,” Marcus wrote. “Aloof to the journalistic side of fiction, she’s still deeply enjoyable to read — indeed, ruthlessly acerbic and insightful. Few writers could, for instance, imagine the well-pressed customers at a restaurant in clinical terms that are also oddly lyrical, as Eisenberg does in ‘Like It or Not:’ ‘This aggregation of hairy vertebrates, scrubbed, scented, prancing about on hind legs, was ruthlessly bent on physical gratifications — tactile, visual, gustatory, genital … The candles! The flowers! A trough providing mass feeding for naked guests would be less pornographic.’”

Prior to becoming a writer, Eisenberg was waiting tables in New York City and was somewhat directionless. When she was turning 30, she decided to quit her habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.
Quitting did not come easily. “I absolutely fell to pieces,” she said. “Either I was going to live or I was going to die.”
As she struggled, her boyfriend encouraged her to try her hand at writing. “He said, ‘now you have nothing to lose,’” she said. “He was right. I didn’t have anything to lose.”

So Eisenberg wrote a story, which a friend performed as a dramatic reading in New York. Eisenberg was so nervous about the performance, she didn’t attend and left town altogether. The story was well received, however, and launched her career.
Eisenberg joined the faculty of UVa’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in 1994. She teaches fiction.
She said she intends to use her $500,000 to “buy time” to write more stories in the coming years.
“I’m not going to be spending my days at the racetrack or taking up needlepoint,” she said.