I’m an award-winning writer with thirty-five years experience as an independent editor for publishers and private clients. My own publications and professional work include fiction, memoir, nonfiction trade writing, academic writing (two books published by Harvard University Press), screenwriting, and playwriting. I have taught many workshops and counseled clients on dealing with writer’s block based on my book On Writer’s Block (Houghton Mifflin, a Book of the Month Club alternate selection). I have given notes on scripts of major feature films (Hellboy, 2019) and am coproducer of an upcoming Fox Searchlight film, Rogue Male, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
I teach in the Goddard College MFAW graduate creative writing program, where I have overseen the writing of full-length novels, memoirs, story and personal essay collections, and film and theater scripts for over fifteen years.
Author website: http://www.victorianelson.net
Academic website: https://www.goddard.edu/people/victoria-nelson/
My books
2021 Neighbor George (Strange Attractor Press)
2018 Ed. and intro., Compulsory Games by Robert Aickman (New York Review Books)
2012 Gothicka (Harvard University Press)
2011 A Bestiary of My Heart: Cautionary Tales (InkerMen Press)
2004 Wild California: Stories (Five Leaves Press)
2002 The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press)
1993 On Writer’s Block (Houghton Mifflin)
1990 My Time in Hawaii: A Polynesian Memoir (St. Martin’s Press)
1988 Letters, Drawings and Selected Prose of Bruno Schulz (Harper & Row), co-translator with Walter Arndt
My dramatic writing (partial list)
One screenplay optioned
Co-producer, Rogue Male (major feature film), Fox Searchlight, in preproduction
Play, Seraphita, a re-imagining of the Balzac novel, optioned 2019 by LatitudeLink production company
Play, The Vampyre/Bride of the Isles, adaptation of James Robertson Planché’s 1820 melodrama with new musical accompaniment, unproduced
My academic background
Graduate Faculty, Goddard College Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, 2007–present
Senior Lecturer in Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Edelstein Keller Visiting Writer in Residence, University of Minnesota
Senior Lecturer in English, California College of the Arts
Instructor, Department of English, University of Hawaii
Fellowships (partial list)
Guggenheim Fellowship
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
Awards and Prizes
Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection (for On Writer’s Block, 1993)
Modern Language Association, Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies (for The Secret Life of Puppets, 2002)
Association of American Publishers PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Award in Literature (for Gothicka, 2012)