Last month, Madison-based author and UW-Madison professor Beth Nguyen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her upcoming nonfiction project, which she will spend the 2024-2025 academic year developing. Tentatively titled “Estuary,” the book will focus on landscapes of disaster and impact craters left behind by meteorites.
This year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 188 fellowships to artists, scholars, and cultural creators across 52 fields. The prestigious prize recognizes “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.” This was Nguyen’s second time applying, a process which she described as “arduous.”
In light of this huge success, which comes at the heels of Nguyen’s warmly received 2023 family memoir “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” no one would have guessed how much self-doubt went into Nguyen’s application journey.
“The writing life is just filled with more no’s than yes’s,” she explained. “Self-doubt was such a big part of my process — it’s a big part of everyone’s process. We’re just trying to figure out, ‘What do I really want to say? What do I really care about?”
In some ways, this self-doubt is justified. Nguyen pointed out that writers of color are often bogged down by “internal and external pressure[s]” to write about cultural identity, which has been the main focus of many of her previous works. “Estuary,” by most accounts, is a departure from this.
“It was almost as though I had to give myself permission to write about something completely different. To say, ‘Okay, not only can I do this, but I’m going to allow myself to take the time to learn subjects that I don’t know enough about, and see where the learning takes me,’” she said.
It took time for Nguyen to realize that her fascination with geology, and impact craters specifically, wasn’t simply a passing hobby, but something worth exploring in depth. In part, she says this understanding didn’t come sooner because of the racial constraints of nature writing as a genre.
“Part of the reason why I have never thought of myself as someone who writes about nature is because it is historically a very white field,” she explained. “I think a lot of writers of color have found [it], if not hostile, kind of just closed off.”
Upon further reflection, the productive role of nature for Nguyen’s new work is clear: “It’s a way for me to understand trauma and disaster.”
While Nguyen’s latest book, “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” is a project that came together over the course of many years, “Estuary” is an idea more fully formed, with structure established from the beginning.
Predictably, delving into these new topics will require her to take a different approach to her writing. She’s particularly excited about the sense of discovery that will come with archival, concrete research.
“I love the anti-algorithm aspects of true research,” she said. “Curiosity is the heart of any kind of writing project. [Of] asking questions knowing that we’re not necessarily going to find answers.”
She continued: “Part of my last book [was] trying to come to terms with the fact that I have a lot of questions about my life, my family’s history, a lot of questions about my mother, about how I was born. And maybe I don’t have to know the answer.”
Nguyen has proven herself a master in the art of disclosure, a craft element that was central to her storytelling in “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” In “Estuary,” Nguyen is thinking deeply about narrative as it is reflected in interpersonal relationships.
“The expectations involved in the lifespan of relationships are, to me, connected to the expectations involved in narrative building, [in] reading a narrative, and what happens when those expectations get subverted or changed. Is it a failure? Because I don’t think it is.”
On her upcoming research plans, Nguyen jokes that she doesn’t have anything “glamorous” planned. Having already visited the Barringer crater in Arizona, which is the largest visible meteor crater in the country, Nguyen will spend her time reading and digging deeper into her newfound scientific inquiries.
This gift of time and being able to fall down “rabbit holes” is inherent to what the Guggenheim Fellowship allows: “I’ve never in my whole career writing and teaching I’ve ever had a whole year to focus on research,” she said.
Nguyen will be doing a reading at Mystery to Me bookstore on Tuesday, May 28. She will be reading from “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and talking about the writing process.
