U.Va. professor wins “genius grant” for her short fiction

Deborah Eisenberg had a student conference in the morning and a writing class in the afternoon. It was just a normal day for the University of Virginia professor "with a hiatus of abnormality" in the middle, she said.

Yesterday, Eisenberg, a short-story writer teaching two courses this semester, was named one of 24 winners of a 2009 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." She said she plans to take her creative-writing students to dinner to celebrate.

The five-year, $500,000 fellowship will give her "more time and less worry" to write. Eisenberg, 63, is known for stories that examine contemporary American life through portraits of personal relationships in a changing social context.

"I'm a very, very slow writer," said Eisenberg, who has taught one semester a year at U.Va. since 1994.

She uses the other semester to work on her short fiction, which also has won her the Rea Award for the Short Story, a Whiting Writers' Award and five O. Henry Awards.

Her collections include "All Around Atlantis," "Under the 82nd Airborne" and "Twilight of the Superheroes," whose title story is a reflection on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York explored through a group of young friends who witness it.

A New York City resident when she's not working in Charlottesville, Eisenberg plans to continue teaching but the fellowship will mean she won't have financial worries on her semester off.

"It can only give me a kind of freedom I could not have hoped for otherwise," she said.

The MacArthur award comes without stipulations and reporting requirements to give creative freedom to recipients, which this year include an infectious-disease physician, an ornithologist and a bridge engineer.

Eisenberg, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and the Virginia Quarterly Review, described the writing process as such that "you can't really tell if you're working or not."

Sometimes writers fill up a lot of paper with what "turns out to be complete junk," and do their best work when they appear to be doing nothing but sitting at a desk staring out a window.

As a result, she said, she couldn't really say if she has a writing project under way.

If there's a lesson for her students in her MacArthur award, it's that they should not think in terms of commercial success but "write the truth as they see it."

Contact Karin Kapsidelis at (804) 649-6119 or .