Creative writing professor Maud Casey sits at her desk. Casey was one of 175 out of 3,100 applicants to win a Guggenheim Fellowship
The roughly 5 percent acceptance rate for John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship winners is about as selective as Harvard University’s — and one creative writing professor at this university falls within that percentage.
Maud Casey will join writers, scholars, artists, historians, scientists and university faculty members after being selected last week for a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is one of 175 chosen from more than 3,100 applicants.
“Delighted would be a huge understatement,” Casey said.
As part of the fellowship, Casey will receive funding to work on her fiction writing. The grant is awarded annually to scholars, generally midway through their careers, who have “demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts,” according to the foundation’s website.
Casey is working on a collection of stories — preliminarily called Iconographies — which focuses on the patients of 19th-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who worked at a Parisian hospital called the Salpêtrière and is most famous for his work on the diagnosis of hysteria.
With her writing recently gravitating toward the history of psychiatry, she plans to visit Paris to conduct archival research at the hospital using the fellowship money.
“There’s a lot of photographic images of these women performing the various stages of hysteria,” Casey said. “So I got really interested in this idea of the performance of pain. … What was the nature of these women’s anguish? What are their stories that brought them to the hospital in the first place?”
Casey has had some of her work published in The New York Times and is an author of three novels: The Shape of Things to Come, Genealogy and The Man Who Walked Away, which was published in 2014.
“The award means that you can take a year’s leave,” Joshua Weiner, a creative writing professor at this university and 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, wrote in an email. “The most important kind of time for a writer comes in contiguous blocks; that’s the only way you really get anything done. And as great teaching is, finding those blocks of time is made more difficult by a full time teaching load.”
While Casey is unsure of the timeline for her upcoming plans, she said she is looking forward to visiting the hospital and getting her project off the ground.
Carlea Holl-Jensen, an English professor and 2014 master’s alumna, said she had Casey as a professor and has admired her writing. Casey includes a sensitivity to characters, developing them all in depth and from a unique perspective, which makes her writing unusual and deserving of the fellowship, Holl-Jensen said.
“What really amazes me about [Casey’s] writing is just how close she is able to bring to characters,” Holl-Jensen said. “She is very able to suspend an outside judgment of a character and bring the reader close to their experience of the world.”
The writing process requires time and work, Casey said, and she emphasized the importance of making and correcting errors before one has a work published or wins a fellowship.
Casey said she’s currently reading books such as Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, There’s Something I Want You To Do by Charles Baxter, River House by Sally Keith and Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz for inspiration, and looks forward to using her fellowship money in the coming year.
“[Casey] is one of the real brilliant lights in contemporary American fiction,” Weiner wrote. “Her imagination goes where no one else’s will go; and what she finds there is news about the human condition that, paradoxically, is sometimes of a historical nature. Great writers live in such parodoxy.”
