User:Alison Clement

Alison Clement is an American fiction writer, known for her novels, short stories and essays. Her first novel, ''Pretty Is As Pretty Does', was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writer selection, a BookSense choice and Bookreporter Staff pick. Editor and author James Hoggard, compares Clement’s writing to that of Eudora Welty. Her second novel, Twenty Questions, won the 2007 Ken Kesey Award for Best Novel through the Oregon Book Awards. Oregon Book Award judge, Antonya Nelson writes: "With Twenty Questions, Alison Clement has accomplished that rare feat of a literary page-turner. The prose is deceptively straightforward and the characters     eerily ordinary and recognizable. Beneath a simple surface runs a complex and frightening subterranean story, one that continues to produce surprises and insights, the most alarming of which might be that this is every person's psychology, every town's fraught underside. This book satisfies at all levels."

Clement’s stories and essays have appeared in The Sun, The Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News and Salon. Clement is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was awarded The Joyce Carol Oates Graduate Commencement Award in Prose. Her work has been taught, anthologized and performed. Stephen King included one of her short stories as a notable in The Best Short Stories of 2007. Alison Clement grew up in Georgia and South Carolina. At fifteen, her family moved from Charleston, South Carolina to Beardstown, Illinois, a place that became the jumping off point for her first novel. ''The roads in central Illinois are all laid out on a grid, straight, and the cornfields too, and the fields of soybean, all perfectly straight. They're laid out on top of a prairie and if you've ever seen a prairie you know there's a subtle beauty to it, to the slope of the land, the little creeks that run through it, the different grasses that grow there. You can see a remnant of that wild prairie even today, if you look carefully. The people have an order imposed on them too, narrow perimeters, straight lines, control — but just like the land, there's a wildness that wants to assert itself. What happens when someone in a place like this lets herself go a little wild? That was my question, as I wrote my first novel. What happens to someone when she stops caring about the things that normally hold people in check?''

In 2014, Clement earned a Masters of Fine Arts at Oregon State University. Her thesis was a screenplay adaptation of her second novel. The project is titled, Twenty Questions, Writing in Pictures, after John Sayle's book about filmmaking, Thinking in Pictures. She currently teaches composition at a small, rural community college in western Oregon.