2008 Woodie Awards
The heart of a poet, a memoir about murder
Tessa Ruddy - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 4/2/07 Section: Arts
- Page 1 of 1
In March 1969, 23-year-old Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, caught a ride home with a man she had met through the campus bulletin board. She was making the trip home to tell her parents that her boyfriend had proposed and that she would soon be married. Mixer, however, never arrived home that night. Her body was found the following morning lying on top of a gravestone in a small cemetery 14 miles away. She had been shot twice in the head and strangled with a pair of pantyhose.
Mixer was believed to have been another victim of serial killer John Norman Collins, so Michigan detectives closed the case for 35 years until a startling DNA match was found in November 2004. This discovery led to the reopening of the case and the conviction of Gary Earl Leiterman.
The trial was documented by Maggie Nelson, a professor who at the time taught in Connecticut and who had long been obsessed with the murder of a woman she had never actually met - her Aunt Jane.
Nelson, now a creative-writing professor at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, will read from her book The Red Parts: A Memoir today at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. In the memoir, she recounts the intimate details of her life leading up to and after the reopening of her aunt's murder trial 35 years after the fact.
Aunt Jane's death has haunted her since childhood. Nelson's grandfather nicknamed her "Janie" after his murdered daughter, and only after finding newspaper clippings tucked away in a bookshelf did she grasp the pet name's cryptic undertones.
This is not the first time Nelson has used her aunt's murder as literary inspiration. In 2005, Jane: A Murder was published, a book of poetry in which, using research, Nelson told the story of her aunt's murder. Just a few months before this biographical collection of poems was supposed to be published, Mixer's case was reopened, leaving Nelson in a peculiar situation.
"When [the case] was reopened, it just seemed like a natural thing to keep writing about," Nelson said. "The Red Parts ended up just being a chronicle of my psychic landscape over a year period. I think that a lot of things that I wanted to say in Jane didn't really end up belonging in the poetry."
Once Mixer's case was reopened and Nelson dealt with the legal system and the newly reinterested media, the murder became more of a reality as opposed to the research project she had done in order to write Jane: A Murder. Still, Nelson considers the two works "sister projects."
While Jane: A Murder detailed Mixer's death through her own eyes, The Red Parts intertwines very personal details of Nelson's life, such as the breakup with her boyfriend and the death of her father, with scenes from the rigid courtroom where she is made to watch gruesome pictures of her aunt - dried blood caked on her face and her jumper pulled up around her waist.
Nelson explains in The Red Parts that she has developed what she calls "murder mind." She cannot stop thinking, dreaming, or reading about murder and death. Now that she has published two books on the subject, she would like to move on to other topics - like closure.
When asked if her new work is her last on the subject, Nelson replied, with a sighing laugh, "I hope so."
E-mail DI reporter Tessa Ruddy at:
tessa-ruddy@uiowa.edu
READING
Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts: A Memoir
When: Today, 7 p.m.
Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.
Admission: Free
Mixer was believed to have been another victim of serial killer John Norman Collins, so Michigan detectives closed the case for 35 years until a startling DNA match was found in November 2004. This discovery led to the reopening of the case and the conviction of Gary Earl Leiterman.
The trial was documented by Maggie Nelson, a professor who at the time taught in Connecticut and who had long been obsessed with the murder of a woman she had never actually met - her Aunt Jane.
Nelson, now a creative-writing professor at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, will read from her book The Red Parts: A Memoir today at 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. In the memoir, she recounts the intimate details of her life leading up to and after the reopening of her aunt's murder trial 35 years after the fact.
Aunt Jane's death has haunted her since childhood. Nelson's grandfather nicknamed her "Janie" after his murdered daughter, and only after finding newspaper clippings tucked away in a bookshelf did she grasp the pet name's cryptic undertones.
This is not the first time Nelson has used her aunt's murder as literary inspiration. In 2005, Jane: A Murder was published, a book of poetry in which, using research, Nelson told the story of her aunt's murder. Just a few months before this biographical collection of poems was supposed to be published, Mixer's case was reopened, leaving Nelson in a peculiar situation.
"When [the case] was reopened, it just seemed like a natural thing to keep writing about," Nelson said. "The Red Parts ended up just being a chronicle of my psychic landscape over a year period. I think that a lot of things that I wanted to say in Jane didn't really end up belonging in the poetry."
Once Mixer's case was reopened and Nelson dealt with the legal system and the newly reinterested media, the murder became more of a reality as opposed to the research project she had done in order to write Jane: A Murder. Still, Nelson considers the two works "sister projects."
While Jane: A Murder detailed Mixer's death through her own eyes, The Red Parts intertwines very personal details of Nelson's life, such as the breakup with her boyfriend and the death of her father, with scenes from the rigid courtroom where she is made to watch gruesome pictures of her aunt - dried blood caked on her face and her jumper pulled up around her waist.
Nelson explains in The Red Parts that she has developed what she calls "murder mind." She cannot stop thinking, dreaming, or reading about murder and death. Now that she has published two books on the subject, she would like to move on to other topics - like closure.
When asked if her new work is her last on the subject, Nelson replied, with a sighing laugh, "I hope so."
E-mail DI reporter Tessa Ruddy at:
tessa-ruddy@uiowa.edu
READING
Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts: A Memoir
When: Today, 7 p.m.
Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.
Admission: Free
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