Shirley Nelson

Shirley Nelson

Amherst, MA — Shirley White Nelson, 96, of Amherst, MA, died peacefully at her home on Wednesday, April 27, 2022, with family members at her side.

Shirley was born in Shillington, PA. The White family soon moved to New Jersey for several years and finally to New England where they had deep roots. Shirley's parents, Arnold and Merlyn White, had been brought as children - by their parents - to live at Shiloh, a fundamentalist Christian community in southern Maine led by the cultic figure Frank Sandford.

Her father broke free by joining the Army in World War I. Her mother managed her own escape, fleeing alone on a train to the home of a family in Boston that promised her both freedom and security.

Shirley began her writing career on-the-job, in the late 1940s, first in radio, producing an hour-long children's show for Rhode Island's first FM radio station. Surviving that fun, barely, she and her husband, Rudy Nelson, broke into script writing for an independent film company in Pennsylvania. When they left that position - to re-enter academia and to raise a family - she published poetry and short fiction and taught for a time at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf. During this period, she began what developed into her first novel, The Last Year of the War, a story framed by her own teen years during World War II. That won a Harper Saxton Fellowship, opening the door to a second book, Fair Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh - A Strange Fragment of American History, the story in depth of the Maine Shiloh community.

A new emphasis entered their lives in August 1987 when Rudy joined a study group of twelve from the Albany Presbytery, traveling first to Nicaragua, then to Guatemala. In the course of time, the Guatemala connection led him and Shirley to produce two collaborative projects: a documentary film ("Precarious Peace: God and Guatemala") which explored the role of churches in the country's long civil war, and a novel (The Risk of Returning) in which the story is embedded in the country's turbulent late 1980s.

Shirley's three siblings pre-deceased her. The oldest, her brother Dorrance, was killed in World War II. Her older sister lived into her nineties in Florida, and her younger sister Elaine died in a bicycle accident in 1950. Shirley leaves behind Rudy, her husband of 73 years, three children and their partners, five grandchildren and their partners, and three great-grandchildren.

A celebration of life is being planned for Saturday, July 23rd in Albany, NY. In Shirley's memory, donations can be made to Covenant House New Jersey (https://covenanthousenj.org/).