Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prompt to Page podcast, a partnership between the Jessamine County Public Library and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. I'm your host, librarian and poet Carrie Green Each episode, we interview a published writer who shares their favorite writing prompt. Our guest today is Melissa Scholes Young.

Melissa is the author of the novels "Flood" and "The Hive." Her poetry collection, "Another Word for Longing: Saudade," is forthcoming in the New Women's Voices series from Finishing Line Press. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Ms., Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Joyland, Brevity, and The Believer.

Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Tapestry, New Madrid, and Gargoyle. A first-generation college student from Hannibal, Missouri, [00:01:00] she is professor in creative writing at the University of Kentucky. Welcome, Melissa. Thanks for joining us on Prompt to Page. 

Melissa: Thank you for having me. Anytime I get to talk about books and libraries and talk to you, Carrie, as a poet and librarian, I'm very excited to be here.

Carrie: So tell us about your bookstore, Bond House Books, which you own and operate with your daughter. 

Melissa: Yes. Bond House Books is in Lexington. We're operating as a pop-up right now, but we're gonna open a storefront early next year. We're in the process of building that, but we've been able to offer pop-ups at Lexington Pride and at the Renaissance Fair and other local places where we could just meet readers and learn what the community's reading, find out what people are interested in.

And the bookstore will be a community space for not just author events, but also arts and craft nights, and we'll be having book clubs meet there, and we're very excited. It'll be located in the downtown, and we're excited about that part also. That [00:02:00] means a lot to us to, you know, build a house of readers downtown, where people already are. 

Carrie: And what made you want to open up the bookstore, especially as a family business? 

Melissa: Well, I grew up in a family business, actually, and decided that I probably never wanted to do that. [Laughter] Family businesses have a lot of challenges, but when we moved here to Lexington, Izzy, my oldest kid, who's a local artist, was really, really surprised by the welcome, to be honest, that Lexington was such a safe place to land and such a great community, and we just wanted to be a part of that.

What we know is books, and what we know is how to bring people together, and what we wanna learn is how to make that kind of meaning here in Lexington. So we've always, in our own home, been a house of readers, so to me, it makes sense to extend that sort of beyond our own house, kind of a bigger house of readers with Bond House.

That's the [00:03:00] goal. 

Carrie: Yeah. Well, I'm excited about that. 

Melissa: Yeah. 

Carrie: And I know that you also are doing some workshops around town. You wanna talk about that? 

Melissa: I am. I am. I'm doing a workshop that's down at the Lexington Public Library at the Central Branch on October 24th. It's at 10:00 AM in the Farish Theatre, and it's a writer's workshop called Extreme Book Makeover.

So we'll be talking about revision and structure, and it's a craft workshop, so it will be very hands-on. People will be doing things and focusing on their own projects. But what I'll teach and demonstrate is how I use spreadsheets to help organize what's going on in my head, especially in revision.

So when I get to the end of a first draft of one of my novels, I create spreadsheets that help me determine and diagnose where revision really needs to happen. So I create these spreadsheets that end up being dozens of pages, which probably only makes sense to me, but it helps very much get me [00:04:00] unstuck in the process, which I think is the hardest part, and it also gives me an assignment for the time I have.

So most writers I know do not have endless days at their keyboard. They have an hour or two or three, and so the spreadsheets help me keep track of where I can revise in chapter three a point of view problem for a character that's answering a big question. And so the workshop's open to anyone. Like I said, registration is open soon, and I think it's useful at any point in the project, whether someone is beginning a project or whether they have several drafts of a project and they're not sure how to go about the revision process.

This will be good for, you know, any level of writer. 

Carrie: Yeah. It sounds like a really unique way of looking at revision. I think most writers think that they're getting away from spreadsheets if they're doing creative writing. 

Melissa: I didn't know it was so unique until I revealed it one time. And then someone said to me, "What are you doing?" [Laughter]

And I realized these spreadsheets were a [00:05:00] way for me to figure out how to balance my writing life, my work life as a professor, my, you know, parenting life, my personal life, because it really gave me a structure for what I needed to do with the time that I had. 

Carrie: Right. 

Melissa: I think revision, I think drafting is so glorious and magical and fun that we often don't realize that 90% of the work we do is actually in revision.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. 

Melissa: And that's the part that we avoid because we think, "Oh, the next time I write a rough draft, it will just be better. I will somehow magically have all the tools and skills that I need to not make those mistakes again."

Carrie: Right. [Laughter]

Melissa: But I feel like the first draft is just writing my way into meaning. I get to the end of the first draft and I really wish I had known that 300 pages ago.

And so the revision spreadsheets help me keep track of what I need to do when, instead of thinking, "Oh, I'm gonna write a novel," which no one can do. You can write 500 words a day, but no one can write a whole novel in a [00:06:00] sitting. Or "I'm going to revise 300 pages." Instead, these spreadsheets help me keep track of where I am in that process and what my big picture goals are, as well as what I need to do at a line level.

Carrie: And so you also have a book of poetry that's coming out, so I'm curious, did you use a similar system when you were writing that collection? 

Melissa: That's, oh, that's such a great process. I have found revising poetry to be a little different than revising novels. I have found revising poetry to be much harder.

You would think it's just a page or a couple pages and a poem, and then you kind of put them all together, but thinking about the spreadsheets helped me when I was thinking about the ordering of the poems and what that trajectory was going to be, and how the poems were in conversation with each other, and what parts of the collection.

It has three different parts to the collection, and so the spreadsheets helped me a great deal when I figured out which each [00:07:00] part's, yeah, trajectory is the right word. And so they helped me, but they didn't help me on the line level the same way. I found, and I would love tips on this, Carrie, on revising poetry because I found I just had to start over each time.

Carrie: Oh, really? 

Melissa: I would have a poem, and I would have an idea for it, and I would change line breaks, and I would perhaps play with voice, and I would think about different sensory descriptions. But really, what helped me most is I would print them out, and I would just rewrite the entire poem and make decisions while I was in that part of revision.

So the spreadsheets, the structure helped me think of the whole collection, but I would say the individual poems within it just, I rewrote them again and again, maybe 20, 30 times. I mean, this is a collection I drafted first two decades ago, so it's taken a long time for me to put this collection together, to edit the individual poems within it, and then to think about it as an entire project.

Carrie: Yeah. No, I mean, that sounds about right. I know, I mean, my own work and my book, I [00:08:00] have at least one poem that I first drafted in graduate school, you know, and at the time that my book was published, it had been 20 years. So I think that it is much shorter, but something about the attention that you have to pay to the language and sound and, you know, how everything is working together maybe in a more concentrated aspect than in prose.

I think sometimes it just takes longer. 

Melissa: It does. I think of it as breathing. Like, the poem is just sitting over there sort of breathing, and I have to learn to listen to it in a very different way, and I think it's exactly what you said. There's a type of paying attention that writers do that is so much more critical in poetry.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. 

Melissa: Because it's, once you learn to walk through the world observing everything and listening to everything and paying attention to everything, it's diffi- it's more challenging to walk through the world because you're paying attention on a deeper level. That's certainly what poetry has taught me.

[00:09:00] I also tend to write in multiple genres, and I sometimes write in the wrong genre first. I wrote this collection originally as a memoir about the years I lived in Brazil and fell in love in Brazil, and I wrote it as a memoir about sort of falling in love with the country, but also with my husband, and also with language.

But then over the two decades that it sat there and had some breaths put into it, I thought so much more about language and about Portuguese and about saudade and this idea of longing, and about the past and how we have sort of a nostalgic look at the past, which is true and then sometimes is not true, right?

It's not, when you're living in another country and you're learning its language, it makes you, in some ways, pay even more attention to your own. You have to understand your own English grammar in order to learn another language and be able to construct grammar in another language, and so much of what I learned about Portuguese was actually through poetry written in Portuguese.

It was easier for me to understand because it's [00:10:00] line by line and word by word. And it was easier to translate and understand. And also I loved the lyricism of it. Portuguese is such a beautiful language. But then I found when I moved home from Brazil after all those years, I was suddenly fluent in Portuguese.

And I suddenly only was translating the world from the world to Portuguese to English, and then from sound to light to color in a way that was pretty consuming. And so it became successful as a poetry, as a poem rather than as a memoir or as a short story. Which do very, very different things.

Carrie: Yeah. Interesting. Have you met Jeremy Paden? 

Melissa: I have not. No. 

Carrie: Well, so he is a Spanish professor at Transylvania. We were in a writing group together for a long time. But anyway, should put you in touch with him because he grew up in Latin America, but he is American. And so he started, when he first started writing poetry, he was writing in [00:11:00] Spanish.

And so he, and he does a lot of translations. I mean, sometimes he writes his poems in Spanish and then translates them back into English. Anyway, you might have some things to talk about. 

Melissa: I would love that introduction. I am, I'm excited to, meet anyone, any writer anywhere. I feel like we just, writers just wanna be together.

We wanna be speaking these common languages and talking about what's really in our hearts that we're trying to sort. And you know, poetry is a good place. And also community. Like just to gather and be in a space where other people are valuing the same type of art. 

Carrie: Absolutely. Yeah. So maybe we should start talking about prompts.

Do prompts play a role in your writing process? Maybe it depends on genre since you write in different genres. 

Melissa: I do. It really depends on where I am in the process. I find my best writing prompt is actually to leave my writing desk, is to, [00:12:00] go outside. I think that we count writing, we think it's sort of this punishing process where you're sitting at the desk and you're working really hard and you're accumulating words and pages, and that's somehow success, where I like to think of writing as something I'm doing in the world all the time.

So my favorite writing prompt actually is to leave the desk and to go outside and pay attention to something much bigger than me, and then also something much smaller than me. So when I'm thinking about prompts, I think of it from perspective. So I wanna think, I'm outside and I see this beautiful tree that I get to watch every day in my backyard, and I think, "What does my desk look like from that tree's perspective?"

Or, "What does the sidewalk look like from that tree's perspective?"  

Or, "what colors and sound does the tree hear that I don't because I'm in this very, very small human container?" And then the same thing on perspective I use for an object, something that I've had in my life and completely paid, you know, very, very little attention to, but has a new perspective also.

So I have this [00:13:00] beautiful yellow lamp on my desk. It's an old antique ginger jar yellow lamp that I love so much. And it's bright and it's sunny, but I wanna think, "What does it see that I don't see?" So most of my writing prompts actually are getting away from my desk and thinking bigger and then smaller about the world.

Just paying attention in a different way. But I also think that a writer's superpower is a type of empathy, right? Of being able to see our characters or being able to see our subjects with a type of not just paying attention, but real compassion. 

And I don't wanna write things that I'm not feeling empathy for.

I want to be able to be curious enough about the topic, about the line break, about the color, about the sound, in order to be able to write it, you know, really with a wider lens. 

Carrie: Mm-hmm. 

Melissa: So I don't know if that's a great prompt. It just means not prompting, right? It means counting writing as not just when you're at the page, but when you're thinking about the writing, too.

I often, if I get stuck in a chapter or a plot point [00:14:00] or, like I said, at a line break, it is, I usually take a dog, go for a walk, and when I'm walking, I get unstuck in my mind. But it requires a little bit more elasticity in my thinking in order to get back to the page. 

Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

No, I think there have been other guests who have talked similarly about their process. Either those who walking is an important part of their practice. I think--let's see. I think she's one, maybe one of your colleagues, Robin Lamer Rajia? She talked about carrying the poem with you throughout the day.

And I know this person hasn't been a guest on the podcast, but I know someone who, like, carries a draft of a poem in his pocket, just so it's there all day. 

Melissa: I-- First of all, Robin is an absolute treasure. I mean, at UK it's just, it is an honor just to be in Robin's presence and around a [00:15:00] poet, who's thinking so critically about the things that are hard actually to think about.

And so it's, it feels very safe to be in big bureaucratic meetings sometimes when you're sitting next to another poet like Robin and feeling like, "Oh, that's right. We both are just thinking about words and images and ideas at all times." I do that a lot, though, with printing poetry or printing a novel pitch, like right at the end of the revision process.

My third novel is now closer to being published. My first novel's published, my second novel's published, and my third one I've been working on the last couple years. And one of the last things I do when I know I'm done revising an entire manuscript is I write the summary, some of the assets that an agent and a publisher want from you, like a two-page summary of what the book's about, right? Or a tell-all that gives every way, every single detail, and I think of it as a pitch, right? 

Like I'm pitching to someone what the book's about, 'cause people ask you that all the time, "What's the book about?" And they, you have to have a [00:16:00] one-line about what the book's about, and then you have to have a one-page about what the book's about.

That one page I will print and carry with me, and I will read it to every single you know, stranger on the sidewalk. I will read it to a bartender. [Laughter] I will read it to a student in the hallway. 

There's something about making yourself commit to saying out loud what your project is about that gets you more comfortable saying what it's about. 

But also when you hear it and you cringe, you know that that's oh, not the right language or that you need a different pitch. So I will do that also with what I call pitches, idea pitches. And sometimes I like to do that actually before I start a project.

Carrie: Okay. 

Melissa: Right? Just, just try it out. I do this with titles all the time. There's just a way of getting that type of feedback by, yeah, carrying it with you throughout the day. I like that idea. 

Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Interesting. I know a lot of people, and probably myself included--and maybe it's different because poetry is sometimes different--don't really like to articulate before, like too early in the work- [00:17:00] 

Melissa: Mm-hmm ... 

Carrie: what the work is about. Do you ever feel that, or...? 

Melissa: I do. I tell my students at UK, I teach in the MFA program and I teach undergraduate creative writing also, and I tell them they shouldn't be sharing anything until it's a third draft.

The idea that you would bring a rough draft to workshop just terrifies me. Not because their rough drafts aren't good, they are, they're incredible writers, but because I don't always know what I'm trying to say until I've said it in three drafts, and I feel that I need it to marinate more in my own mind, in my own body to figure out what I'm trying to say before I share it.

Because once you share it with someone else, they're gonna give you feedback. They're gonna tell you what they think. And sometimes we look for that time of external validation more than the internal validation of ourself as authors that we need to be more patient for. So I do worry about inviting someone into a project too soon.

I think a third draft is a good space, but what happens is writing is so hard, and so we wanna run out and tell our friends about it. [Laughter] [00:18:00] 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Melissa: And, you know, and get some encouragement along the way to fortify us for these lonely writing rooms. So I understand the instinct to do that too. 

But I also just know what I'm good at and what I'm bad at, and I'm not great at titles.

And so I will often give people lots of titles and ask them actually for titles. It's actually how the title of this poetry collection came about. My very dear friend David Keplinger was talking to me about the project and he said, "Well, what's it about? What, you know, what could be the title?" And I gave him all my bad titles and I said, "The project's really about this type of like nostalgia for something that you can't have again.

It's not just missing something. It's not exactly nostalgia. Like saudade has this flavor to it that's different." And he said, "Well, what does the word mean?" And I said, "Oh, it's another word for longing." 

And he's a poet, so it immediately made sense to him that that was what I was trying to say, and it required me to fail at the title so many times and then finally say it out loud to get to [00:19:00] yes, saudade is another word for longing, but it doesn't translate perfectly, right? 

It's also about thinking about the past and thinking about who you are in the present because of the past. And then, you know, sort of having this longing for wanting to go back in time and pay even more attention that maybe you didn't capture the first time.

I think that's why travel is so important because it redefines those boundaries and identity lines about who you are when you're in a different space and who you are when you're in your home space and who you are when you're moving around the world.

That is so much a part of what I write about, in my novels when I'm writing about the Mississippi River and rural culture, and also in my poetry when I'm thinking about where I exist in time and space and where those memories exist too, and then the way that the world changes those memories, whether it's time or whether it's illness or whether it's an airplane, like whatever it is that changes the body in time and space, I'm fascinated to somehow figure out how to define that too. 

Carrie: Yeah. And language too. How, you know, like your title is an untranslatable [00:20:00] word, so being able to think in those different languages, that must affect your writing as well. 

Melissa: I think it gives me more room to play. Because I'm not so strict, and in the collection, I move between Portuguese and English so much.

There are, you know, song lyrics in it that are in Portuguese that I translate into English, but then it's a part of a larger poem. Music plays such a huge part of my life and the way that I I hear things also in the world. So it's, it-- 

The poetry collection has allowed me, and I think poetry in particular allows me to be really expansive in a way that when I'm writing a novel, there's more of a container for it.

There is a timeframe. The novel I just finished is about different flood stages. It's organized by flood stages along the Mississippi River. It's a Thelma and Louise canoe trip down the Mississippi River.

Carrie: Oh, wow. [Laughter]

Melissa: And, and so when they go on this canoe trip, everything is determined by the flood stage, but also the weather pattern that day, and how [00:21:00] many miles you can actually travel in a canoe--

based realistically on what the currents are, what the weather is, and all those things determine time and space in an interesting way. So I have different timeframes for my novels, different containers, than I do for poetry. 

Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I can't wait to read the next one. That sounds great.

Melissa: I'm excited about it. It's, every novel to me is such a different journey. And every publishing part of the process to me has been a really different part of the journey, too. My debut novel, "Flood," came out with Hachette, so a Big Five, and then my second novel, "The Hive," came out with Turner, which was a big, you know, is a big independent publisher.

And then, "Saudade" is coming out with a smaller publisher that happens to be based in Georgetown, Kentucky. 

Carrie: Mm-hmm. 

Melissa: And I wrote this 20 years ago and talked to the editor then, and now to have landed just a few miles from their door and decide this is the moment to bring this collection out feels somehow fortuitous. 

Carrie: Well, that's great. Well, do you have [00:22:00] any final writing tips that you'd like to give our listeners? 

Melissa: Think there are stories everywhere. I think that it's not as hard perhaps as we make it seem. I like to think about when I show up to my writing desk as sort of a date rather than a punishing part of the process, and I wanna set that date the night before, right?

"Here's my favorite pen, and here's my journal open to a blank new page, and here's my favorite coffee mug." Like, I wanna think about showing up to my desk the way that I would for a date that I would look forward to. I think that's an important part of the process, is not to be quite so punishing about our writing lives.

Carrie: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Melissa. We look forward to your new books and Bond House Books and all of the events that are coming up with that. 

Melissa: I appreciate that, Carrie. Thank you so much for having me on, and thank you for hosting a conversation that's, you know, about writers, for writers.

It matters so much in the world. 

Carrie: Absolutely. My pleasure.

Thank [00:23:00] you for listening to Prompt to Page. To learn more about the Jessamine County Public Library, visit jesspublib.org. Find the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning at carnegiecenterlex.org. Our music is by Archipelago, an all-instrumental musical collaboration between three Lexington-based university professors.

Find out more about Archipelago Songs from Quarantine Volumes 1 and 2 at the links on our podcast website