by Ty Phelps
Melissa Range is a recent winner of the National Poetry Series. Her book, Scriptorium, was chosen by Tracy K. Smith and published by Beacon Press. She has received awards and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, among others. She currently teaches at Lawrence University and lives in Wisconsin. She will be reading at ALL on June 16th for New Poems from Wisconsin, an event where our readers dive into reckoning with history, the five senses, and uncertainty.
ALL Review: How did your writing life begin? Do you have an origin story?
Melissa Range: I started out writing little scenes and dialogues on office notepads from my dad’s work (he’s a mechanic who owns his own shop, so everything had a “Range Equipment Repair” logo on it that I had to work around) when I was in elementary school. They were very short, possibly due to the size of the paper, so maybe I was writing flash fiction without knowing it. Most of these pieces were about monsters going on picnics together or outcasts befriending each other and taking on the establishment. Like a lot of poets do before they realize they’re poets, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I attempted lots of stories as a teenager, but never could finish any of them (never could do plot, and honestly was never very interested in it—I should’ve known fiction was not my genre). When I was a junior in college, I took a poetry workshop because the fiction workshop was full. It was only a week or two before I realized that I was much better suited to a shorter, more image-driven genre. It was a “duh!” moment: of course I should’ve been writing poetry all along!
ALL: What is the worst piece of writing advice you've received?
MR: I have had various people over the years tell me not to write about where I’m from (which is the southern Appalachian region of East Tennessee), not to use Southern dialect or slang, and not to be too “regional,” as opposed to universal (whatever that means), I guess. One person told me that the poems I was writing were, and I quote, “corn pone.” All of the things I was writing about were true and were part of my experience, but I was being told not to write about them blame hillbillies. I decided to ignore this advice, although it took me awhile to feel confident about doing so.
ALL: What preoccupies you as a writer? Any ideas or concepts of which you just cannot seem to let go?
MR: God, religion, violence, language, social justice (and within this, issues of gender, class, and race, especially), outsiders, the environment, poverty, history, the South. Not necessarily in that order!
ALL: You're a professor as well as a poet. How does that work inform your art? What is your favorite part of being a literature professor?
MR: I love teaching at Lawrence University because in addition to teaching creative writing courses, I get to teach lots of literature courses. My specialty is nineteenth century American literature, and I teach courses on nineteenth century American poets, women writers, and African American writers (each of these groups gets their own class, but of course there is also overlap within each class of all three groups, plus others). Right now, I am working on a historical poetry collection about the abolitionist movement, so the research I do to prepare for teaching courses on the nineteenth century is profoundly influencing what I end up writing poems about. For example, I might do research on 19th-century newspapers both for poems and for teaching students about how writers interacted with print culture back then. I will often incorporate text from these 19th century writers into my own poems, and/or write in forms they popularized, like ballads.
ALL: When you start a poem, what pulls you in? Is it a line that pops into your head? An image? A point to be made?
MR: Usually, I start with sounds. I like the way words sound when they’re next to each other, so a lot of times I’ll begin with a phrase I like the sound of. I might choose to rhyme from there (I love rhyming), and if I do, I’ll start doing some free association with sounds. I also have ideas in mind, typically, especially now since I’m working on a historical collection, and I’ve been doing a ton of research. So I will have had thoughts brewing about the people and places I want to write about, often for a very long time before I actually start writing. I try to have my mind be as immersed in the subject I’m writing about (whether that’s illuminated manuscripts, weapons, Old English poetry, or abolitionists) as can be, so that when I hit upon a good combination of rhythms and sounds, I am ready for anything that sparks.
ALL: Any book recommendations for our readers?
MR: Yes! So many. One of my all-time favorite poets is Gjertrud Schnackenberg; all of her books are fantastic, but I especially like her latest, Heavenly Questions. You can’t go wrong with Natasha Trethewey. Native Guard is one of my most-read and most-beloved books, but as with Schnackenberg, you might as well read ‘em all. Some new books I’m loving right now are Kiki Petrosino’s Witch Wife, Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water, and Anna Maria Hong’s Age of Glass. Very excited for Erica Dawson’s upcoming When Rap Spoke Straight to God in September. Also can I please publicize some of the great poets y’all have in Madison, like Rita Mae Reese, Derrick Austin, and Cynthia Marie Hoffman? I have read and taught books by all of these amazing folks. If you’ve not read their work, do yourself a favor and get on that, post-haste! I also have a bunch of arcane 19th century poets I’d recommend, but I’ll spare you my niche/academic interests.
