Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novels The Hive and Flood, and editor of Grace in Darkness and Furious Gravity, two anthologies of new writing by women writers. She is a contributing editor at Fiction Writers Review, and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Foundation Residency Fellowship and the Center for Mark Twain Studies’ Quarry Farm Fellowship. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, she is currently an associate professor in Literature at American University.
“Every time I write a story, I’m writing it as part of a manuscript or a cycle.” Brandon Taylor talks with Melissa Scholes Young about his short story collection, Filthy Animals, as well as story cycles, social codes, and the Midwestern way of being.
“Like my predecessors, I want to show us grappling, resisting, and (hopefully) healing, to show our full humanity in a country that was not designed with our freedom in mind, and in which those freedoms are still threatened, daily.” Deesha Philyaw talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her award-winning collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
“There’s plenty of great fiction about belonging to a place and being part of a community—with the opportunities and obligations this brings—but that’s not a state of being I understand well.” Steven Wingate talks with Melissa Scholes Young about The Leave-Takers.
“More broadly, the book, and the short story form in general, is interested in the way that certain choices preclude others.” Danielle Evans talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her new collection, The Office of Historical Corrections.
“In contemporary life, sports are a lot like politics or religion in that they activate these very deep-seated affinities, which we re-enact continuously, and often without examination.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Katherine Hill about her new novel, A Short Move.
“The tension between whether a story wants to be long or short requires us to examine them together.” Melissa Scholes Young thinks about form and story containers by engaging with the work of R.L. Maizes.
“I’m not the kind of historical writer who takes an event or a thing and tries to factually inhabit it. But I love to take the germ of something and pull it in a weird direction.” Melissa Scholes Young talks with Clare Beams about The Illness Lesson.
“Every character gets understanding. That’s what a writer does. But abusive humans only get two pages. That’s it.” Jami Attenberg talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her new novel, family secrets, the desire for happiness, and more.
Melissa Scholes Young talks with Melissa Rivero about her debut novel, The Affairs of the Falcóns, as well as making time to write, the immigrant narrative, and writing as a political act.
The form of motherhood is beautifully banal: Melissa Scholes Young on the interplay between form and meaning in Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel.
