Imagination and Intuition: An Interview with Mary Kay Zuravleff
by Melissa Scholes Young
“Be careful what you invent, darling”: Mary Kay Zuravleff talks to Melissa Scholes Young about her latest novel, Man Alive!
Melissa Scholes Young’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative, Ploughshares, Huffington Post, Poets & Writers, Brain Child, and other literary journals. She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. and is a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow. Her debut novel, Flood, was published by Hachette in 2017.
“Be careful what you invent, darling”: Mary Kay Zuravleff talks to Melissa Scholes Young about her latest novel, Man Alive!
“For me, the perspective shift is one of the great powers and pleasures of writing fiction,” says Katherine Hill in conversation with Melissa Scholes Young. “Not that I’d be bored with one perspective—well, all right, I might be bored—but I think I’m just incredibly interested in people’s reactions to each other, both conscious and unconscious.”
Friendship unraveling around exposed ambition: Jacinda Townsend talks with Melissa Scholes Young about competition, solidarity, and the constraints of the wider world.
I don’t read post-apocalyptic fiction, but I will read about anything by Lane Kareska. Lane and I were MFA students together at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Over our three years in the program, Lane and I met almost weekly outside of class to workshop our own work. We supported each other as our literary voices emerged. But when he told me that he was publishing North Dark (Sirens Call Publications, 2013), a novella, set in sparse futuristic failed state, I all but rolled my eyes. It’s not that I don’t see value in science fiction or the end of […]
“When you live in a nation that has been politically destabilized by outside forces, anything is possible. I know what it’s like firsthand for a government to fall, for a system to collapse. If you’ve lived in a society where that has happened, there is nothing ‘magical’ about that ‘realism”: Elizabeth Huergo talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her debut novel, The Death of Fidel Pérez.
Anne Panning talks to Melissa Scholes Young about her debut novel, her writing process, the benefits of social media, and the advantages of working with a small press.
Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway, Stephanie Powell Watts talks about her debut collection, Elvis as tragic hero, and authenticity in storytelling.
Though written in English, Luana Monteiro’s debut collection is firmly rooted in Brazilian culture — carnaval to Coetzee, Candomblé to Christianity.
Viva Cuba! Myth, magic, ghostly remains: Ana Menendez’s latest story collection, Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves. The journalist and Pushcart Prize-winning author talks communal bonds, fictional bibliographies, the elusiveness of identity, and much more.
When The Clash asked the question “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Jennine Capó Crucet had an answer. In How to Leave Hialeah, Crucet’s debut short story collection, characters wrestle with how the places they’re from shape their identity, how to grow beyond them, and why leaving is sometimes the only answer.
