The Golden State, by Lydia Kiesling
by Melissa Scholes Young
The form of motherhood is beautifully banal: Melissa Scholes Young on the interplay between form and meaning in Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel.
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.
The form of motherhood is beautifully banal: Melissa Scholes Young on the interplay between form and meaning in Lydia Kiesling’s debut novel.
Melissa Scholes Young talks with fellow Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Residency Fellows Crystal Hana Kim and Ingrid Rojas Contreras about their debut novels, craft, research, and more.
“Alam’s novel asks readers to examine the relationship between how we construct and project ‘motherhood’ as an identity with notions of the limitations and constrictions of this identity.”
“I’m honored to be a lifelong Midwesterner and to write and think about place with central allegiance”: Melissa Scholes Young talks with Melissa Fraterrigo about her story collection, Glory Days.
In her debut collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans’s characters, like most of us, struggle to belong. Their loyalties to place, to family, and to self are often divided. Melissa Scholes Young interviews the author to find out how the identities we claim or deny often define the people we become.
“I believe difficulty and loss of control forge us into our truer, fuller selves, and I hoped to bring each of these characters to that real-ness”: Sonya Chung talks with Melissa Scholes Young about her new novel, The Loved Ones.
“Is unlikeable also unsympathetic? I don’t think so”: Paula Whyman chats with Melissa Scholes Young about her debut collection, You May See a Stranger.
Leslie Pietrzyk talks with Melissa Scholes Young about story contests, writing grief, mothers & daughters, storytelling, and more.
Melissa Scholes Young sits down with Jennine Capó Crucet again, this time to discuss the author’s debut novel, as well as the role humor plays in fiction, finding your material, and being asked the “Where Are You From From?” question.
“I knew I wanted the book to have one foot in the past and one in the present. It was the only way to really explore the themes that interested me, namely how much impact does the past have upon our present? “
