Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Flood
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.melissascholesyoung.com/
CITY: Washington
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://cafemfa.com/?p=814 * http://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/msyoung.cfm
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017090722
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3625.O96728
Personal name heading:
Young, Melissa Scholes
Place of birth: Hannibal (Mo.)
Affiliation: American University (Washington, D.C.)
Profession or occupation:
College teachers Authors Novelists
Found in: Young, Melissa Scholes. Flood, 2017: title page (Melissa
Scholes Young) jacket flap (Melissa Scholes Young was
born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri... Her writing has
appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Narrative,
Ploughshares, and Poet & Writers; teaches at American
University in Washington, D.C.; Flood is her first
novel)
Associated language:
eng
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born in Hannibal, Missouri; married; husband’s name Joe Young; children.
EDUCATION:Monmouth College, B.A.; Stetson University, M.A. (education); Southern Illinois University, M.F.A. (creative writing).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and teacher. American School in Brasilia, Brazil, middle school teacher; American University, Washington, DC, writing teacher, 2010-; Fiction Writers Review, contributing editor.
AWARDS:Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellowship, 2015; Best Book Award, Literary Fiction Category, American Book Fest, 2017, for Flood.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction to literary journals, including Atlantic, Washington Post, Washington Independent Review of Books, Narrative, Ploughshares, and Poets & Writers. Also edited the anthology Grace in Darkness.
SIDELIGHTS
Melissa Scholes Young incorporates life lessons she learned growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s boyhood home, into her fiction. She has published her work in literary journals, such as the Atlantic, Washington Post, Narrative, Ploughshares, and Poets & Writers. Now living in Washington, DC, she teaches college writing and creative writing at American University. Young is also contributing editor at Fiction Writers Review and editor of an anthology of works of women writers from the Washington, DC, metro area, Grace in Darkness.
In 2017, Young published her debut book, Flood: A Novel, which received the Best Book Award in the Literary Fiction Category from American Book Fest. Set in Hannibal, Missouri, the story follows Laura Brooks, who fled Hannibal ten years ago after a historic flood of the Mississippi River. Now she has left her job as a nurse in Florida and returns home unannounced to find a new direction in life. She gets involved with the colorful small-town folks: her recently divorced best friend, Rose; her twelve-year-old godson, Bobby; a town official aptly named Tom Sawyer; and Laura’s onetime beau, Sammy McGuire. Writing in Booklist, Cortney Ophoff noted that Young presents “a delightful setting in the heart of Mark Twain country for this story of self-realization and redemption.” The story is also uplifting and heartwarming, despite instances of anachronisms and social inconsistencies, according to Ophoff.
Laura is treated like a traitor by the townspeople and as someone who could not make it on her own. Yet she is torn between staying in Hannibal or leaving and wondering where she belongs. Now history is repeating itself as another flood is imminent and Laura must decide if she wants to leave again while also wanting to finally find stability and a place to truly call home. A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the book’s ties between Laura’s journey and the famous location, adding: “This debut is a wonderful story of home, hope, and the ties that bind us to family.”
At RT Book Reviews, Sarah Frobisher commented: “Young’s debut novel explores what it means to come home, and all the messiness that returning can bring.” Charmed by the historical location and the sentiment of a home place, Kevin Mac Donnell noted online at Mark Twain Forum: “Flood reflects America’s rural-urban divide, racism, empty-headed faith, willful ignorance, wheel-spinning, and marveling at distracting fireworks instead of the vast universe looming behind them. It’s more than a hillbilly elegy.” Mac Donnell also observed: “No readers will correctly guess what Laura decides, and how readers feel about her decision will reflect as much about themselves and their own homeplaces as about Laura’s.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2017, Cortney Ophoff, review of Flood: A Novel, p. 15.
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of Flood, p. 61.
ONLINE
American University Website, https://www.american.edu (January 24, 2017), author faculty profile.
Mark Twain Forum, http://www.twainweb.net/ (November 6, 2017), Kevin Mac Donnell, review of Flood.
Melissa Scholes Young Website, http://www.melissascholesyoung.com/ (January 1, 2018), author profile.
RT Book Reviews, https://www.rtbookreviews.com/ (January 1, 2018), Sarah Frobisher, review of Flood.
Young ’97 teaches life lessons she learned at Monmouth
Jeff Rankin
05/20/2016
Melissa Scholes Young ’97
View High Resolution Version
As a teenager growing up in the small Missouri river town of Hannibal, Melissa Scholes Young ’97 watched barges plying the Mississippi, dreaming about one day becoming a lawyer. Little did she imagine that she would instead follow in the footsteps of hometown legend Mark Twain and pursue a literary career on the East Coast.
Now a veteran writer and novelist who teaches college writing and creative writing at American University in Washington, D.C., Scholes Young says she had her eyes opened to previously unimagined possibilities when she enrolled at Monmouth College.
The game-changing nature of her experience at Monmouth was at the heart of a recent essay Scholes Young wrote for The Atlantic, as part of a series titled “Next America: Higher Education”
A first-generation college student who had breezed through her high school studies, Scholes Young recounts how her naiveté about collegiate academic expectations landed her in a history professor’s office, where she was kindly but firmly informed about the shortcomings of her work.
“I sat in the library for hours reading a composition book [the professor] loaned me,” she wrote. “It was a guide for how to write for college: essay structure, thesis statements, rhetorical arguments, outlining, citing research. These are skills I teach daily as a first-generation-student-turned-faculty-member because I know what happens if you come to college without them.”
The lessons she learned at Monmouth caused her to not only reassess her perceived skills, but also to change one of her majors, and her career path away from the law.
The change in majors came about unexpectedly when as a freshman she accidentally wandered into a senior-level Russian Cultural History class with Professor David Suda. “I was too embarrassed to raise my hand and explain that I was in the wrong classroom,” she said, “so I stayed. I enjoyed the class so much that I switched my major from business to history.”
Suda would later figure prominently in her intellectual development, when she enrolled in his senior capstone course “Poetics of the Self.”
“He taught me to think,” she said. “He pushed us to question our identities and the world around us. He challenged us to live consciously.”
Scholes Young said that the realization that a professor could actually teach students to think helped drive her to her current occupation.
Her decision to abandon law was equally fortuitous.
“As a junior, I spent a semester in the local prosecutor’s office,” she said. “It involved a lot of paperwork, which I didn’t expect or enjoy. I’m grateful for that internship opportunity, because without it I would probably have gone the business route and law school.”
Scholes Young said her inexperience in the ways of college continually played to her advantage at Monmouth.
“I didn’t know what you could or couldn’t do, so I just kept trying new things,” she said.
Those included joining a sorority, playing in the wind ensemble and serving as a resident assistant. A passion for government also led her to add a government major, run successfully for student body vice president, and enroll in American University’s Washington Semester program, which would have a life-changing benefit.
On the morning after her 21st birthday, she met her future husband, Joe Young, while standing in line at American University’s D.C. campus to get student IDs. They were married the following fall, and 20 years later they found themselves standing in line to get IDs again – this time as AU faculty.
While participating in Washington Semester, an internship in AU’s International Business & Trade program further refined her aspirations.
“I learned that I liked the ‘international’ part but not so much the ‘business and trade’ side,” she said. “The businesses I learned about were focused on profits, and I was more interested in people – especially in culture, history, languages and social justice. But I do think the experience solidified my decision to move overseas.”
After Monmouth, Scholes Young earned a master’s degree in education from Stetson (Florida) University. She and Joe then both taught at the International School in Brasilia, Brazil, for several years. The couple then took turns pursuing graduate degrees, and Melissa earned an MFA in creative writing at Southern Illinois University, where she was an assistant editor for Crab Orchard Review.
The writing bug didn’t seriously bite Scholes Young until after her first child was born; motherhood fueled her creativity. Today, her work appears in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Narrative, Ploughshares, Huffington Post, Poets & Writers and other literary journals. A novel, which is set in 1993 in her hometown of Hannibal, was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and is currently awaiting publication.
Welcome.
I was born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's beloved boyhood home. I've lived a lot of places since I left, but Hannibal is still my hometown.
My writing has been published in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Narrative, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. I'm a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review and Editor of an anthology of D.C. Women Writers, Grace in Darkness.
I write now from Washington, D.C. where I teach College Writing and Creative Writing at American University. My debut novel, FLOOD, is available from Center Street/ Hachette. I live in Maryland with my husband, kids, and a chocolate labrador named Huckleberry Finn.
Fiction. Essay. Poetry.
I won my first writing contest in third grade. It was a prompt for Mother's Day about why I had the best mom.
I wrote I have the best mom in the world because I have the best dad in the world and the best dad's pick the best moms. The end.
The prize was a $10 gift certificate to the Ponderosa Steakhouse. I've been writing ever since.
Novel
Fiction
FLOOD, novel
Center Street, Hachette Book Group
"A Soft Place to Rest"
American Fiction, vol. 15
New Rivers Press
"Oxygen in Use"
Abundant Grace
Paycock Press
"Storage"
Smokelong Quarterly
“Holding Hands”
Sliver of Stone Magazine
Pushcart Prize Nominee
“People Counting”
Front Porch
Pushcart Prize Nominee
“Scrap Metal Baby”
The View
“Postpartum Exile”
Literary Mama
Essay
"Navigating Campus Together: First Generation Faculty Can Steer First Generation Students to Success"
The Atlantic
"The Cost of Being First"
The Atlantic
"Teachers Teaching Their Own: The Frederick Douglass House"
Washington Post
"Dying to be Blue"
Washington Post
"A Residency of One's Own: The Complicated Path to a Writer's Retreat"
Poets & Writers Magazine
"St. John's River, Florida"
Narrative
"Measuring Tape is a Flexible Ruler"
Literary Mama
"Sit. Stay."
Ploughshares
“Where We Write: Hannibal, Missouri”
Poets & Writers Magazine
“Something Borrowed”
Brain, Child
“Baby Naming 101”
Mothering Magazine
“On the Verge of Everything”
Mandala
Melissa Scholes Young has appeared in Narrative, Ploughshares, Huffington Post, Poets & Writers, Poet Lore, and other literary journals. She is a Contributing Editor for Fiction Writers Review. She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. and is a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow. An earlier draft of FLOOD was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Melissa was born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri and still proudly claims it her hometown. Her short stories are forthcoming in Paycock Press' Gravity and Grace and in the 2016 American Fiction Anthology. Her debut novel, FLOOD, is forthcoming from Center Street, June 2017.
Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with Melissa Scholes Young
by Michelle Ross Read the Story June 20, 2016
story art
Art by Dave Petraglia
Was the idea of winning Ferris Bueller at a carnival the catalyst for this story? Or did it begin with the garage full of the father’s belongings? Or elsewhere?
I’m from Missouri, the land of fairs and carnivals. There’s not much else to do but make your own fun. I won Ferris in my dream one night. It was surreal for a kid of the eighties. Ferris gave us all permission to break the rules with style. The day after my dream I was having dinner with my friend and fellow fiction writer John Copenhaver, and we were talking about how garages get so full of stuff that they paralyze people from moving forward in life. This story began with Ferris. I was surprised he didn’t want to hang out in Tammy’s garage more, actually.
When it comes to carnival games, the joy is in the winning and in the novelty of the often absurd and impractical prizes. My partner once won a stuffed banana larger than our son. The grinning banana lasted barely a few months in our son’s bedroom before we threw it out, though. Because who really wants a giant stuffed banana? Do you think Tammy’s desire to win Ferris Bueller is similar to the desire to win a giant stuffed banana? And if Bueller/Broderick hadn’t run off, would she have kept him for long? What would she have done with him?
I want nothing more in life now than a giant stuffed banana. My students would be so jealous and confused to see it in my office. Whether you win the banana or Ferris, you’re still going to be disappointed, though. Bueller/Broderick isn’t the answer to Tammy’s pain. The next thing you achieve isn’t going to fix your problem. That’s what Ferris is there to teach Tammy. You can’t go around grief. You have to go through it.
You’re a writer with kids. So often people pit writing and mothering (not so much fathering) against each other as though one is bound to suffer, if not both. But being a mother has given me stories I wouldn’t have written otherwise. And I’d argue that my writing benefits my son in all sorts of ways too. For one, he is inundated with talk about the importance of discipline and perseverance. How do you think having children has benefited your writing? How has your writing benefited your children?
Writing with kids has given me plenty of reasons to run away. I’m kidding. Sort of. Last year I was named a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow and awarded a four-week residency in the south of France to finish my novel. I ran away quickly to that one, but I did get a lot of pushback—not from my partner or kids; they were very supportive. I was asked “What about the kids?” again and again. I published an essay in Poets & Writers as my answer. The night before my residency, my oldest daughter said, “Mom, I need you to do this residency more than I need you to stay.” She saw me being brave even though I was a little scared to leave them. Like your son, writing is just a part of our life. My kids go to readings all the time. Writing takes a lot of courage, especially to keep going through all the rejection. I hope my daughters learn that from me.
Do you have a favorite flash fiction story you’ve read in a journal or a collection recently? What? Who? Where? Why?
I just read Ty Coleman’s “Prom Night” over at The Stoneslide Corrective. I think I held my breath through it. It’s edgy and honest, like all of Ty’s work.
I’m going to cheat, as I tend to, and add flash nonfiction to the mix, too. As an MFA student at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, I met Anne Panning and read “Candy Cigarettes” in Brevity. Her work opened my eyes to form in a new way.
Tara Campbell recently published a lovely flash, “Angels and Blueberries,” over at Defenestrationism. There’s a line in it—“But if you ask a writer, you’ll get a different answer every time”—that struck me as absolutely true.
Jan Elman Stout also has a fine flash, “Marital Amnesias,” at Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. There are bananas in it, too. Real ones.
If you could win a character, whether it be from a movie or a book, at a carnival, who would it be and what would you do with your prize?
What a great question. The mother in me would love to raise Matilda or Scout Finch or Ramona Quimby. I’d bring home Pippi, too. I’d have a beer with Jo March or Professor McGonagall, and I think they’d be a riot together. I have questions for Clarissa Dalloway, so I hope she brings her author. Rory Gilmore may come over and organize my life anytime. The ultimate prize would be Huckleberry Finn. He and I would take my dog, which is named after him, and go for a long walk in the woods to plot our escape.
About the Author:
Melissa Scholes Young's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Narrative, Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, Poet Lore, and other literary journals. She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C., and is a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow.
November 16, 2016
Faculty Spotlight: Melissa Scholes Young
Faculty Spotlight: Melissa Scholes Young
Melissa Scholes Young’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Narrative, Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, Poet Lore, and other literary journals. She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C. and is a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow. Her novel, Flood, is forthcoming from Hachette.
Vince Granata, staff editor at Café Américain, recently interviewed Melissa about her forthcoming novel, Flood, about flash narrative, and about potentially being a professional student.
melissa-scholes-young-author-photo
One question that I want to ask is actually one you raise yourself when talking about using your hometown as the setting for your novel in your piece in Poets & Writers: “How do we writers reveal the soft underbelly of our beloved homes without hurting the people who make up the place we love?” This question seems like an essential one for anyone writing about home, whether in nonfiction or fiction. Can you talk about how you represent and describe your hometown in your novel and what challenges you encountered in this process?
One of the biggest challenges for me was to imagine what it’s like to leave, to develop a separate identity, and then try to return. I haven’t lived in Hannibal since I was seventeen-years-old, but I do know it would be a soft place for me to land if I needed to, unlike the reception Laura Brooks gets in Flood. It’s also challenging to convey what it’s like to be from a place like Hannibal. My roots run deep. The mythology of Mark Twain permeates my work. I’ve always known where I was from. I have a family that would welcome me back, even if they shake their heads while I unpack my bags.
Loving a person or a place doesn’t mean you always agree with them. My family taught me to work hard, to be loyal, and to commit to something worthy. I’m grateful for that. I’ve never felt I couldn’t disagree with them, but I do recognize that it’s my constant questioning of norms that makes family gatherings awkward. Hannibal has changed since I left, but I’ve changed a lot, too. Maybe we have to meet each other halfway, but there are things that can’t be compromised, of course.
People and places are complicated. You can question and embrace them at the same time, I hope. In Flood, there is a young African-American girl who competes to be Becky Thatcher in the annual pageant. It’s fiction, of course. This has never actually happened in our majority (90%) white town. Some of my characters express racist sentiments about her candidacy. Many don’t. Others are silent. It wouldn’t be authentic to write characters that aren’t truthful, but it also wouldn’t be useful to make an unfair, sweeping generalization about an entire town’s population. I indict the barriers, the complacency, and the system. I want readers to question them too, just like Twain suggested in his work, even if they come to different conclusions. My favorite moment (okay—second favorite—the ending is my actual favorite) in the novel is during the Tom and Becky reveal when Laura Brooks looks around the crowd and realizes she has more in common than not. All parents want their kids to be safe and to succeed. All people, regardless of class or race or gender or identity, want their communities to see them, hear them, and value their experiences. Hannibal isn’t any different. Small towns have the luxury of insulation. It protects and provides. But isolation can suppress and oppress, too, if you are too careful with your bubble.
Another bit of that piece really struck me, a Mark Twain quote you reference about returning home: “When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: There is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for.” For me, this raises a number of questions about the difficulties writer’s encounter when they look at their pasts for material. What I’m wondering about specifically is how you, whether writing in fiction or nonfiction, mine your own experiences for use in your writing. And, a bit more broadly, what impacts your decision to choose fiction or nonfiction when examining past experience?
Questions drive my writing. The answers determine whether I can tell the story as fiction or nonfiction. Writing Flood gave me a lot of room that only a novel would allow. I certainly mined the setting in this book, especially the Mississippi River, but I had to read a lot and listen even more to understand the economic and racial divides still present. I was also interested in how the stories we tell ourselves in memories are influenced by our imaginations. We’re always retelling our stories. What happens when the foundation shifts? That’s what Laura Brooks had to teach me.
Recently, when writing for the Atlantic, I had to make a decision about including my personal experience, as I did when I wrote about being a first-generation college student, versus a reported article about the conflated labels between first-gen and low-income. I needed the distance and research for the article so I decided to stay out of my own way.
In the flash course you taught for MFA students this summer, you talked about the “urgency” and “immediacy” that both micro narrative and flash fiction demands. How have writing (and teaching) flash pieces changed your writing? What do you enjoy most about writing flash?
Flash is much harder than it looks. The short forms require sharper writing tools. You can flex without too much investment. You can try things on that may extend into larger work. But flash is its own form, and it is always challenging to do well. I just published an essay about exactly this over at SmokeLong Quarterly. My students are often surprised by how much they can accomplish in micro and flash forms. They can leave you breathless. The limit necessitates that you boil your work down to what matters and slice the rest. Ouch.
For current MFA students, what did you find most valuable from your own MFA experience and what (if anything), do you wish you took greater advantage of?
I learned so much as an assistant editor in the Crab Orchard Review office. I had great mentors in my MFA program, but I learned the rest about the business of writing by reading submissions, editing the work of others, understanding editorial decisions with the goal of amplifying great writing and necessary work for a larger literary conversation. Poets and editors Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble have such an amazing ethic in their journal. I understood where my talent stood in relation to others and how much hard work was necessary to succeed. Everyone in my program was submitting their work to journals. At Southern Illinois University-Carbondale they didn’t teach us how, they showed us how. We were expected to take risks and to send our work out into the world. They cheered on our successes. To me, it’s important to celebrate each other on this lonely path. How to publish shouldn’t be a dirty secret if publishing is your goal, but writing and publishing are very different things. The writing matters more.
It was also valuable to workshop outside of workshop. If you need the structure and deadline of a class to produce pages, you’ll struggle making a writing life after the MFA. Find the best writer in your program and buddy up. If you want to get better, you have to play in better leagues.
You spoke a good deal during our summer course about the process of working towards publication, and the many challenges therein. Is there any specific advice you think most helpful for an emerging writer trying to place his or her work? Is there anything you wish you had known when you were starting out as a writer that you know now?
I wish I’d realized that all journals are not created equal. I had some easy, early success. It should be more of a struggle. I had to develop filters for where my voice mattered most. That’s not something my teachers could have taught me, though. I learned it through reading literary journals. Nothing takes the place of reading journals.
Emerging writers trying to place their work should aim high. Develop a tier system for where you’d be thrilled to be published. Always start at the top. Don’t put any publication on your list that wouldn’t make you proud to share. Read enough to understand the editor’s taste. Know the editor’s name. Rejection isn’t personal, but a lot of rejection may signal that the work needs revision. But how do you know until you try? I say fail big.
If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be doing?
Probably a journalist. I like collecting stories. My Midwestern manners serve me well. I’ve been a teacher for eighteen years. I thought about being a high school principal, but I’ve never wanted to leave the classroom. Can I be a professional student? I suppose teaching and writing is as close as I can get to that.
Melissa Scholes Young
Born Hannibal, Missouri
Nationality American
Alma mater Southern Illinois University (MFA), Stetson University (MA), and Monmouth College (BA)
Occupation Professor
Employer American University
Known for Creative Writing
Notable work Flood, “A Soft Place to Rest,” American Fiction vol. 15
Awards Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellowship, 2015
Melissa Scholes Young (born 1975) is an American writer.
Contents
1 Life
2 Career
3 References
4 External links
Life
Melissa Scholes Young was born in Hannibal, Missouri. She graduated from Monmouth College with a BA in History, from Stetson University with an MA in Education, and from Southern Illinois University with an MFA in Creative Writing. She spent ten years teaching high school English and a few more teaching middle school at the American School in Brasilia, Brazil.
Career
Scholes Young is a Contributing Editor for Fiction Writers Review[1] and Editor of the Grace & Gravity anthology.[2] Her writing has appeared in American Fiction,[3] The Atlantic,[4] Narrative, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Poets & Writers,[5] The Washington Independent Review of Books,[6] and The Washington Post.[7]
Scholes Young attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2014 and was awarded the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellowship in 2015.[8]
She also published her debut novel, FLOOD, in 2017.[9] The novel received reviews from residents and press[10][11][12] in Hannibal, Missouri: Scholes Young's hometown, Mark Twain's hometown, and the setting and inspiration of the novel.[13] The novel also received attention from the literary community in Washington, D.C.[14][15] and brought rise to Scholes Young's creative writing career as an emerging author in the nation's capital.[16]
She currently teaches in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. where she champions first-generation student issues.[17][18]
Melissa Young
Professorial Lecturer Department of Literature
Melissa Scholes Young is a writer and a teacher. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Washington Post, Ploughshares, Narrative, Poets & Writers, Brain, Child, Huffington Post, Poet Lore, and other literary journals. She is a Contributing Editor for Fiction Writers Review. In 2015, she was named a Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellow. Her novel, Flood, was published in 2017. She's also the Editor for an anthology of fiction by D.C. women titled Grace in Darkness.
Degrees
BA, history, Monmouth College MA, education, Stetson University MFA, creative writing, Southern Illinois University
Interviews | June 26, 2017
Holding Difficult Truths: An Interview with Melissa Scholes Young
"I don’t think you can really go home again. I was more interested in what happens if you have to": Melissa Scholes Young chats with Aline Ohanesian about motherhood, small-town USA, and her debut novel, Flood, out this week from Center Street/Hachette.
by Aline Ohanesian
In her riveting debut novel, Flood (Center Street/Hachette) Melissa Scholes Young asks if we can ever truly go home again. Set in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, hometown to Mark Twain and the author herself, the book is a rumination on the meaning of home, family, and self. After getting laid off from her job, Flood’s protagonist, Laura Brooks, returns to her hometown, confronting the familial, racial and economic troubles she escaped as an eighteen year old. The conflicts in this novel are as deep and turbulent as the Mississippi River that threatens to flood the town and everyone in it. Young takes on big themes of identity, family, and the idea of home with a refreshing mix of honesty and humor.
Melissa and I met at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where we shared a workshop with Luis Urrea. We immediately bonded over the truths we wanted to tell in our stories and what it means to leave family behind to do so. We chatted through email and social media for this conversation.
Interview:
Aline Ohanesian: Mother-daughter relationships can be some of the most complex in life and literature. Were the contours of Laura’s relationship with her mother, its difficulties as well as its strengths, clear to you from the start or did they evolve during the writing of the book?
Melissa Scholes Young: Laura and Mama’s bond was always clear, but it actually took outside readers to help me see some of their dysfunction. I wanted to show Mama doing the best she could with the equipment she had, even if it wasn’t good enough for Laura. Also, as Laura learns more about the choices her Mama had to make, she sees her their relationship with more compassion.
How does Laura’s view change throughout the story?
My guess is that we expect too much from our mothers. Laura definitely does when she first returns to Hannibal. But as she begins to question her own identity and unravel some of the stories she’s been telling herself, she sees Mama more clearly, more as a separate person rather than just her mother. The character of Aunt Betty is a kind of mother, too, and she guides Laura to a new understanding.
Does it matter that Mama is not that likable as a character, certainly not at first?
That makes sense to me since we can only see it through Laura’s initial narrow lens. During a later draft I decided that Mama’s portrait was too limited through Laura’s grieving eyes, so I gave Mama chickens. I adore chickens. Mama loves her “girls,” and I hope readers see that some of Mama’s edge toward her daughter is a kind of grit she thinks is necessary. Softness is not valued in rural culture. It’s sometimes viewed as a kind of weakness. Hardness helps you survive, and Mama is tough on Laura to teach her strength.
As we both know, parenting is lovely and hard. I wanted to write a more communal approach to mothering and mentoring through Mama, Aunt Betty, and Ms. B. I grew up with twenty-seven first cousins on my mom’s side and a dozen more on my dad’s. Aunts swarmed us. The benefit of growing up with so much family is seeing so many ways of being beyond your nucleus. Laura has so many people in her life that love her, and sometimes your people know you better than you know yourself.
Setting is an important aspect of every literary work, but place plays such a crucial role in Flood. I’m especially interested in the seamless way personal and literary histories are interwoven. How did the history of Hannibal, which is not only Mark Twain’s hometown but yours as well, impact the writing of Flood?
Writing from roots is a common theme in all my work. When you grow up in an historical place like Hannibal and know Mark Twain’s writings from an early age, literature is just part of your identity. But I also realize that we tend to mythologize it. We embrace the Tom and Becky story because we are America’s hometown and it’s safe and digestible, but we shy from Huck and Jim’s story because it’s more complicated. In writing Flood, I wanted to hold it all. I wanted to poke at that history and make characters reckon with it. I trust my readers. They can hold difficult truths.
I trust my readers. They can hold difficult truths.
One of the themes in Flood is the idea of going home again. Can we ever really go home again?
I don’t think you can really go home again. I was more interested in what happens if you have to. Home doesn’t change but you do. Your perspective shifts and you lens widens. Home is the same but you see it through different eyes. One of the opening epigraphs is from Mark Twain:
When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.
Writing Flood helped me see that focus for Laura.
The historical narratives throughout are so rich in placing us in the story. What research did you rely on? What led to your decision to develop a character to share this history?
Melissa Scholes Young
My mentors mean so much to me, and as a first generation college student, like Laura, I know how important mentorship is on your path to success. I wanted Laura to have that, so I wrote Ms. B as an outsider who sees Hannibal through fresh, adoring eyes. Ms. B is shocked that her students do not appreciate the rich literary landscape among them and she’s hungry to share it with them. But Ms. B will always be an outsider among insiders and that’s a tough place to be. She knows more about Hannibal than most townsfolk yet she struggles to teach them because she wants to move beyond the safe Tom & Becky stories to the more challenging and controversial Jim & Huck ones. The research—and there was years of it—came separate from Ms. B’s character. It was actually my brilliant editor at Center Street who brainstormed with me ways to better integrate the historical openings for each chapter.
Will you write another book from Hannibal? What are you working on now?
I think this is the only Hannibal book I have in me. We’ll see. I’m writing a new novel now. It’s a story of four daughters in a family pest control business and the radicalization of rural culture in America.
Our national and political narrative is finally turning its eye to small-town America. Flood does a great job of capturing the cultural and economic complexities of small towns. Were you conscious of depicting not only your own hometown, but this notion of small-town USA, for a national reading audience?
Absolutely. I fear in our political climate that small-town USA is painted with one brushstroke. Laura was guilty of this too when she first returns. Later in the novel, she realizes that it takes courage to stay, to dig in and devote yourself to a town, to build on generations of memory and to make your own mark.
I adore small-town USA and I can hold both its sometimes frustratingly slow progress and its comfort. I now live near Washington, D.C., which you can imagine is an entirely different experience. I’ve always been curious about new things. Like Twain, I wanted to travel and to question. I’m restless and want to sit with difficult answers. That can get me in a lot of trouble, but I hope it makes my existence and what I choose to write about more authentic.
I always say Hannibal was and is my hometown. It means a lot to be from a place and from people that know you, really know you, and love you in spite of your, in my case many, flaws.
To Forge A New Path: Q & A with Melissa Scholes Young
Posted on June 27, 2017 by sonyachung Leave a comment
by Wendy Besel Hahn
Melissa Scholes Young’s debut novel, Flood, testifies to all of the ways in which the past haunts us while simultaneously offering us roots from which to grow. Like the Mississippi River, which once actually ran backwards, Laura Brooks attempts to return home to Missouri after a ten-year absence. Much to her surprise, Hannibal’s inhabitants and her own family have changed—except for the ways in which they haven’t. As the metaphorical and literal water rises and threatens to overflow, Laura must once again find an escape route.
[More info about this book at powells.com (new window)] Admirers of Mark Twain’s work will appreciate Young’s exquisite homage to her literary patron saint and his fictional characters. Flood’s characters themselves carry marks of Twain: Laura’s new raft tattoo and the nails in the shape of crosses embedded in Trey’s work boots. Young’s novel portrays Hannibal’s yearly parade at which two adolescents are named honorary “Tom” and “Becky” after the main characters from Adventures of Tom Sawyer. On a more subtle level, Young creates plain-speaking folks who “school” the more educated: early in the book Mama tells Laura, “We don’t all need fixin’, you know,” and in the final scene Sammy’s daddy asks Laura what gave her the impression that life was fair.
Young departs from Twain’s shadow when she alternates between Laura’s narrative and expository passages detailing the history of the river, the town, and its famous inhabitants. This “book within a book” has a distinct voice—an outsider trying to explain Mark Twain and Hannibal’s history to an insider. With the novel’s structure, Young forges a new path.
As one of the first readers of Flood, I enjoyed talking with Melissa Scholes Young about the origins of her novel, her good fortune in finding a wonderful agent, and the perseverance needed to revise what was a promising manuscript with a strong voice into a marvelous debut novel.
Wendy Besel Hahn: Writing this novel involved a great deal of research into Samuel Clemens, the Mississippi River, and Hannibal, Missouri, as evident in your Notes. What was the most surprising discovery you made while researching?
Melissa Scholes Young: That the Mississippi actually DID run backwards. In 1812 a series of earthquakes on the New Madrid fault line in Missouri caused the river to run in the wrong direction for a few hours. I read accounts of that harrowing event from witnesses on the shoreline, mothers in boats with their babies, and historians trying to explain it all. The idea of recalibrating, of needing to run in the wrong direction to survive, and of how floods destroy but also make fertile ground was the beginning of my writing Flood.
WBH: Like the Mississippi River, which regularly leaves the confines of its banks, your novel breeches some genre boundaries by including expository sections preceding each chapter. Was this risk taking intentional on your part or instinctual?
MSY: I wrote the expository sections when I was researching almost as tales to myself. They were definitely from my subconscious and what was working in my brain behind the explicit plot of the book. The idea to incorporate them as a Tom and Becky manual written by Mrs. B that Laura helped edit during high school came much later. The form gave me a way to connect Bobby, who is competing to be named Tom, and Laura, who has always wanted to be a Becky. It was a risk, but I’m unreasonably wedded to pushing boundaries.
WBH: Mark Twain addressed inequality, both in terms of race and socioeconomic status, in his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Flood also explores this terrain. Did these parallels surprise you as you wrote about your hometown?
MSY: The parallels didn’t surprise me, but race and socioeconomic status became more acute themes in the drafting. I wanted it to be an affectionate portrait, but I also needed it to be true. Characters are lovely and flawed. So are settings. I reread so much Mark Twain while I was writing that of course it infused my own work. Fiction writers have to reveal truth, even when it’s painful to do so.
WBH: What progress have you seen in Hannibal since 2003 when your novel comes to a close?
MSY: One important change is the opening of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center in 2013. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum has incorporated more of Hannibal’s slave history into their exhibits as well.
WBH: One reviewer called Flood the fictional companion to Hillbilly Elegy. Do you agree with that assessment?
[More info about this book at powells.com (new window)] MSY: I appreciate the comparison. Hillbilly Elegy was a difficult read for me because I’m also from a struggling rural community. JD Vance’s book is brave, but doesn’t offer much hope. Hannibal survives and thrives because it’s built a tourism industry and invests in new types of manufacturing. Many rural communities that are losing population and economies need compassion and hospice rather than blame and condemnation. In writing about Hannibal, I wanted my portrayal to be more compassionate. There is so much to celebrate, and hope is necessary.
WBH: Both works address a crucial topic for our American culture today.
MSY: The biggest challenge we’re facing as a nation is rural/urban polarization. I worry we are speaking different languages and have lost contact with what unites us. I stumble trying to explain my love for rural people to my east coast friends who know so little of small towns, and I’m worried for my hometown folks who often reject outright what seems unknown. Like Mark Twain taught us, travel changes the individual, and I think we all need to expand our cultural and literary imaginations.
WBH: In Flood, the protagonist Laura Brooks tries very hard to play by the rules, but she struggles to right her course. Part of that process involves her crossing the lines of fair play. Is it accurate to say she transforms from playing the role of Becky Thatcher to behaving like Huck Finn?
MSY: It’s an accurate and astute assessment. Laura wants to be like Becky, but it’s an ideal she just can’t achieve. Becky has a charmed life; she’s wealthy and beautiful, demure when she needs to be. Laura just doesn’t fit, her life has not been easy, and she’s pushed to extreme choices. Also, Becky didn’t get to grow up, so who knows how she would have consented or rebelled. It’s a limited perspective based solely on Tom’s crush. I like to think she wasn’t as well-behaved as Tom believes her to be. Laura discovers how complicated judgment is and how right and wrong sometimes shifts depending on whose eyes we’re looking from.
WBH: Flood includes a cast of strong supporting characters in Mama, Trey, Aunt Betty, Josh, Rose, and Bobby. Which character was most fun to write and why?
MSY: Tough call! Rose, Laura’s best friend, was so naughty and fun that she kept stealing the story. She loves fiercely, her loyalty is her strength, and yet she just can’t seem to believe she deserves to make better choices in her life. Or she feeds on drama and loves stirring it up so she can star in it. Rose surprised me every time I wrote her.
Bobby, Rose’s twelve-year-old son, was the most challenging to write. I originally tried to find his voice through the first person. It gave me access to his character but this is Laura’s story with Bobby in a starring role. I had to call a lot of friends with teen boys and ask a lot of questions to understand him.
But Mama was actually my favorite to write. She’s tough. I get that. She’s raw and real and absolutely doing the best she can with the equipment she has. Mama loves her chickens and she loves her kids, even in flawed ways.
WBH: Sammy, Laura’s love interest, makes a late entrance in the novel while Rose and Laura are shooting pool in a bar, yet his presence through flashbacks haunts Laura from the start. Why was it important to hold off his appearance?
MSY: I think Sammy is stuck in time for Laura when the story begins anyway. Sammy and Laura haven’t seen each other in ten years. They’ve never sorted out their past, yet they’ve both made life choices based on their understanding of each other. Part of the plot is figuring out whether the stories we tell ourselves are ever really true.
WBH: Like Laura Brooks, Huck Finn, and Mark Twain, you left Hannibal. How much of Laura’s story is your own?
MSY: Laura’s story is different than mine, but we both had to make our own paths. I left Hannibal when I was seventeen. Like Mark Twain, I’ve never moved back. But I do visit often. What fascinated me so much about telling Laura’s story is that I had to imagine all of it. Laura is returning as an outsider needing to be let back in. I understand what it’s like to straddle homes and to have the skills to function in different ways of being.
WBH: Is the accusation Sammy’s brother levels at Laura (“You aren’t from here anymore”), one you’ve encountered?
[More info about this book at powells.com (new window)] MSY: Like Laura, I’m still from Hannibal. It was and is my hometown. I’ll always be from Hannibal, no matter where I travel. It’s true that you can’t go home again, but it’s not necessarily home’s fault. You’ve changed too much. Home expects you to be who you once were and can’t quite recalibrate to your new self. It’s exhausting and unfair to expect your people to know all of this. Laura has to learn this by returning. She has to get stung further by the feeling of not belonging to realize she never really did. Then she has to dust herself off and get back up again. What I think Laura figures out through the process is how important it is to have roots to grow from. Those roots have served me well, but I’ve never returned permanently.
WBH: Your novel ends with some ambiguity, but also on what I would consider a redemptive note: “A flood makes fertile ground on both banks.” Is that a fair interpretation?
MSY: I hope so. I want it to be so. It’s true in both a physical and metaphorical sense. Flood devastation returns the earth to fertility. Tragedy brings new beginnings. But it’s impossible to see any of that when you’re in the middle of the loss.
WBH: I had the pleasure of reading your first draft of Flood. During multiple rewrites, you changed your protagonist’s name and many elements of the plot. You’ve joked you had to write everything “wrong” before you could get it correct. What did you get “right” the first time around?
MSY: The final scene may be the only part that never changed during revision. I wrote that scene during the first draft. Five years and twenty some full revisions later, it’s the same. I always knew the ending, and I was always writing to it. During the process, I was trying to earn it.
WBH: In your Acknowledgements, you thank your agent, Claire Anderson-Wheeler, for believing “in this voice before it was really a book.” In comparing notes with other debut novelists, do you think this relationship is unique in today’s literary world?
MSY: I do. Claire is really special. She plucked my very rough manuscript out of a slush pile because she saw potential in my voice. She actually passed on it when I first queried her, but she said to follow up if I did another revision and gave me notes. She definitely didn’t have to do that with a ‘no.’
We worked together editing for two years before Claire thought it was ready. It sold relatively quickly and found a perfect home. Claire is the best type of agent for me because she’s patient when I’m not. Also, if you’re lucky enough to have an agent that reads as critically and as carefully as Claire, you are lucky indeed.
WBH: You are at work on a second novel. Because I have read an early draft of the first pages, I noticed some overlap with Flood. What else can you reveal about your novel in progress for Bloom readers?
MSY: The novel I’m working on is also set in a rural community. The push and pull of family is constant, but this one delves into family businesses. This family is part of the ‘prepper’ population, specifically the mother believes there will soon be a catastrophic disaster or emergency, so there’s a lot of preparation in survivalist training. The radicalization of rural communities is new and fascinating territory for me. It’s also the story of four sisters and their mother rather than a single point of view. That’s a much wider lens to manage.
WBH: At age 40, you are embarking on your first book tour. Why was this a novel you couldn’t have written when you were Laura Brooks’ age?
MSY: I wasn’t even writing when I was Laura Brooks’ age. She’s 28 and I came late to the writing life. I entered an MFA in my mid-thirties. I’d grown up a lot. I was rushing out to nurse a baby while my fellow students took smoke breaks. I think it takes this long to know yourself and learn what you want to say. I know how to listen better—to myself, to my characters, to my readers—than I did at her age. I also know that it matters where you’re from but it matters more where you are going.
Bloom Post End
Navigating Campus Together
First-generation faculty can steer first-generation college students toward success.
Jessica Hill / AP
Melissa Scholes Young May 6, 2016 Education
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I knew Sarah was one of them on the first day of class. We made eye contact as I reviewed the lengthy roll of campus resources listed on my syllabus. “Just so you know,” I said, “all of these people are here to help you. No extra charge. You’ve already paid tuition. These services are included.” Sarah’s classmates doodled on the syllabus. Some transferred essay due dates from the course schedule into their calendars. But Sarah drew a star next to one of the resources. “You might as well use them, right?” I added. Writing centers and campus counselors and diversity-inclusion programs want students to succeed. But as a first-generation college student I avoided all of them, assuming I couldn’t afford the extra bill. Now, as college faculty, I want my students to know what I didn’t.
According to College Board, more than 30 percent of today’s undergraduate students are the first in their families to go to college. Two-thirds of first-generation students attend community college, many part-time. They are disproportionately minorities from low-income backgrounds. And even for those of us who win the elusive admission ticket, three out of five won’t graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Very few of us attend graduate school.
Next America: Higher Education
Understanding the opportunity and achievement gaps in U.S. universities
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First-generation college students who are now college faculty, such as myself, learn to keep our status quiet. We know better than to admit how much we still don’t know. Most of my colleagues at American University in Washington, D.C., where I’ve been teaching for five years, attended Ivy League institutions. A faculty member in another department once commiserated, “Well, I was the first in my family to attend Harvard, so I know how you feel.” The distance I’d traveled from a rural Missouri town with a population less than American University’s first-year class to college was a far more uncertain path.
I decided I was college-bound in ninth grade. My class was on a field trip to General Mills and Watlow Manufacturing, two industrial plants that fueled our hometown economy. We formed a circle around our guidance counselor, Mr. Eggleston. “Look around,” he said, gesturing toward the assembly line. “These are good jobs. These are good people. We can get you plant jobs that pay $10 an hour or more. You can live in town on that.” Mr. Eggleston waved to a few high-school graduates he knew. “Or you leave. Go to college. Be something more than a factory worker. Choice is yours. I’ll help you either way.” And he did. He showed me how to fill out college applications and apply for scholarships. He talked to my parents about my academic potential and suggested we schedule campus visits. At first, my parents refused to fill out the FAFSA; they thought it was an invasion of privacy. Mr. Eggleston convinced them that without those numbers, a college wouldn’t consider my application.
Delaying entering the workforce was an investment, even if it seemed a risk to my family. College Board reports that over a 40-year working life, a college graduate will earn 66 percent more than their peers with only a high-school diploma. Like Mr. Eggleston, my parents supported my choices, even when they didn’t understand them.
Sarah says that her family also brags about her college path. She’s the smart one, the brave kid from a tiny town in Virginia who graduated from high school in a class of 11. But when she visits home, just like I did, she’s expected to have more answers than she does. “What are you studying?” people ask. “What are you going to do with that expensive degree?” Sarah doesn’t know yet. Neither did I.
Compared to their peers whose parents went to college, most first-generation students need more time to declare a major and are more likely to switch majors. As a first-year student, I pledged myself to the business school at Monmouth College in Illinois. It made sense. I’d grown up in a small family pest-control business. We lived in the country and grew corn, raised chickens, and sold firewood by the side of the road. I knew how to do whatever the job was and to make customers happy. But then I took an accounting class and ran from the major. I switched to government. An internship at a prosecutor’s office saved me from law school. The reading load in my classes was entirely manageable, but a summer spent at the Missouri State Archives showed me that I didn’t want to use my history degree to trace genealogies.
"When first-year students tell me they’re undecided in their field of study, I tell them it’s courageous not to know."
When first-year students tell me they’re undecided in their field of study, I tell them it’s courageous not to know. They rub elbows with students who have clear career trajectories, who brag about their networks that will ensure employment after graduation. Instead, I tell them to try things on, to intern, to volunteer, to job shadow. The first time I designed a lesson plan and stood in front of a class, teaching thrilled me, but I needed to try on plenty of majors that didn’t fit to find one that did.
In the college-writing course I teach, when the first major essay was due, Sarah needed an extension. “I’m sorry to ask,” she said. “It just took me longer to understand the assignment.” I gave her more time on the draft with the caveat that she visit the Writing Center. I pulled up their information on my computer and showed her how to make an appointment. Then I recommended a few tutors I knew could coach her well. Even when first-generation college students know there are resources, they don’t always know how to access them or they don’t feel entitled to do so. Just like first-generation faculty, students don’t know what they don’t know.
When I was a first-year student like Sarah, the phone rang in my dorm room at Monmouth on a sunny Sunday just before spring break. My history professor, Dr. Cordery, called me into her office. “We need to talk about your essay. Bring your notes and any printed resources. Bring every single thing you used to write this paper.” Ten minutes later I knocked on her office door. She didn’t say hello. She pointed to an empty chair. “Now, show me,” she said. “Show me everything you used and where you put it in the paper.” She pointed out how I’d transcribed notes incorrectly, how I’d summarized sources too close to the original text, how I’d cited the authors without following a proper documentation style. “Basically,” she said, “you have no idea how to write for college.”
I’d never written more than a couple of paragraphs in high school. I’d never done research in a database. In my rural community, most assignments were still handwritten, first drafts. I’d sailed through with As because the standards were so low. My teachers knew my family. They knew my brothers. They thought they knew my predetermined path.
I walked back to my dorm ashamed and frustrated and a little grateful. Dr. Cordery could have turned me in for plagiarism or failed me for the course. Instead, she sought the root cause of my misstep so that she’d know how to teach me not to make the same mistake. I sat in the library for hours reading a composition book she’d loaned me. It was a guide for how to write for college: essay structure, thesis statements, rhetorical arguments, outlining, citing research. These are skills I teach daily as a first-generation-student-turned-faculty-member because I know what happens if you come to college without them.
My lack of basic skills is common among first-generation college students. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that these students have lower grade-point averages and the majority need one or more remedial classes to catch up with their peers. Faculty ought to be more patient with what they come to us not knowing, just like Dr. Cordery, and meet them where they are.
Two months into the semester, Sarah shared that she’d missed a deadline for something unrelated to our class. This one seemed inflexible, though, and the consequences were dire. “I got an email about signing up for next year’s housing. I thought it was for something else,” she said. We’d just finished class and lingered packing up our bags. “I was trying to keep all the registrations straight but I messed up. I got my courses, but I don’t know where I’m going to live.”
The next morning, I called my dean’s office. I told them her enrollment was precarious without the ability to use her scholarship on housing. They reached out to Sarah immediately and suggested she file an appeal.
Being flexible and helpful with first-generation college students doesn’t mean that they are getting special treatment. The same resources are available to all students, regardless of what it took to gain admission. But faculty who were also first-generation students need to watch closely for those that slip through the cracks because those students can’t see the sidewalk. Like Sarah, I was hard-working and motivated, but I didn’t even know the questions to ask. I had to learn the hard way how to “do” college.
When I was on the other side of this desk, as a college senior with an internship in Washington, D.C., I drove from Missouri in my car. How else could I move around the city? I’d never travelled on mass transit. I’d never ridden a bus. I brought maps and, apparently, guts.
My family joked that my stay in D.C. was “studying abroad.” When I spoke to my brother by phone, he gave me the weather report like all good Midwesterners do. “Looks like it rains out in those parts a lot.”
“Seems sunny, actually. The leaves are changing colors,” I reported. “I was at the Lincoln Memorial this morning. Gorgeous.”
“Huh. Weather map shows nothing but storms.”
Then, I got it. “I’m in Washington, D.C.,—not Washington state. They’re on opposite sides of the country.”
“Oh.” There was a pause on the other side of the phone. “How’s the car holding up? Did you find a place to get your oil changed?”
When the College of Arts & Sciences at American University organized a first-generation faculty meet up, I hesitated to join. Who would be in the room? Would I be outing myself and confirm their suspicions that I really didn’t belong?
Instead, I found administrators, department chairs, and accomplished scholars sitting around a conference table unpacking their brown-bag lunches. We talked about the masks we often wear with our colleagues and how even our achievements still feel unmerited.
After the first meet-up, we invited first-generation students to a Q & A where they could ask us the questions they were too afraid to ask elsewhere. We shared stories of our mentors and the faculty who chose not to laugh at our naiveté but to hold out their hands and help when we fumbled. Sharing our experiences as first-generation faculty doesn’t hurt our credibility. It helps build it. First-generation college students need role models that have navigated similar paths and succeeded against the odds. We bring a diversity of backgrounds and working-class experiences to the ivory tower. And there are benefits to not knowing the rules. In college and my career, I didn’t know not to knock so I learned to knock louder.
As she left office hours one day, Sarah asked, “Do you know if the gym is free, too? A lot of my friends have been bugging me to go but you know.”
“I’ll find out,” I promised.
And I did. No additional fee is charged. Faculty, though, still have to pay.
This article is part of our Next America: Higher Education project, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
Flood
Cortney Ophoff
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Flood. By Melissa Scholes Young. June 2017.304p. Center Street, $26 (9781478970781); e-book, $13.99 (9781478970767).
When Laura Brooks returns to her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, she tells her mother she is just there for her upcoming 10-year reunion, and herself that the move is only temporary while she figures out what comes next. But going home is never simple, especially when home is a small town with big talkers and a lot of baggage. Treated alternately as traitor and escapee, Laura is dogged by her failure to "make it" after getting out of town, but as she reconnects with friends and family, she finds that she isn't the only broken one. Still uncertain of her future, when things start rekindling with her high-school sweetheart she realizes she is more tied to her roots than she imagined. With both past and future tugging at her heartstrings, which way will she turn? Debut novelist Young, a native of Hannibal, creates a delightful setting in the heart of Mark Twain country for this story of self-realization and redemption. Occasional anachronisms and social inconsistencies are distracting, but Laura's path is ultimately uplifting and heartwarming. -Cortney Ophoff
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ophoff, Cortney. "Flood." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 15. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084722/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3aaf098b. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084722
Flood
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Flood
Melissa Scholes Young. Center Street, $26
(336p) ISBN 978-1-4789-7078-1
In her debut novel. Young introduces readers to Hannibal, Miss., a town seemingly stuck in time, divided racially and unable to escape the long shadow of Mark Twain and his notoriously mischievous adventurers, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Laura Brooks is on an adventure. of her own. Ten years have passed since she fled Hannibal as the Mississippi River inundated the weak levies built by locals. She's been gone a decade when she is laid off from her job in Florida and forced to return to her childhood home and figure out a new direction for her life. She tells her mother she's come back just briefly to attend her high school reunion. However, with another flood looming and tensions among the townsfolk running high, Hannibal sucks Laura back, forcing her to face her past, including a former love interest and her absent father, while searching for stability in her future. Filled with pithy dialogue and cultural references, Young's writing ties Laura's journey of self-discovery squarely to Hannibal and its famous young troublemakers. As Laura reckons with her past. Young reckons with Twain's influence on the region. This debut is a wonderful story of home, hope, and the ties that bind us to family. Agent: Claire Anderson-Wheeler, Regal Hoffmann & Associates, (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Flood." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 61. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250778/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=01a31258. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250778
Prof sells debut to Center Street
Rachel Deahl
263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Melissa Scholes Young, a lecturer at American University, sold her debut novel, Flood, to Christina Boys at Center Street. Claire Anderson-Wheeler at Regal Hoffmann and Associates handled the world rights deal for Young, who has contributed to the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Wheeler described the novel, set in Missouri, as something "Mark Twain would have written if Becky Thatcher had gone home for her high school reunion and found Tom Sawyer."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Deahl, Rachel. "Prof sells debut to Center Street." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A461609231/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5c7bdc9c. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461609231
FLOOD
Author(s):
Melissa Scholes Young
Young's debut novel explores what it means to come home, and all the messiness that returning can bring. Young does a masterful job of weaving the history of Mark Twain into that of Laura Brooks, and the juxtaposition of the town then and now brings a layer to the book that readers appreciate. Laura's crisis of character — trying to find herself, loving her hometown yet desperately wanting to leave — endears her to readers, who come to care for her by the end of the book. Laura is everyone who ever left home only to return later wondering who they are and where they belong.
When Laura Brooks suddenly loses her job in Florida, she has nowhere to go but home. Returning to her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Mark Twain, after 10 years brings an overflow of emotions. Nothing, and everything, has changed. Her friends and family are there — just where she left them — but somehow it feels different now. As the great Mississippi River rises, bringing fears of a flood, it seems as if history is repeating itself. Laura is at a crossroads: Does she stay home and face her past, or does she leave again? She is now faced with the ultimate dilemma: What is truly important in life, and who does she want to be? (CENTER STREET, Jun., 336 pp., $26.00)
Reviewed by:
Sarah Frobisher
BOOK REVIEW
Flood: A Novel. Melissa Scholes Young. Center Street/Hachette Book Group, 2017. Pp. 321. Hardcover $26.00. ISBN 978-1-4789-7078 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4789-7076-7 (ebook).
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The following review appeared 6 November 2017 on the Mark Twain Forum.
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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Kevin Mac Donnell
There is a homeplace in nearly every American novel. Sometimes it's the focus of the story; other times it's in the background. But every protagonist has fled their homeplace, or fled and returned--or else never left at all. Those who flee take some of their homeplace with them. Homeplaces haunt, choke, nourish, comfort, and extinguish the spirit, often all at once. They are populated with family we did not choose, including some we'd never choose. They swarm with friends we didn't choose either; we just grew up with them as they revealed their flaws a little at a time, and we adjusted and forgave along the way. Even the dead and the absent are alive in the homeplace, insisting on remembrance.
Homeplaces have gravitational pulls that are barely escaped, and which never fully subside. If your life founders on a rocky foreign shore, the homeplace is where you return to heal. They offer strength and loyalty and faith and acceptance--or convincing illusions of these all-American virtues. If our homeplaces are flawed, so are we, and we can hardly face life without one, whether we left one, never left, or have returned to one. Homeplaces are mythic, and yet we all have one.
Hannibal, Missouri is the homeplace of Laura Brooks, the Huck-like heroine of Melissa Young's debut novel, Flood, and Laura's life as a nurse in Florida has unexpectedly faltered ten years after she fled Hannibal during a great flood on July 4th, 1993. Home was confining and suffocating, and populated with the sort of family and friends who tear you down and hold you back. The town is preoccupied with Tom and Becky and has yet to come to grips with Huck and Jim. There are haves and have-nots. The haves make money off the swarms of tourists and never get flooded, but if you are a have-not you get flooded and you spend what money you have at the local Walmart "where half your social life happens in the parking lot" (147). But the have-nots do have style--even their babies have mullets (265).
Floods define the place, and so does the lottery if you are a have-not. After driving twenty-two hours non-stop to get home, Laura learns that the Mississippi River is rising toward another major flood, and finds her mother dozing in her recliner in front of the TV waiting for an update on the flood stages and her Lotto numbers. "When you can see the Mississippi out your windows, flood stages are your religion. And when you can't imagine how to dig yourself out of your hole, you put your faith in the Powerball" Laura muses (2-3). Young knows her people and captures them with the right words, and she also knows her homeplace bugs. When Laura opens a "dirty window to let in some fresh air" she notices that a "parade of dead flies rests belly-up on the sill, their legs reaching toward freedom" (7-8). Emily Dickinson knew the metaphoric value of one live fly, and Young knows the value of a bunch of dead ones with their eyes on the prize. She knows her Mark Twain too. No sooner is Laura home that she is thinking of leaving again: "Anywhere but here. Sometimes being stuck is worse than staying put. What we need is a signal, a mark twain, to show us that the water is deep enough for us to get out" (82). And she knows that "the only thing harder in Hannibal's hierarchy than being poor and white was being respectable and black" (112).
So, what could possibly keep her home? Friends and family? She and her mother have a dysfunctional relationship. Her best friend Rose is going through a divorce from her husband Josh (aka "The Bastard") who has money for booze but not for the antibiotics needed by his son Bobby. He marks the heel of his boots with crossed nails to keep away the Devil. It doesn't work. To make ends meet, Rose, who is not the model of stability, embezzles from her employer, and must borrow the last of Laura's savings to avoid jail and losing her son. Laura's father puts in a brief appearance to steal something from her mother. His stomach is a fish-belly white. Laura's Aunt Betty is dependable and "when in doubt, she feeds people" (231). Every Laura should have an Aunt Betty. Laura's brother Trey is a drug-addict who dreams of a better life. Finally, there's Laura's old boyfriend, Sammy, the reason she left in the first place because he was the only reason she had for staying, but he disappointed her. Yet the very sight of him, his touch, his smell, just the thought of him, sends Laura into spasms of yearning and confusion. Twainians will by now have recognized some allusions to Mark Twain and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Josh, Sammy, Laura, an absent thieving father, crossed nails in boots, fish-belly white, and an aunt who plays a much-needed maternal role.
The Twainian allusions are lightly framed by intercalary extracts from Painting Fences, a manual written by Laura's English teacher, Melanie K. Bechtold (aka Ms. B) to help aspiring Tom Sawyers and Becky Thatchers learn about Mark Twain and prep for Hannibal's annual Tom and Becky contest. Rose's son Bobby is hoping he will be selected as Tom, a role won years before by Laura's boyfriend Sammy. But Laura considers herself "more of a Huck than a Becky" (106) and has a raft tattoo to prove it. One of the chapters in Ms. B's manual describes the time the Mississippi River ran backwards for several hours after an earthquake in 1812, a metaphor for Laura's return home that is hard to miss.
But Laura has changed and her homeplace has not. Will Laura find enough to keep her home or will she light out for the Territory? She wonders if "maybe it takes more courage to invest, dig in, and make it a home you want" (107). On the other hand, after watching her high school chums reliving their glory days, she concludes "I want everything good to be in front of me, not behind" (113). But Laura is a Huck who rubs her raft tattoo for good luck, and as she watches tourists eating ice cream at Becky's Old Fashioned Ice Cream Emporium and photographing each other pretending to whitewash "Tom's fence" next to the boyhood home, she reflects that "Huck would fit in even less now. He was never this civilized, never behaved the way the town wanted him to" (123).
Ms. B writes in her manual that Huck spent his first days on Jackson Island "eating berries and fish, smoking tobacco, and watching the stars" (243). Laura is surrounded by people who eat and smoke, but she alone does all three. Others gaze at the July 4th fireworks, but never the stars beyond. Laura is clear-eyed enough to see the flaws in her family and friends, and she accepts that she is just as flawed as her people and their place--and why shouldn't she? All of these flawed people have repeatedly told her so. She gets what passes for sage advice from her Aunt Betty: "Folks think there's a right or wrong choice in life. There ain't. You just choose and make it work. Bloom where you're planted, I say" (293). This was the same advice she'd given Laura's mother about her father. Sometimes what passes for wisdom sounds more like excuses for inaction.
Laura's homeplace is not life-affirming, but soul-killing. Her family and friends are strong and loyal. Until they are neither. They literally spin their wheels in driveways and parking lots, but figuratively chase their tails at every other moment. When they are backed into a corner they toss a prayer in Jesus' direction instead of backing out of the corner they've backed themselves into. This all passes for civilization in Laura's homeplace. Her Sammy was once a "Tom" but Laura was never a Becky, and although her raft tattoo is skin-deep her Huckness goes to the bone. At the same time, Sammy is the gravitational pull that draws her back. But she can't forget why she left him and her homeplace. Flood waters breach levees and destroy lives, but they leave fertile ground in their wake. One moment she may stay; the next moment she may go. You can't go home again. Or, can you? Laura at last has her own "All right then, I'll go to hell" moment and takes action. But such moments can actually launch you on your way to Hell, just the same as lighting out for an unknown Territory. Hell could be just beyond the horizon, or hidden among familiar surroundings.
T. S. Eliot said of Mark Twain's writing of Huckleberry Finn that the book would give readers what each reader was capable of taking from it, and that Twain may have written a much better book than he realized. Eliot was not excusing Mark Twain: What Eliot wrote is what genuine wisdom looks like on the printed page. The same could be said of Melissa Young and Flood. It's not a masterpiece like Twain's work, but it's much larger than its story of Laura and her Hannibal. What readers are given by this story will depend on what readers bring with them to the reading of it. Flood reflects America's rural-urban divide, racism, empty-headed faith, willful ignorance, wheel-spinning, and marveling at distracting fireworks instead of the vast universe looming behind them. It's more than a hillbilly elegy.
No readers will correctly guess what Laura decides, and how readers feel about her decision will reflect as much about themselves and their own homeplaces as about Laura's. The great American homeplace is aspiration, not stagnation, and each generation wishes for the next generation a chance at a better life, sprung up from the fertile fields of the generation before it. In this place horizons, not just levees, are breached. Readers will hope for a sequel. What does Laura do next? A fresh first novel is a fine beginning, but sequels can be stellar works, as Mark Twain himself could attest.