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Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing
Publication Date: Spring 2005
Meet Melissa Pritchard, author of six books of fiction and a teacher of writing. See her at book store readings and conference presentations, where her theater training comes out with props and some flamboyancy. See her with students, both in the classroom and one-on-one, critiquing their stories firmly but sensitively and offering insights from her experiences in pursuing subject matter, creating a writing process, publishing, and everything in between. Know that when you don’t see her she’s working—driven to write.
It may be difficult to picture Melissa Pritchard, a successful novelist and tenured professor of English at Arizona State University, crouched under a dining room table writing on a yellow legal pad.
However, that was how she spent part of each afternoon when she was a stay-at-home mom with two young children. While her daughters napped, Pritchard would escape under the table for an hour or two of writing. It was the one place in her small Illinois home that was uncontaminated by toys and interruptions.
Today, more than 25 years later, she sits at that same table in Tempe—bemoaning the oval top’s worn finish and the seat cushions’ body-contour depressions—and explores her drive to write that has resulted in three novels, three books of short stories, and much more.
Incidentally, Pritchard now writes as much in longhand while sitting in her backyard as in front of a computer screen.
“I realized fairly early on that writing was essential to my health and being a better mom,” Pritchard says. “I didn’t tell anyone about it. I was pretty insecure about my own talent. I didn’t want to expose it to the light, so I did write under that dining room table.”
She wrote the 17 short stories that would be collected for her first book, Spirit Seizures, under what had been her parents’ dining room table. The stories, first published in literary magazines, won the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award from the University of Georgia Press in 1987. The award was among the first of many, including two Pushcart Prizes, which have recognized her writing.
Only after the literary magazines had published her stories did Pritchard show them to her family and her mothers’ group on Isabella Street in Evanston, Illinois. Through their reactions, Pritchard realized that she had a writing persona separate from her Midwestern mother self—the Kool-Aid mom, the children’s theater group director.
“Everybody knew me a certain way, and then I would write these stories. They couldn’t put it together,” she says. “The comment I would get most frequently was, ‘You use a lot of big words. You have to look these up in the dictionary.’”
At the same time, a magazine editor wrote Pritchard a letter comparing her work to that of Katherine Mansfield, a 20th-century short story master. Pritchard still has that letter.
Today, editors and readers alike note Pritchard’s mastery of language. For instance, during the discussion after a bookstore reading from the Disappearing Ingénue, a retired gentleman stands to re-read Pritchard’s description of a character’s glasses as “galaxied with dandruff.”
Pritchard simply says, “Yes.”
“Melissa is a true wordsmith,” says Deborah Futter, vice president and deputy editorial director at Doubleday. Futter edited Pritchard’s last two books, Disappearing Ingénue and Late Bloomer. “She uses words in the most creative and fresh ways. I don’t know any other writer who is so articulate with the words, not just the thoughts. You can open a page of any book and find 10 examples without even blinking.”
Pritchard’s skill with language is self-taught.
“This often surprises people who think you have to get a M.F.A. to be a writer and then, of course, to teach writing,” Pritchard says.
Her decision to start writing one to two hours each day became a pivotal point in her life. She was 29 and saw 30 around the corner. “I panicked and thought about my own mortality,” she says. “It seemed very old to me—30. I thought, ‘That’s it. I better do this if I’m going to do it.’”
Pritchard, who had always been a reader, began reading voraciously. She would put her daughters in the stroller and walk to the neighborhood library. In addition to bringing home stacks of novels and short story collections, she spent time in the reference section. “I researched, quietly and on my own, how to send stories out,” she says.
She admits to a few misguided submissions at first—The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and the like. After receiving about three big-league rejections, Pritchard decided to start smaller within the state of Illinois. An acceptance letter came two weeks later. The magazine at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wanted her story “The Housekeeper.”
Even after she started publishing stories, Pritchard couldn’t afford the time or expense of pursuing graduate studies in English. She had earned her bachelor’s degree in comparative religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, although she says she had really wanted to be an actress and spent much of her junior and senior years being in plays.
Nonetheless, 25 years after graduating from UC-Santa Barbara, as bookstores were stocking her third book in 1995, she received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Vermont College. Further, while pursuing her own graduate degree, she was teaching master’s-level fiction workshops as a visiting assistant professor of English at ASU. In 1994, the word “visiting” was dropped from her title, and in 1995, she also became an affiliate of the Women’s Studies Department.
“Melissa brought an incredible humanity to class,” says Amy Sage Webb, who was among the students taking Pritchard’s first ASU classes.
“She was the first female professor in whom I saw my own face,” says Webb, who now directs the creative writing program at Emporia State University in Kansas. “She kept evolving in front of us.”
The events of Pritchard’s life had influenced her choice of short fiction versus novels. As a mother with young children, a short story’s trajectory of beginning, middle, and end with a three- to six-month writing schedule was manageable.
“I could take the short bites of the story,” Pritchard says. “It’s a more compressed form. It was like swimming across a pool instead of across a lake.”
Years later—with greater confidence in her abilities as a writer, her teaching career on track, and her teenagers navigating high school and beyond—Pritchard’s writing took on not only lakes, but veritable oceans. She wrote a historical novel, Selene of the Spirits, involving spiritualists in Victorian London. In her next book, The Disappearing Ingénue, the character Eleanor Stoddard linked all the short stories. Most recently, she juxtaposed the romance genre, a “real” story, and feminist analyses of romance novels in Late Bloomer, which the Chicago Tribune named as one of the best books of 2004.
“I think great stories have an ethical essence to them, an ethical question posed at the heart of them, fueling them, giving them dramatic heft,” Pritchard says. “The ethical question is acted out by the characters. And there’s not necessarily an answer—yes or no, good or bad—just these are the really great questions of being a human being on the planet right now at this point and time.”
For instance, in Late Bloomer amid the exotic love affair with all its Native American trappings, Pritchard examines questions of romantic love, middle age and love, and subtle forms of emotional abuse.
“I was very serious asking: If you let go of romance and all those false concepts, can you still love? My resounding answer at the end of the book was absolutely,” she says. “You can love better and more deeply, especially if you love yourself first.
“The paradoxical thing about fiction is it’s a call to utter honesty, emotional honesty. We’re not trained to be emotionally honest. It doesn’t work with the socialization. Writing fiction is one of the very few places left where you can be brutally honest, utterly honest, honest in a clarifying way.”
Doubleday’s Futter has praised Pritchard’s writing as having tremendous heart. “I think she is a real student of the human condition,” she says. “She can portray people deep down where they live emotionally, while maintaining humor.”
Digging into emotional truths and ethical questions underlying stories can be daunting. Nonetheless, it’s what Pritchard does.
“Writing fiction is the most deeply and intimately fulfilling work of my life. And it is very private,” she says.
She acknowledges the importance of publishers, reviewers, and readers. “But the most gratifying part of it for me is the actual writing. When I say it’s labor and it’s work, it’s also incredibly joyous to me. It’s a way of forgetting myself.” —Melissa Olson-PetrieMelissa Pritchard has been commissioned to write the biography of Virginia G. Piper and recently participated in the center’s international writer’s exchange. In fall 2004, she taught at the University of Warwick, England. To learn more about her work, contact Melissa Pritchard, MFA, Department of English, 480.965.7295. Send E-mail to melissap@asu.edu Arts & Humanities: Creative Writing