Lynn Melnick with Solar Editors Lena Ayala and Amy Kinder Moore
Lynn Melnick is the author of three books of poetry, including Refusenik, with YesYes Books, which was released in February of 2022. Her upcoming memoir, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton is forthcoming from University of Texas Press's American Music Series in 2022.
Lynn was kind enough to speak with us about approaching cross-disciplinary prose writing as a practiced poet. Our conversation with her covers her work’s evolving relationship to trauma and the first person speaker, her enduring interest in revision, and the joyous magic of Dolly Parton.
— Editors Lena Ayala & Amy Kinder Moore
Solar: You have two books coming out this year: your memoir I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, and a book of poetry, Refusenik. The latter just came out a few weeks ago. How do you feel?
Lynn Melnick: I feel excited and proud, but also very anxious. I’ve kind of been in a bubble for the last few years working on the memoir, and it’s such a lovely place to be, just writing, not thinking about publication and all that comes with that. And now that part is over. That said, I’m still so proud to have written these books. It was both very pleasurable and very difficult, and I’m happy they will go out into the world.
Solar: You’ve spoken about your love of revision a great deal. How did your relationship to revision change, or not change, when writing your memoir? Did that experience affect how you revise your poetry?
Lynn Melnick: I do love to revise! In some ways, it’s where the work is, as opposed to that initial, feverish draft, which is a bit like magic. But revision is magic too! It’s kind of like raising kids, where everyone makes a big deal out of the changes between zero and one, and yeah, they’re huge! But between ages one and two the changes are just as amazing; they often learn to speak and walk and make friends! The second draft is like the second year of life maybe?
Revising my memoir was so different from revising my poetry books, because, except for poem order, I revise on a poem-by-poem basis. With my memoir, the process was more in conversation with the manuscript as a whole, even though I was going chapter-by-chapter. I did, like with my poetry books, read the entire thing out loud a handful of times. I lost my voice in the process! But I don’t know how to fix a sentence — as in, I don’t know how to fix a line — without speaking it out loud.
I haven’t written poetry since finishing the memoir, so I can’t answer that last question, but I hope to soon. I miss it so much.
Solar: Your new book’s title poem, "Refusenik," is structured beautifully. There is so much going on narratively — the speaker’s relationship with V, how she grapples with gender and Judaism, Alan Cranston, 80’s makeup trends, the danger of “pretty” men — all until the “exhalation” of those last few lines. I was particularly struck by how the poem balanced the speaker’s personal history against the broader history of California in 80’s. What was the process of writing that poem like?
Lynn Melnick: Thank you! Speaking of revision, this one was an interesting poem to write because I wrote it in a week—after some weeks of research—and the words came out (and this is very rare for me) exactly as they remain in the book. But the first draft of the poem didn’t work. Nor did the second or third. I almost thought I’d have to scrap it and start over — I always meant for this poem to be the anchor in Refusenik, and I needed it to be perfect. The words, as I mentioned, were fine, but I could not get the form right. I tried it in sections, in couplets, in one long stanza. Finally, I tried it in one-line stanzas, something I’d never done before, and it was like putting that last puzzle piece in. It was an amazing feeling.
As for all the various details and references in the poem, that is from the magic part, from the first draft, and I don’t know how it all got in there or how it came to me in those moments. Like, Alan Cranston? Random! How did he get in there? Sometimes it’s as surprising to me as it might be to the reader.
Solar: In 2017, there was a Publisher’s Weekly review of your book Landscape with Sex and Violence that infamously called your poetry a “parade of I.” Did the experience with Publisher’s Weekly, and with misogynist reactions to Landscape more broadly, affect your relationship to the “I” in your work? I’m thinking especially about “Refusenik,” which is written in first person, occasionally in direct address to the reader — an unblinking “I,” if you will.
Lynn Melnick: That review was so upsetting, because they also basically pulled a “not all men” about a book on rape and rape culture. Yikes. I had expected such a reaction from trolls on social media but not from Publisher’s Weekly! I think you are right about my “I” becoming even more unblinking in Refusenik—in the title poem as well as many others. And then I wrote a whole-ass memoir about my “I”! Look, the story of rape culture is just as universal as any so-called universal story men get to tell. It’s a tragedy born out in different permutations from the beginning of time. If that’s a parade of “I,” then that “I” is all of us. And that’s the story I’m trying to tell.
Solar: I read that you began writing I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive after a trip to Dollywood with your family. It reminded me of Landscape, and how closely entwined trauma is with place in that book. What was it like to tap into memories of “trauma and persistence” in prose? Do you think writing in a different medium drew anything new out of you as a writer?
Lynn Melnick: Writing prose is wild. With poetry, you are not bound to the actual; with memoir, of course, you are. So, in some ways, writing trauma and persistence in nonfiction prose felt a lot more vulnerable, because it’s just me, telling my story exactly how it happened, with no line breaks or white space or veering off into descriptions of flora to protect me.
I think the whole experience of writing a memoir made me more compassionate—both to myself and to others. Why do people do the things they do, make the decisions they do, act in ways they would probably never have imagined they’d act? And, because the book is also a love letter to Dolly Parton, as well as her music and cultural impact, I felt like she was my guide through all these questions (and hopefully, my guide through some answers, too).
Solar: I watched Dolly Parton’s Christmas special, “A Holly Dolly Christmas,” with my family this year. Did you happen to catch it?
Lynn Melnick: I did! At my in-laws’ house on Christmas Eve! Along with the tribute show to Kenny Rogers, which came on right after. I’d seen both before, when I was still writing the book, so I was watching with my research brain on those first times—"oh! I can use this quote/moment!”—but this recent time I just watched for joy, and it brought me so much of it that I was getting teary-eyed. I mean, speaking of magic, Dolly is magic.