Introduction of Melanie Sumner by Adrienne Su for a reading at Dickinson College
April 20, 2005
I’ve known Melanie Sumner for a dozen years, and there are many things I want to tell you about her, none of which comes close to summing her up. I could talk at length about why she’s an extraordinary writer, with a poet’s ear for the music of the line, a playwright’s perfect pitch with dialogue, and a knack for making you laugh so hard that you cry, and then making you cry. But you’ll hear that from her. I could list her many credentials, but a couple of highlights will give you a sense of her caliber: her fiction appears in places likeHarper’s and The New Yorker, and her first book, Polite Society, won a Whiting Writer’s Award, a grant that all writers want but few receive; it falls out of the sky; it can’t even be applied for. I could tell you she’s a true friend in writing and in life: she won’t lie when you’ve gotten an unflattering haircut, and she won’t lie when you’ve written a terrible poem. I could tell you she possesses an adventurous spirit, that she has a habit of walking away from what’s easy and predictable; she served in the Peace Corps in Senegal, moved to the middle of nowhere in Alaska to report on weather conditions, jumped out of airplanes, and lived the bohemian artist’s life in beautiful and far-flung places like Taos, New Mexico, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is the real item.This spirit of adventure is ever-present in her fiction, which has a singular voice. Once you get to know it, you recognize it instantly. Yet I’d like to take a stab at describing it in terms of the literary ancestors who, for every writer, are always part of the deal. There’s nothing derivative about Melanie’s work. But every writer writes out of, and in response to, a literary tradition, and the heart of Melanie’s genius is that she knows where she comes from.Influence is never as simple or direct as “one part this, two parts that,” so what I came up with is a recipe. In good cooking, as in good writing, the product is greater than the sum of its ingredients, and the person who receives it can only be grateful, and try to imagine how it was made. So, if fiction could be bread, here’s my guess at what you would do to try to emulate Melanie Sumner: Combine in a large mixing bowl 1 cup each of Faulkner, Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Oscar Wilde, Carson McCullers, and John Keats. Leaven with the blackest humor you can find. Knead with your bare hands until your elbows ache, sprinkling on some extra O’Connor if the dough sticks to your work surface. Cover and let rise in a warm place, preferably well south of the Mason-Dixon Line, until the dough has doubled in size. Then punch it down and shape it to resemble the three people you love most in the world. Bake in hell, cool in heaven, and serve on earth. Makes enough to feed the multitudes. Now I’ll stop talking.
Su is the author of these books of poems: Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), Sanctuary(Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009).
