Today, I'm participating in the 2013 Summer Author Blitz! I'm interviewing the fabulous Melissa Studdard, and she's giving away a couple of gems. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom to enter the giveaway!
Introducing Melissa Studdard
Melissa Studdard is the author of the bestselling
novel Six Weeks to Yehidah, and its companion journal, My
Yehidah (both on All Things That Matter Press). Since its August
2011 release, Six Weeks to Yehidah has been the recipient of
many accolades, including the Forward National Literature Award, the
Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, the International Book Award, and January
Magazine's best children's books of 2011. It was also named a finalist
for the National Indie Excellence Awards and the Readers Favorite Awards.
Melissa is also the author of The Tiferet Talk Interviews and the forthcoming
poetry collection, “I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast.” Along with Scott Lutz,
Melissa is co-author of For the Love of All (Trestle Press), which
is the fifth story in the Mark Miller’s One series and debuted
in the number one spot for Hot New Releases in Literary Criticism and Theory in
the Amazon Kindle store. As well, her poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and
articles have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies.
Interview
1) What are you working on now?
I’m currently trying to pull a poetry
collection called I Ate the Cosmos for
Breakfast from my literary hat. A
friend of mine, Ron Starbuck, recently started a press (Saint Julian Press)
that publishes spiritual writings. He knew my poetry was a perfect fit for
Saint Julian, so he asked me for a manuscript. It’s a frightening and exciting
process to re-examine poems I’ve written over many, many years—to try to see
how they fit together and how they should be arranged. So many stages of my
life and my ideas and feelings and beliefs are represented. It’s almost like
reading through old diaries. It’s really making me think about who I am and
have been as a person and a writer and who I want to continue to become.
Subterranean
I’m
not talking about the underside of a kitten’s
belly,
or the layers of dress on a modest woman’s
corpse.
I don’t mean that beneath the skin there’s
a
world of vein, meat and bone. No, I’m talking about
mantle
and core – the viscous, shifting substrata
beneath
the camel’s hoof, beneath the sand,
beneath
the crust beneath the sand. I think there are
birds
in there, flying around inside the earth’s body,
birds
flying over oceans, streams and lakes, children
laughing
beside rivers, mothers calling them home
to
supper by beating wooden spoons on the sides
of
aluminum pots. It doesn’t matter that we can’t see
them,
or even that my theory has been disproven.
I
go where the laughter is, pure and simple, and I say
this
ball of clay is really an onion, a snake coiled
around
a bouncing ball, a swirl of petals exploding
from
bud. It’s simple, really: love is the pack on a
hitchhiker’s
back, everything he owns, everywhere
he
goes, the only article that can’t be left behind.
And
we’ve all got our thumbs out, pointed towards
that
other realm, the one beneath the skin, beneath
the
bone and marrow and veiny streams of blood, where gods
await
us like lovers, like dense smoke, like cracked
I like that part when I’m just starting
to realize that what I’m working on is viable.
At that point I’m still charged with beginner’s energy, but I can see
the finish line through the fog.
4) Are you pantser or a plotter?
I’m so intuitive and spontaneous I
don’t even wear pants. Most everything
that happens on my page is a delightful, mysterious, wondrous surprise to me.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
5) What inspired you to write Six Weeks to Yehidah?
I’m obsessed with writing the way
teenage girls are obsessed with make-up and teenage boys are obsessed with
teenage girls. I always want to write.
7) What is your favorite snack while
writing?
