Friday, March 13, 2009

What is Melissa Hotchkiss reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Melissa Hotchkiss, author of the debut poetry collection Storm Damage.

One paragraph from her entry:
I am reading a book I have read at least a dozen times in the last ten years. I teach So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell off and on. I am continually humbled and transformed by Maxwell’s writing style and the brilliant and original structure of this memoir, autobiography, fiction book, first published in 1980. He states early on, writing this book is his way of ‘making amends’. We soon learn he feels guilty over ignoring a childhood friend, Cletus Smith, he saw in the hallway on the first day of high school in his new home of Chicago in the 1930’s. This boy’s father had murdered a man named Lloyd Wilson before taking his own life. But more than this story line, the book is about Maxwell’s childhood and the devastating loss of his mother to the influenza pandemic of 1918. This book is a heartbreaking and amazing window into the organization of the inner world.[read on]
Melissa Hotchkiss’ poems have appeared in numerous publications such as failbetter.com, The New York Times, Free Inquiry, LIT, 3rd bed, Lyric Poetry Review, Upstairs at Duroc, and Heliotrope. Her prose has appeared in The New York Times and the New Virginia Review.

She is one of the editors of the poetry journal Barrow Street and a member of Urban Park Rangers, a poetry workshop in New York City.

Visit the official Melissa Hotchkiss website.


Writers Read: Melissa Hotchkiss.

--Marshal Zeringue