Introducing Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington: Kseniya Melnik

JMM Writer-in-Washington
Kseniya Melnik
Photo Credit: Morgan Demeter

The Jenny McKean Moore Fund was established in honor of the late Jenny Moore, who was a playwrighting student at GW and who left in trust a fund that has, for almost forty years, encouraged the teaching and study of Creative Writing in the English Department, allowing us to bring a poet, novelist, playwright, or creative non-fiction writer to campus each year. While in residence, the writer brings a unique experience to the GW community, teaching a free community workshop for adults along with Creative Writing classes for GW students..  

This year we are especially proud to host Kseniya Melnik, whose debut linked short story collection Snow in May appeared in 2014.  The collection was on the short list for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the long list for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.  She has been interviewed in a range of venues about her work, including on NPR.  You can listen to that interview here.  Professor Melnik was born in Magadan, Russia, where the stories in Snow in May are set.  She moved to Alaska in 1998 at the age of 15, and went on to receive her MFA from New York University.  The GW community will have a chance to hear Professor Melnik read on September 24 as part of the Jenny McKean Moore reading series.  We caught up with her to pose a few questions in advance of her arrival.

What attracted you to the position at GW, and as Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington?

 The location is exciting, for one. I had spent a couple of weeks in D.C. as a high school student attending an ambitiously-named "International Law and Diplomacy" program at American University, where we did a lot of model UN debates and were carted from monument to monument in a big bus. I've always wanted to go back. I am thrilled to be able to try on D.C. life as a temporary local. 

But most importantly I've been attracted by the perfect balance between community engagement and time to write that the JMM fellowship offers. I've taught creative writing on the undergraduate level before, at NYU, and am looking forward to working with young writers again, introducing them to my favorite authors and hearing fresh takes on stories (and life!). I took my first workshop as a sophomore in college, and it was a life-changing experience. I am still in touch with my first teacher, Jennifer Vanderbes, Colgate University's own writing fellow from that year. 

I am also very excited and intrigued to lead the free community workshop. When I lived in New York City and supported myself by working at law firm, I attended similar classes at The New School (albeit not for free). I was often blown away by the range of stories submitted for critique by people of wildly disparate backgrounds and ages, all united in their passion for writing and literature. I bow to the fellowship fund and the university for creating such a unique opportunity for people to incorporate creativity into their lives at a time when other things often take priority.   

I hope to create stimulating and supportive environments in both types of classes, and learn from my students as much as teach.

Tell us a bit about your debut story collection, Snow in May.  The linked stories are all in some way connected to the Russian town of Magadan, your hometown – can you describe this setting for us?  What sets this location apart from other Russian settings?

The stories are set in various Russian towns-Moscow, Stavropol, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and even in America, in California and Fairbanks, Alaska, but the emotional center of gravity is my hometown of Magadan.

Magadan, a remote port town in the northeast of Russia, has a very interesting history. It is cold, windy, isolated, but also beautiful and enchanting. It started out as a gold rush town in the 20s, then became an administrative center of a vast network of Gulag camps in the natural resource rich valley of the Kolyma River; in fact, prisoners, including Japanese POWs, built most of the original Magadan. After the Gulag era was over, many former prisoners remained in Magadan; many of them were from the Soviet elite and Magadan became a cultural center of the North. That special combination of romance of the uncharted territories of “Wild Far East,” high culture, and tremendous suffering is probably what makes Magadan most different from other Russian towns with Gulag history. 

The government encouraged people to move to Magadan in the 60s and 70s with subsidies to develop the north, so a lot of young specialists streamed in. It was quite a lively bustling town by the time I was born. Then, in the 90s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and subsidies ended, there was an exodus back to the "continent," as Magadanians call the rest of Russia. Magadan is a city of sharp contrasts. Surrounded by breathtaking scenery, it became a grave for more than one hundred thousand prisoners. The arts thrived despite stagnation, poverty, and crime. 

So, the collection is a result of almost ten years of trying to reconcile the Russia of my happy youth with the intricacies of a more complex reality, of trying to imagine what made the people living under such drastic historical conditions tick, cry, laugh, love, feel inspired, remain strong.    

The stories in Snow in May take place over the course of many years: what were some of the challenges you faced writing about characters across such a span of years in a country that saw so much change during that period?

 The collection is set between 1950s and early 2000s and, of course, I wasn't alive for most of that time. On top of that, having moved to the US at fifteen, I now have a somewhat "American" perspective.  

I was quite fastidious about research, which I did online, in books, films, and through interviews. I believe that quotidian details sometimes play a bigger role in the characters’ conception of themselves and what dreams they dare to dream than the big political and historical movements. I also had the benefit of checking my research against the memories of family members who had lived in Magadan during different decades.     

Tell us what you’ve been working on.  Will you be presenting both from Snow in May and some of your new work when you open the JMM reading series in September?

I've been working on a novel. It started out in 2009 as a short story I planned to include in the collection, and since then grew into a long and ambitious project. It is also set in Magadan and includes school romance, missing fathers, picaresque road trips, the ghosts of Gulag, flying reindeer, talking skulls, and time travel. I may read from that or one of the new short stories I've been drafting.
 
Who are some of the short story writers you have been reading lately?  

Nina McConigley is a brilliant young writer whose first collection, "Cowboys and East Indians" is set mostly in the American West. Others are Molly Antopol, Laura van den Berg, Ramona Ausubel, and Colin Barrett. 

Welcome, Professor Melnik!

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Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page in Conversation

Join Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence Brando Skyhorse and Acting Director of Creative Writing Lisa Page in a discussion to be held this Monday at the Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital.  Presented by Hill Center & PEN/Faulkner.

921 Pennsylvania Ave SE, at 7:00 PM. Free and Open to the Public.

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Paul Steinberg, JMM Seminar Alum, Publishes A Salamander's Tale

Jenny McKean Moore seminar
alum and author Paul Steinberg

"A Salamander's Tale is about Drugs, Sex, Lust, Rock 'N Roll, Time, and Death"

Paul Steinberg, a longtime psychiatrist in Washington, graduated from GW's Jenny McKean Moore seminar.  His book, A Salamander's Tale: Regeneration and Redemption in Facing Prostate Cancer, comes out next April.  We talked to him about his time at GW, his work life, his relationship to literature, and his forthcoming book.

You were a student of Tilar Mazzeo by way of our department's Jenny McKean Moore seminar, whose focus your semester was creative non-fiction.  What was that experience like?  Had you taken any literature/creative writing courses before this?

 I found the creative non-fiction course extraordinarily helpful, especially in learning the "craft" of writing, also in figuring out timing, the most succinct way to put in a punch-line.  I had never taken a creative writing course previously, although I had taken plenty of English courses in college.  I had wanted to be an English major, but at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960's, the rigidity of the English Department was striking.  Although I had six years of Latin under my belt, the department chair insisted I had to take six semesters of a modern language.  Fo'get about it!  I ended up majoring in Political Science since it had the least demanding requirements; and it allowed me to take plenty of English courses and also complete the pre-med requirements. 

The seminar with Tilar Mazzeo was fascinating in terms of the dynamics of the group: As a psychiatrist I was struck by the not surprising shame and embarrassment of several of the younger members of the seminar as they read their work.  As a person in his 60's, I didn't give a damn about being revelatory.  Let it all literally hang out and give it a shot.  I have nothing to lose.  The shame component - and some tough critiques from some of the members - made several people run away.  All the more time for my work, I say unashamedly selfishly.

You're a psychiatrist here in Washington.  In what ways did a career spent hearing other people's stories prepare you for intensive reading in creative non-fiction?  Were there particular writers you found especially useful, inspiring?

Every human being has a story; and each of my patients over the years has inspired me with their resilience, their efforts to survive despite significant traumas, severe depression and anxiety, and other conditions created by the environment or one's biology and genetics.  I was fortunate to have been trained as a psychiatrist in what some people have called "the golden age" of psychiatry.  My colleagues and I learned techniques for doing excellent psychotherapy, whether from a psychodynamic and psychoanalytic point of view or from a cognitive-behavioral point of view.  We were not just medication pushers, in the way that many psychiatrists are practicing now.  In the early 1990's, with the advent of managed care, psychiatrists essentially priced themselves out of the psychotherapy market and began to focus on pharmacological treatments.  I was fortunate to have an eclectic and well-rounded training that has allowed me to see all the nuances in most of my patients.

Writers whom I found especially useful and inspiring: I came of age with the great Jewish writers of the 1950's and 1960's - Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, even relatively unknown writers like Myron Kaufmann (Remember Me to God), with a little John Updike thrown in for the WASPy point of view.    Although I mostly try to read non-fiction these days, I loved the remarkable writers of the first half of the 20th century - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos.

As a student-health psychiatrist, before I developed prostate cancer diagnosed in 1984, I taught an Honors course at the University of Maryland in College Park in the early 1980's - a course entitled "The Inner Life: The Nature of Dreams and Passions."  More than anything, it was a great excuse to teach some early Philip Roth novels including Portnoy's Complaint (Students loved it - and I still can't get over the punch-line at the end from the previously silent Viennese psychoanalyst, "So now ve may begin").  Also I included Roth's The Professor of Desire, plenty of Kafka, with a few John Updike stories thrown in. These writers did not hold back - they pushed the envelope at the time.  And I've tried to do the same.

Your book, A Salamander's Tale: Regeneration and Redemption in Facing Prostate Cancer, came out of that seminar experience.  In what ways (creatively and pragmatically) did that seminar help in the writing of the book?

As I noted above, I wanted to learn the craft of writing, and the seminar provided all the stuff I was lacking.  I had previously written a number of pieces in the Op-Ed section and the Science section of the New York Times, as well as pieces for the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.  But making non-fiction into something creative that reads like a novel was a skill I did not have.  Kudos to Tilar Mazzeo for helping me with this skill.

From the summary I've read, you use the salamander's regenerative capacity as a way to talk about human beings and their capacities to overcome injury - physical and emotional.  Can you say something more about that?

 As much as I love the salamander for its regenerative capacities, I love the fact that evolution has taken us from cold-blooded animals like the salamander to warm-blooded animals like ourselves - with the remarkable evolutionary development of the human brain.  A salamander can survive for months while its tail or even part of its heart regenerates; but we human beings, warm-blooded, would have all sorts of bacteria growing in the wound site, and we would not survive.

So, we now have huge brains and enormous cognitive abilities - most of which we do not use as productively as we could.  We lose something special in going from cold-blooded to warm blooded; but we gain something even more remarkable.  The second half of the book, in fact, takes a look at how we can bust and debunk myths about sex and sexuality, about the gods, about time and death.  It may be a bit pretentious, but I often tell friends that A Salamander's Tale is about Drugs, Sex, Lust, Rock 'N Roll, Time, and Death.

Do you have any advice for would-be writers among our students?

Advice for would-be writers: Again, everyone has a story.  Something happens in everyone's life.  After all, none of us get out of here alive.  We're all busy living and busy dying.  There's a story in all of that, whether it's presented in the form of fiction or non-fiction. Life is full of crazy events; and truth can be stranger than any fiction.  Take advantage of the crazy bounces of life; and use them, instead of suppressing and dismissing them.  Then learn the craft, and tell your stories in as entertaining and creative way as you can.

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