Not-Floundering Friday #8: Always Humming-- A Conversation with Melissa Sonico
Talking deadlines, heritage, finding the music, letting go...
This is the latest in what I hope will be a long-running series in which I get to check in with former students and colleagues and peers whose work I have loved, to chat about and compare how the writing life looks and feels from where we are, respectively.
Melissa Sonico was a member of the first MFA class at the program I helped launch at Cal State San Bernardino, and well on her way to developing her formidable talent before she ever appeared in my workshop. You can (and really should) read some samples of her flash fiction on her website. Her work has appeared in The Pacific Review, Darling Magazine, and elsewhere, and she is close to finalizing a collection you will read more about below. It’s going to be a stunner. Our conversation took place over e-mail during the past few weeks.
GH: When I first encountered your work at CSUSB, you were already such a polished, precise writer, with a powerful (possibly overdeveloped, a disease I recognize) sense of what you wanted your fiction to do. You're now in the process of assembling and finalizing your first collection. How much of a perfectionist do you feel like you are, and do you find that helpful or frustrating or essential to the way you write? How about to your professional writing life (considering that you've been assembling this book ever since I’ve known you?) Do you find you need to curb that urge sometimes? How do you do that?
MS: In a sense, I feel like I'm both an extreme perfectionist and a little bit lazy when it comes to my writing—professionally and otherwise. I guess they're not mutually exclusive anyway, right? Line to line, I'm hyper aware of word choice and creating a sort of (hopefully) understated lyric quality even when trying to convey everyday, seemingly mundane things. But then I'm impatient when it comes to editing or changing things. Absolutely equal parts essential and frustrating.
Like you mentioned, I've been working on–with a lot of large blocks where I'm putting it off—assembling a first collection. And I think one of the main reasons for the length of time it's taking is that I'm just that consumed with wanting it to be some kind of way that I'm not actively doing it. That sounds really bad but is definitely a reflection of my anxiety as a writer, and person really. And other times I do try to push that feeling aside and end up churning out things that I'm mostly proud of, like that hybrid piece I wrote in the virtual pandemic workshop of yours [held during the summer of 2020— GH]. I'm still working on finding a place for it in my collection too. I'm finding I thrive more with having deadlines to work against, so it was nice to have that after so long without. Any advice on not relying on that as much? I've been enjoying your Substack a Iot, by the way, especially the technique and maxims in terms of being helpful for my own writing!
GH: So much I want to respond to, there. First, about being "hyper aware of word choice" and wanting to create that "understated lyric quality,,,": Me, too, and yep, I agree, it's a curse and a blessing. But I also think that bringing out that quality in language is a primary driver in getting me to write at all, and therefore both indispensable and unavoidable. I do think of writing as "composition,” in the musical sense. Obviously— I hope—I need something to say. But I want to say it singing. Do you mutter to yourself while writing? I do. Constantly. Except I've really come to think of it as humming.
One thing I have found is that there are naturally occurring moments in any given piece where the lyricism I long for just comes. If I find myself going over and over one image or metaphor or phrase, that's usually a signal that I'm obsessing, and that's when I try to make sure that what I'm saying simply makes sense, and then move on. As with so many things in the artistic process, it's a balance.
About deadlines: for me, the key wound up being learning to clamp them on myself. Those years I spent as a critic/music journalist were helpful in many ways, and this was a big one. I got better— through necessity, because I needed to get paid so I could eat—at deciding the language in a given piece was as powerful or lyric as it was going to get. Getting older also helps, annoyingly. I'm just more aware that there may be...other deadlines up ahead somewhere...
One of the things I loved about seeing your most recent stories was the way you were suddenly (at least in my experience of your work) weaving your Filipino heritage into the prose. Was that a conscious decision, and if so, any idea why that's surfacing now? Do you feel like elements of that have always inflected your work? It's odd. whenever I write a story infused with my American Jewish raising, I feel simultaneously more at home—like I'm on solid ground, doing what I know—and like I'm...I don't know. Intruding, almost. Or appropriating in some way, because I got this from my parents and relatives, and it's theirs, not mine, except of course it's mine, and that's how they got it, too, and...See what I mean?
MS: Always humming and writing! That's so interesting to me, that shared connection we have. Music has always been super integral in my creative process, too, so I guess it's not surprising. I try to sing or make music (mostly for myself) whenever I can, and always have.
I feel you on the "ultimate" deadline as well. I'm certain it has something to do with having recently created tiny humans that's made me aware of my own mortality, but it definitely is something hovering over my decision-making these days.
I actually have one or two other stories that subtly and not-so-subtly infuse bits of my Filipino heritage into the world of my characters, including the title piece of my MFA thesis way back when. Like a lot of my writing, the story centers around my father, who may have minutely stifled that side of my upbringing in his attempt to be more American? I know the food, for instance, and can understand the language but not speak it. It's been a balancing act trying to work it into my writing without it seeming forced, at least from my perspective. In the story I just submitted to a writing contest, I actually changed the main character's features to be more Filipino without saying so outright, while before I shied away from making my characters look, well, like me, because of a misguided need to distance myself from my characters.
But I do think I've been more compelled lately to delve into my Filipino side. Maybe hoping to make up for lost time. In terms of confidence levels, I'm finding my footing in it slowly, which is good. I'm excited to see what I can make out of all of this, and lucky to have this outlet to connect more to a culture I know so much and so little about.
GH: That phrase of yours about “a culture I know so much and so little about...” I really think that gets at the heart of the challenge for so many American writers. Or at least for me. There are plenty of Jews who wouldn’t consider me very Jewish. And yet I know that elements of Jewish experience and outlook and scholarship and history color every thought I have and everything I put down on paper. It’s not so much that I want to honor that, or that I feel some kind of responsibility to represent “my” people accurately or speak for the culture, as that I can’t help but write through that filter. So I guess that makes me entitled to use it? Entitled or not, I seem to have no choice.
There are at least five other conversations that could sprout from this one. Guess we’ll have to do another round sometime soon! But I did want to pick up on one other thing you said. You mentioned becoming a parent (as well as a child), and the way that has affected your sense of having to be more intentional about pretty much everything. I’m wondering whether you’re seeing ways in which that sense of more urgent intentionality is seeping into your writing. I’m not sure I was aware of it back when my kids were young. But I do look both at what I wrote then and especially what I’m writing now, and it all seems layered with feelings and experiences I have no memory of trying to wedge in there. Maybe writing really is something we draw down from the air rather than call up out of ourselves.
Or maybe we’re just more often writing tired while parenting, which makes it easier to access that marvel-filled, liminal space between being conscious and being elsewhere.
MS: Oh yes! Whenever I’m brave enough to revisit my old writing, I’ll find those new older-me moments that I can fit into the narrative I’d created years ago just as neatly. I guess a lot of what we write is a continual reckoning between our past and present iterations anyway.
Thank you again, Glen! I’m definitely interested in a part two anytime.