2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

and innovative teacher who knows how to hone in on what works in a story as
well as to help her student’s make the changes necessary to resuscitate a story
back to life. A workshop with Melissa is like being in group therapy. She got us
to delve deep and pull up what was needed to make a story resonate and ring
true! She also became a friend to all of us. No one could possibly forget
Melissa Pritchard and how she transformed each one of us!
Meg: I wanted to go back to the early years of your writing career.
You made it happen without the MFA and I thought you might have
some advice for burgeoning writers with that burning yearning to write,
but not much knowledge of what to do next Is an MFA important at
this point in time to get a book published
Melissa: A cultural belief has taken hold in the last fifteen or
twenty years that you must have an MFA in order to publish, to succeed
as a writer. I don't agree. A passion for literature, for reading, a willingness
to practice the lonely art and daily discipline of writing, to study the
work of writers you love, can give you as much of a chance as anyone.
MFA Programs have their benefits, absolutely, but they are not requisite
to being a successful writer. Occasionally I choose to gently shock my
students by telling them I am self-taught. Years ago, as an aspiring writer,
I had no money to attend an MFA program; as a young midwestern
mother, I wrote at home when the children were napping. I knew no living
writers. I simply had this zeal to write, and I tried to learn how from
my best teachers, authors whose books I checked out of the local library
as often as I could.
Meg: You once told me that you scoured used bookstores and bought
obscure black and white photography collections for your inspiration. A
haunting face or a scene ignited something in you. Is this still one of
your tricks and are there others that work well for you
Melissa: I still buy old books of photography, and sometimes use
them as prompts for students in class. I've never actually written a story
based entirely on a photograph, I just find them stimulating to my imagination,
photographs of people from different eras, different regions and
Santa Fe Literary Review 71