Tessa Mellas is the 2013 winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Her debut collection Lungs Full of Noise will be released from the University of Iowa Press in October of 2013. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and is currently a senior lecturer at the Ohio State University.
Her story "Dye Job" appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.
Here, Tessa Mellas talks to interviewer David Bachman about the work of lips, a girl’s questionable accomplishments, and the natural cruelty of teens.
1. At least twice in this piece, Ruth actually succeeds in gaining access to that for which she at one time reached, namely a grape supply and intimate proximity to Felix. How do you want the reader to view the accomplishments of this character - empowering, validating, compromising, sad, tragic, any or all or none of these?
Wow! Hard question to start with. I think that “compromising” is the best adjective you’ve chosen given that Ruth defies her own intelligence in eating fruit that she knows is “tainted” and in engaging with Felix in such a way. I do also see these actions as empowering and validating, though, albeit in misguided ways. At this point in her life, I think that Ruth needs to believe that she can do daring things that challenge her reputation as a studious innocent girl. I see Ruth as being on the cusp of great changes. This story seems to take place right before her friendship with Lily comes to an end. She is realizing that her relationship with Lily is not really a friendship, but she is using Lily’s condescension as an empowering device to become a stronger, more willful person. Though I do see these actions as sad, I also see them as evidence that Ruth will be a very different person in a few years, someone who is not so easily pushed around and someone who makes the right decisions for who she is rather than for who her friends or parents are.
2. Do you consider Lily’s treatment of Ruth especially cruel or is it just par for the course for characters of this age, who naturally have such volatile dispositions? Can you talk in general about how you designed the relationship between these two girls?
I do consider Lily’s treatment of Ruth to be especially cruel, but I also think that this treatment is extremely common for girls in both middle and high school. My own experience as a girl was very much like this. In the transition from elementary school to middle school, I found myself losing friends as they transitioned into the popular group and I got lost in a no man’s land of grouplessness. This seems to be par for the course. The girls with social power retain that power by verbally harassing girls with less social power. I taught high school for a few years and was also a counselor at summer camps, and this behavior never seems to change. I wrote Lily’s character by channeling the voices of certain students and classmates and imagined a relationship between Lily and an awkward introspective girl, who was just hanging onto that friendship, desperately, longingly, and perhaps knowing that it will soon come to an end. And when it does come to an end, perhaps it will feel like relief.
3. The first line of this story provides an image of a pair of lips sucking on fat grapes. The last scene is that of genitalia being brought to another pair of lips. Was this specific arc and resolution, if it is one, deliberate or is this how the story just unfolded? How conscious were you that the piece was beginning and ending with this oral imagery?
I don’t think that the first draft of the story was bookended with such sexual imagery, but a writer named Randy DeVita suggested it in a workshop at Bowling Green State University. Thanks, Randy! Since then, I have quite intentionally kept it in as I think it is thematically fitting.
4. What are the challenges and limitations of writing teenage characters? Or does the fact that younger people are less predictable and more capable of rash turns in behavior liberate the writer whose job it is to create them, in that anything can go and you can cast a wider net than you would with more predictable adults?
I do find it liberating to write about teenaged girls perhaps because this time in my own life seemed so traumatic and cruel. The angst of that age is so rife with possibilities for fiction. I think that you’ve nailed down many of the qualities of teenagers that make them so interesting in fiction. Also, as a teenager I remember feeling like I had so little control over my life and that helplessness produces so much angry energy that can just fuel the writing process even more than a decade after the fact.
5. Do earlier drafts of this piece offer different narrative arcs or resolutions? If so, are you interested in talking about those drafts and why you took the paths we see in the published draft?
The first draft of the story ended with Ruth (who previously had a different name) watching from Felix’s closet as another girl, the girl from band, gives Felix a blow job. Another writer Mark Baumgartner from my Bowling Green MFA group said, That’s not right. It’s gotta end with Ruth giving the blow job. At first I thought he was nuts. I thought, Ruth would never do that. But after two seconds of thought, I realize how completely right he was. Thanks, Mark! My fellow MFA writers are all such excellent writers and helped shape this and many other stories in extremely important ways. Earlier drafts also included a Greek chorus of mothers at PTA meetings in the school cafeteria, but those really weren’t working so they got the axe.
6. What are you writing these days?
I am currently working on a few creative nonfiction essays about environmentalism. Also, I am working on a novel with another teenaged protagonist. The novel is speculative and takes up environmental issues. I am hoping to get a lot of work done on it this summer. Thanks so much for asking, and thank you for your interest in my work. I was excited to see Lily and Ruth find a home in such a great journal.