Melanie Farmer is a Central Florida based writer and educator who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. She is the winner of a 2019 Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and her work is published in The Tampa Review and Split Lip Magazine.
Q&A
Give us a brief synopsis about this piece.
The piece is written as an instructional guide to how to navigate being an athlete, but within the instruction guide framework, it explore other ideas. The implied expectations that lie in a mother-daughter relationship are central to the piece. But it also explores the contradiction between being both proud of how far one has come while simultaneously seeking validation from some outside source to feel secure that the growth is real. The narrator recaps the current state of her journey in jiu jitsu, not by talking about what she’s learned in the gym, but about what happens in her life outside as a result of her new knowledge and skill.
What inspired you to write it?
When I wrote it I was coming into a moment of really committing to the sport of jiu jitsu. With that came a lot of confidence. I had sort of surprised and impressed myself by taking on this particular athletic endeavor, especially as a person with no history of doing much with sports. But, even as confidence was growing in this one area, I found myself still looking outside for assurance that it was happening. Often, the places I was looking weren’t echoing the answer I wanted. Trying to reconcile the discrepancy between the feeling of personal pride and confidence that the sport brought me with the inability to communicate that joy to others is what the essay journeys through.
Tell us about your journey as a writer.
I have always been a writer from a young age. I wrote quite a bit for my own personal entertainment in middle and high school. I also took writing classes with some teachers who really inspired me to think about writing beyond typical English class assignments and recreational reading. I definitely lost track of myself as a writer in college as I was pursuing other arts interests—mostly theatre.
When I stopped working in theatre I noticed a daily writing habit popped back into my life without me really seeking it out. There was no particular intent behind it other than to see what I could create. The “what would happen if….” approach to writing really woke things back up for me. I don’t know that I thought of myself as a writer, or if I even considered what I was doing to be the foundations of anything.
Mostly I thought of writing as this hobby where I could figure things out. I would (and still do) invent little challenges for myself to see how they would pan out. You can see remnants of this approach in lots of my finished essays—often there is an element of a game in the form I pick. Can you stick to this very distinct voice or point of view choice? Can you write against an expectation or obvious option? Can I make an essay about ___ that doesn’t do ____? I think doing this made me realize how particular I was as a writer.
When I started teaching literature, writing started to follow me around more. Eventually, I ended up teaching both literature and creative writing while working on an MFA. Plugging into my city’s local writing community, making writer friends at retreats, and participating in an MFA program helped me change the way I thought about my role as a writer. Being around other writers, talking about process, and hearing people read their work and tell the story of how it came to be made me realize that what I was doing wasn’t just strange, or a weird little game I played alone—it was writing. Now I think I’m a writer no matter what happens to my writing. That perspective shift has been huge for me, and it’s one I try to pass on to other people.
Is there someone whose writing style influences you?
I don’t know if I can pinpoint any one particular author, but what I can say is that though I write mostly nonfiction, I am influenced by writers of all genres. I select what I read based entirely on interest, not on genre and the authors I gravitate toward are often voice-driven writers. I also love long essays that meander through their subjects and make connections. I love ambiguity, strangeness, and untidy endings.
Are there books you return to when thinking about craft?
Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, and also David Ball’s Backwards & Forwards which is actually about plays, but really influences the way I think about the unfolding of a tale in any genre.
What does it mean to be a writer during a global crisis? Has your writing life or your work been affected or influenced by the events of 2020?
I find that smaller-scale unrest, news events, and crises have often fueled my writing. They seem to kick up memories that mix with the narrative going on around me. I have found the events of Spring and Summer of 2020 sort of enormous and overwhelming to the point of making me feel stumped about how to write about them. Since I write nonfiction, I’m often mining current events and memory. I have found it hard in the past few months to tap into the humor that often fuels my writing. While I often use current events as a place to start, what’s going on now has not worked very well for me as fuel.
Additionally, I keep tripping up against a bad habit as a writer of wondering if the smallness of my personal experience matters. In the face of such looming conflict and large-scale crises, it’s hard to believe that little stories from my little life are important to write down. However, the writing that has been bubbling up for me in the past few months has been heavily connected to these big conversations. And while I often view things as small when I start write about them, the essays seem to keep meandering back to these big, impossible-feeling questions that are at the forefront of the news cycle.
What advice would you give aspiring writers?
Since we’re talking about writing I think it’s important to start with words. The word “aspiring” implies that you’re not yet a writer. If you delete that word and just call yourself a writer, then you have to act. If you have no writing that you have made or are working on, then the first action to take is to make some. The phrase “aspiring writer” is always open; it’s a label that’s waiting for action. Writer is a label that implies the action is already taken. It assigns responsibility. Taking it on can help you upgrade the way you think about the work you’re making. It raises your own bar instead of waiting for someone else to do that.
Past that, I suppose you have to think about the kind of writer you want to be. If you’re making writing and you’re not willing to look at it, you’re probably not a writer. If you think everything you’re writing is fine, or even brilliant, in its first version, I’d say you’re likely not a writer. If your writing excites you just because it exists, that’s a lovely thing, but it’s essentially inward-facing. That sort of writing provides an emotional release, but is likely to only be read by its creator. But, if you can’t stop tinkering with what you make, if you feel things can be improved but never finished, if you see the unused paths in a particular piece and know also that not all of them can or should be taken, then you’re a writer. These feelings are often unsatisfying and are maybe even unappealing. But if you’re familiar with them and even find a weird joy in them, odds are you’re a writer. I don’t think writers are magically imbued with the instinct to write a perfect sentence. Writers choose to write a better sentence—even when the original one was already good.
Rolling: A Ladies’ Guide to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
By Melanie Farmer
An excerpt
First: Fearlessness
You’re a complete coward when it comes to your mother. You’ve fought more imagined battles with her than physical ones with anybody and, while you seem to have stumbled into a reputation of being a “tough girl”[1] both mentally and physically, she remains your greatest opponent. And, though she will never meet you on the mat, you might still be true that, in every match, she wins.
She’ll see it like this:
“What’s that?” Your mother will say. She’ll be referring to the bruises shaped like the hands of large men[2] on your legs. She will have discovered these bruises while looking at you in the backseat of a car from a very unlikely angle which you dressed specifically to avoid. She’ll notice them despite your attempt to wear high enough boots and a low enough hemline to hide them. She won’t want to know how you got them, but she’ll be mad they’re there.
“Are those from that fighting stuff again,” she’ll say.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, I should be worried about who’s beating up on my daughter.”
“That’s not what it is.”
“Then what is it?”
You won’t respond.
But you’ll see it like this:
You covered up your bruises for your grandmother’s 95th birthday party. When you went to get dressed you discovered that your training habit is now written all over your body in the form of tiny blood vessels pressed too hard and broken beneath the skin where they have and leaked into circular shapes and jewel-toned colors. Standing in your underwear you’ll examine these little spots on your body. They are bright red, and deep blue, and a regal, transitional purple. You like them. They are proof of the work you’ve put in and evidence that you’re not too weak to take it. You want to consider short sleeves so you can wear them with the pride of a teenager with a freshly-won hickey. They are the same kind of evidence. Proof that you’re a grown up and you know something know something now. Something secret.
[1] Whatever that means
[2] Because that’s what they are