Melissa Range// Beheading the Berserker

By Emily McCrary 

Meeting artists is a dangerous business. Every interview is pregnant with that ugly baby named arrogance or attitude—the possibility that the person seated in front of you, while knackful, will wreck their own artistic persona in one fell swoop. But sometimes, the baby comes out crying and screaming and red in the cheeks and it’s the greatest single thing you’ve ever laid eyes on, and suddenly that poem or that song or that painting is alive. The artist is sitting right in front of you and pulling back the curtain—and this time she’s the man behind it and she’s fielding questions. 

Melissa Range loves swimming. She likes to have coffee every morning and thinks that hotels can be depressing. She loves the South and looks forward to a day when she can move back to her home soil from her current location in Missouri. She has trouble finishing a narrative, but sees no reason that poets today can’t write epics, and she loves the playful quality of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ work. Melissa Range possesses the intellectual austerity of a doctoral candidate, yet simultaneously bubbles with the adolescent enthusiasm of someone who has just learned for the first time what a poem is, or found out how to manipulate the sound of a palatalized stop, or discovered slant rhyme, or uncovered how to make a reader feel, well, present in the work.

It’s obvious that Range is from the South, from Tennessee even. Her accent is pronounced but her tone is gentle, and she punctuates her sentences with giggles and drawn out vowels. She drops g’s and she uses the word “like,” but you’d never doubt her education. It’s almost as if she makes saying it okay.

Rtm spent the morning sipping coffee with Melissa Range and talking about what it means to be a writer in the South. We asked Range if she considers herself thus—that is, a Southern writer—and braced ourselves for the worst. It’s not uncommon to resent a label like that, but the more we talked to her, Range surprised us again and again.

“I do consider myself a Southern writer,” she says, smiling. “I specifically consider myself an Appalachian poet because I’m from East Tennessee and I’m from Appalachia, and that’s a different Southern experience. The geography’s different. The economics. It’s definitely a poorer region of the south. There’s a history of a lot of denigration of the region—I think there’s a lot of history of denigration of the South overall.”

And Range is no stranger to said denigration. She’s been told that it’s in her best interest to enroll in speech therapy to lose her accent if she ever hopes to be taken seriously. She tells the story of being in a writers’ colony in New York early in her writing career: A composer from New York criticized her for continuing to live and write in the South, because, as he claimed, all the great art is made in New York. Range didn’t miss a beat in reminding him that William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty all hail from below the Mason-Dixon line, just like herself.

Labels don’t seem to bother Range. There’s a strength about her that is no doubt rooted in that tradition of self-assured Southern women—that strange coexistence of stubborn and sweet, gentle and fervid. Her headstrong sense of identity bolsters the power of her writing. Much of her first book of poems, Horse and Rider, personifies weapons, deals with violence, and explores battlefield mentality. It’s far from gentle, yet it’s vulgar in the most appealing of ways. It’s sound driven, as is much of Range’s work, and commands language as deftly as Maurice Ravel did his ivories.

Range is a student of language, especially in its archaic forms—saturating her poems with words like “berserker” and “yeoman.” Her poem, “The Battle-Axe,” first published in New South, reads:

But let’s dial up some double-digit centuries. After all, Melissa Range lives here too. During her reading at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Writers’ Week, Range stops mid-poem. “Now, do you y’all know the phrase ‘flat as a flitter’?” she says. “No? Well, my Grandma used to say it, and I just love the way it sounds, so I decided it needed to go into a poem.” And Ranges rolls back into an ode to her Southern upbringing. That’s how Melissa Range does things—with self-assured resolve.

“I feel really committed to preserving the language [of the South],” says Range. “That’s one reason I use a lot of archaic words in my poems, and it’s also a reason that I want to continue to explore Southern slang and Southern construction, specifically the words and speech patterns of my grandmother’s generation. When I left my hometown, I immediately saw what people thought of where I’m from. They would hear my Southern accent and I heard the way they talked about hillbillies or poor people—it really instilled in me a commitment to always being on the side of the oppressed, the underdog. To me, that seems very tied to where I’m from.”

And that’s just it—It’s not a North-South border war. It’s not a dust-kicking or a pot-stirring. It’s just reaching into her knapsack and pulling out some of the pieces we’ve been looking for, even if we couldn’t give them a name. How easy it is to forget when advocacy is not limited the abrasive or the political or the pitiful, but can simply be holding a microphone to a tradition, a place–even a language–that often gets marginalized for the sake of ethnocentricity or some unnecessary guilt.

“I have a protagonist in my head,” Range says, “who’s about seventy-years-old. He’s seen more than I’ve seen, so I’m not sure how to flesh him out yet. He’s a character who goes wandering, but why does he do that? I can see him in all these places and the way he acts and the way he interacts with people, but until I figure out what make him leave and never come back, I don’t know how to pursue him.”

She takes a few sips of coffee and thinks a little bit more. “I’m just not wise enough to write it yet,” she says, resigning, allowing herself to not know the answers right now. Letting fall that green curtain and going back to work.

Melissa Range’s first book, Horse and Rider, won the 2010 Walt McDonald First Book Award. The Believer called it “exciting, disturbing, [and] promising.” Melissa Range also has a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award under her belt, a Discovery/ The Nation Prize, a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She boasts publication in the Hudson Review, Image, and The Paris Review, to name a few. She’s currently working on her PhD in English at the University of Missouri.