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Melissa Fraterrigo

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Melissa Fraterrigo

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August 2017


Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the forthcoming memoir in essays, The Perils of Girlhood (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) and the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press) and the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press). Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies from Shenandoah and The Massachusetts Review to storySouth, Notre Dame Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has been a finalist for awards from Glimmer Train on multiple occasions, twice nominated for Pushcart Awards, and was the winner of the Sam Adams/Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Contest. She teaches writing at Purdue University and is founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers Studi ...more

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Melissa Fraterrigo Glory Days is the result of some dark days. In the winter of 2011, a few months after moving to Indiana, someone very dear to me was diagnosed with ca…moreGlory Days is the result of some dark days. In the winter of 2011, a few months after moving to Indiana, someone very dear to me was diagnosed with cancer. Writing had always been a means for me to make sense of the world and now I was unable to read a paragraph much less write one. I slept poorly and rather than tossing and turning, got out of bed during the wee hours of the morning to read poetry. I found myself captured by the images these poets were using to describe characters and place. It is during times of change when we feel most alone, and in this time of uncertainty, descriptions of the natural world felt like a comfort. I read a lot of Sharon Olds and Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Diane Gilliam Fisher, and while I didn’t have the constitution at that time to write, I felt like I was learning something new about how certain images held tangible weight that extended beyond the page and could even reflect a character’s emotional state.
So as I was becoming more conscious of details on the page, I was also becoming more aware of Indiana and the place where I now lived. One day the parking lot attendant of our local library told me he’d just come back to town, that he’d been south burying both his mother and sister. I don’t know whether it was the look on his face or something else, but I heard a line: “Gardner hears dogs scrambling up the trees after a squirrel or a neighbor’s cat, he tells himself, eager to be calmed.” This became the first line to “Teensy’s Daughter” and that was it. I was back to writing stories, only now creating a place and accurately portraying its landscape felt as vital to me as the development of characters and their situations.

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Average rating: 4.16 · 212 ratings · 89 reviews · 5 distinct worksSimilar authors
Glory Days

3.86 avg rating — 93 ratings3 editions
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The Perils of Girlhood: A M...

4.46 avg rating — 78 ratings2 editions
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The Longest Pregnancy

3.79 avg rating — 14 ratings — published 2006 — 3 editions
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Living Proof by Tiffany Graham Charkosky
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I read at nights and for the past few evenings, I've been eager to go to bed so I could return to LIVING PROOF! This is a beautiful book that makes the angst of the narrator's genetic diagnosis real for the reader. The way she writes about her mom wh ...more
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Camouflage by Heather  Sweeney
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It would be easy to categorize this as a divorce narrative, as CAMOUFLAGE does showcase the dissolution of Sweeney's marriage. Yet the power of this book is the way our narrator first dissolves under the pressures of a military marriage only to pull ...more
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Level Watch by Mary   Ardery
Level Watch
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Sometimes you finish a book and simply cannot do anything else but let the words settle in your bones. That was my experience with Mary Ardery's brilliant LEVEL WATCH. Evocative, fierce, attentive and insightful, this is a book that I will be returni ...more
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Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson
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I cannot say enough about the beauty of this book--the prose is as taut as a drum, the ideas and transitions about motherhood and how women routinely push themselves into idealized forms of womanhood despite such shapes being far from organic. I have ...more
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Love in the Time of Time's Up by Christine Sneed
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