Unlucky Mel
Three Hills (September 15, 2024)
Interview by Ellen Birkett Morris
Publishing a debut novel is no small feat, and for Aggeliki Pelekidis it took harnessing inspiration from some literary classics and an openness to make the work the best it could be. The result, Unlucky Mel, tells the story of PhD candidate Melody Hollings and her quest to land the perfect academic job somewhere far away from her hometown. This requires that she graduate, finish her novel and convince her good friend Ben to return the favors she’s given by helping him with his writing. But other challenges await, including a sick father and a betrayal that may set Mel on the path of revenge. Pelekidis discusses the creation of Unlucky Mel.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?
PELEKIDIS: My apprenticeship was attending graduate school at Binghamton University where I received my MA and Ph.D. in English with a Creative Writing emphasis. The program involved taking both traditional English Literature courses along with creative writing ones. I had several great mentors for both short story and novel writing, namely Jack Vernon and Jaimee Wriston Colbert. They gave me tons of advice, but one that stands out came from Jack and that was to “cultivate a habit of specificity in all my writing.” I say this to all my writing students to this day. There’s much more great advice that they bestowed upon me, but the main thing both professors did for me was to help me to view myself as a writer.
AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverancecame to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for Unlucky Mel come from?
PELEKIDIS: I happened upon Kingsley Amis’s 1950s novel, Lucky Jim, at some point during graduate school and thought, where have you been all my life? This book was not only hilarious, but it also explored the role of class and classism in higher education through the middle-class main character’s attempts to fit into the elite halls of academia. At the time, which was a few years before 2014 when I started work on Unlucky Mel, there didn’t seem to be any academic satires or campus novels with a female protagonist, something I wanted to rectify. I was also a teaching assistant one semester for a Shakespeare course during my MA, where we read Hamlet. That made me think about the theme of revenge and how doubt over whether it’s justified can impact taking action. The two ideas came together to become the idea of Unlucky Mel.
AUTHORLINK: This book follows in the tradition of books about academia including Stoner and Luck Hank. To what extent did you draw on that tradition to tell Mel’s story? How did you seek to depart from that tradition?
PELEKIDIS: I have not seen either of those but I had read Straight Man by Richard Russo at some point before I began Unlucky Mel. With my book, I wanted to explore how a middle-class woman would do in academia, how imposter syndrome would manifest in her, and how her history of caring for her father would be transposed into caring for a male peer. And then, how all of this would impact her own professional and creative ambitions.
AUTHORLINK: Unlucky Mel deals with the unique challenges women face as they attempt to forge a career path. Talk about how you were able to depict those struggles so vividly and still keep the story funny.
PELEKIDIS: It goes back to Jack Vernon’s advice to cultivate specificity. I had to really get to know Mel, her history, personality, and preferences to be able to create scenes that would be true to her and how she would behave or perceive things that happen to her. That helped me with depicting her daily life and the struggles she dealt with. As for the humor, I think that comes from being extremely mindful of the absurdity I see and experience in real life on a daily basis and then exaggerating it to make it funnier. I’ve been telling funny stories to make and entertain friends since I was a child so it’s challenging for me to explain how it works since it’s so ingrained in my personality.
AUTHORLINK: Your collection of short stories, Patrimonium, won the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Creative Writing. How does writing a novel differ from developing a short story? What aspects of craft cross both disciplines?
PELEKIDIS: While both are challenging and I’m certainly not a master of either, learning how to write a novel was way more difficult for me. My first novel manuscript failed because it started out as a short story and then meandered. I had to learn to create a narrative arc or plot and in the process I discovered that I’m an outliner. But yes, there is a lot of crossover in both genres that has to do with character development, pacing, creating settings and scenes, making decisions on point of view and tone. Learning how to use these elements of craft via short story writing definitely helped me when I switched to novel writing.
AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing Unlucky Mel?
PELEKIDIS: Learning how to create a plot that moved the story along was my biggest challenge and one that I overcame by reading a lot of craft books on plotting and outlining. I had made a lot of mistakes with my first novel that I was determined not to repeat when I started Unlucky Mel.
AUTHORLINK: I’m wondering what advice you offer to apprentice writers about either craft, or staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both.
PELEKIDIS: I would advise apprentice writers to never give up but to also continue learning, especially from failure. If you hear the same piece of advice several times, as I did with what was wrong with my first manuscript, heed it and learn how to fix it. If you make improving whatever you’ve created your priority, as opposed to some concept of being a writer or author, you become much more willing to accept criticism.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
PELEKIDIS: I’m actually working on fixing my first manuscript and taking all that I learned from writing and publishing Unlucky Mel to finally making it better. It’s called One Stone, Two Turtledoves and it’s a comedy about a Greek father who dominates the lives of his wife and two daughters through his control over the family finances and his conditional love.
About the author
Aggeliki Pelekidis earned an MA and Ph.D. in English with a creative writing emphasis from Binghamton University. Her collection of short stories, Patrimonium, won the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Creative Writing. Ann Beattie selected a story of hers as the first-prize winner of the New Ohio Review’s fiction contest. Her writing has appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Confrontation, and many other literary journals. Unlucky Mel was her debut novel. , was published 9/15/24 by Cornell University Press’s Three Hills Imprint. She’s the Associate Director of First-Year Writing at BU and spends her free time gardening, taking care of her many pets, or riding her horses.
