Student Spotlight: Melissa Alipalo

Why do you write?

I write to remem­ber, as a matter of record. I write to honor the people, places, and ideas that have given my life unex­pect­ed meaning. I write with the hope and intent of sharing some of that meaning with others. There’s enough terror and beauty in the world for us all. I write to mend and solid­i­fy those frag­men­tary and float­ing thoughts that won’t leave me alone.

Is there an author who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

For poets, I have loved and learned most from Adelia Prado, Carolyn Forché, Chris­t­ian Wyman, Aga Shahid Ali, Martín Espada, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Khazim Ali. They are my per­mis­sion givers.

For fiction (and some of their non­fic­tion), I read and reread at the feet of Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, Samrat Upad­hyay, V.S. Naipaul, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith.

A lot of my think­ing is ground­ed in the the­o­ret­i­cal work of Pierre Bour­dieu, Michel Fou­cault, Susan Sontag, and the med­i­ta­tions of Joan Didion, Simon Weil, and Verlyn Klinkenborg.

My lit­er­ary origins belong whole-heart­ed­ly to Beverly Cleary and C.S. Lewis.

Why did you choose Stonecoast?

I wanted to study where I am build­ing my lit­er­ary life. Though its stu­dents and faculty come from across the country, Stonecoast also has a mean­ing­ful pres­ence in Maine. I wanted to be part of that mutu­al­ly rein­forc­ing com­mu­ni­ty. I had also been men­tored by poet Cate Marvin and knew I could trust any program where she taught.

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

During my first res­i­dence in June 2021, I had the priv­i­lege of work­shop­ping with Martín Espada and learn­ing his ideas for the broken sonnet: “A broken sonnet for a broken—but not hopeless—world.” It pro­vid­ed me an entry way into mate­r­i­al that had been dif­fi­cult to think about let alone write about, yet I knew the only way to the other side was writing through it. I began that work in his work­shop. After the res­i­den­cy, I received an affirm­ing letter from Espada, a gesture that will mean a lot to me for a long time.

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

I hope to accom­plish a sense of con­tent­ment and only mod­er­ate ambi­tion. That I won’t con­stant­ly feel like I’m running late on my own life. Mean­while, let’s get that novel fin­ished and a nice col­lec­tion of poetry assem­bled and a few essays in the back pocket. I hope to try that thing called “sub­mis­sion.”  I hope to make it back to Nepal to finish the story I started gath­er­ing before the pan­dem­ic. I hope to see many of those moun­tain faces alive and well.

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

Too many envi­able poems to choose just one, but there is only one Gilead, by Mar­i­lynne Robinson.

Universalist Bells

by Melissa Alipalo 

                  —May 31, 2020

Sunday woke to sun and smoke. Cities

reclaimed overnight. Burnt offer­ings made

to the pave­men­t’s cheek that wheezed into

fresh corpse kin­dling. Uni­formed herd

impuni­ty stand by to strike. Flags cry for blood

from stones, fists clinch for more than just the crusts

of our daily white bread, for lives unleavened

by knee-to-the-neck history. Enough news

for one Sunday morning. I take my privilege

for a walk on the beach. On the way,

a Sperry-wearing crowd gives up brunch,

gathers on the lawn of the white church, 

plac­ards of New England restraint. Silence,

while the steeple takes toll.

Melissa Alipalo lives in South­ern Maine with her resilient émigré family after spend­ing most of her adult life in the Philip­pines. She has worked in more than 15 coun­tries in Asia as a jour­nal­ist and social devel­op­ment spe­cial­ist for inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tions. While poetry is her daily medium, Alipalo also has a novel in progress and an ongoing doc­u­men­tary project on a remote, climate-threat­ened Himalayan village in Nepal. She grew up in the pews and Sunday School rooms of the Amer­i­can Midwest, the daugh­ter of an evan­gel­i­cal, Pen­te­costal min­is­ter. For Alipalo, writing feels like a con­stant and nec­es­sary nego­ti­a­tion between the sacred and the profane, duty and love, home and away, being present and absent.