A Solemn Pleasure

Melissa Pritchard is the author of eight books of fiction, including the novel Palmerino and the story collection The Odditorium, as well as the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in 2015). Among other honors, her books have received the Flannery O’Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg awards and two of her short fiction collections were New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice selections. Pritchard has worked as a journalist in Afghanistan, India, and Ethiopia, and her nonfiction has appeared in various publications, including O, The Oprah Magazine, Arrive, Chicago Tribune, and Wilson Quarterly. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Foreword contributor Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the best-selling novel Remember Me Like This, a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Corpus Christi: Stories. He’s also the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. He is the Paul and Catherine Buttenweiser Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University.

I.
A Room in London
The writer lives for two months in London, in another writer’s cramped but atmospheric refuge.
Spirit and Vision
In this essay, the question “why write?” is posed and by way of an answer, Walt Whitman is shown to be a writer of compassionate witness, in contrast to the profit-based pressures of the marketplace.
From the Deep South to the Desert South: An Epiphyte’s Confession
Aware of the power of region in fiction, the writer wonders if her own bland, semi-erased origins will be an obstacle to her literary ambitions.
On Kaspar Hauser
In the British Library, composing a fictional account of the German-born feral child, Kaspar Hauser, the writer comes to see books as devotional objects, holy histories, reliquaries of the human mind.

II.
Time and Biology: On the Threshold of the Sacred
How inescapable pressures of temporality and mortality upon any writer’s work can be met with cultivated courage and an undiminished passion for expressing emotional truths.
Elephant in the Dark
In this essay, an argument is made for “point of view” as being one of the most critical, early decisions to be made by the writer when embarking on a new story.
The Gift of Warwick
A powerful, bittersweet arc of community can emerge in a writing workshop over weeks or months, attesting to attachments formed by a common vulnerability of writers and their shared passion for language and story.

III.
Doxology
The origins and history of the dachshund lead into the author’s own love for her miniature male dachshund, Simon.
A Solemn Pleasure
When the writer reluctantly travels to a writing residency in a castle outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, weeks after her mother’s death, her grief is given perspective when she discovers a cemetery of ancient headstones, each inscription a compressed, often tragic, story.
A Graven Space
In this reflective essay on Georgia O’Keefe, a question emerges: is it possible we idealize the lives of renowned artists in an attempt to unconsciously avoid responsibility for the success or failure of our own creativity?
Decomposing Articles of Faith
Here is an unorthodox, even heretical, response to familiar phrases of Catholic prayer by the writer, herself an unorthodox, even heretical, Catholic.

IV.
Finding Ashton
In this piece, the writer embeds with six female soldiers in Panjshir Province, Afghanistan, and forms an unexpected attachment to the youngest, Senior Airman Ashton Goodman, who will be killed by an IED outside Bagram Air Field four months later.
“Still, God Helps You”: Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave
The harrowing story of a Sudanese boy captured from his village and enslaved by the Janjaweed, only to escape years later into still more harrowing circumstances, as told to the writer by William Akoi Mawwin, now the writer’s informally adopted son.
Circle of Friends
Bereft and directionless, in quiet crisis, the writer travels with photographers Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith to the remote Omo River region of Ethiopia, gaining an unexpected perspective on aging and loneliness.

V.
On Bibliomancy, Anthropodermic Bibliopegy and the Eating Papers
An essay on books, focusing on the use of books for divination, on rare but extant books bound in human skin, and on the ancient healing practice of eating words written on paper.