3 Questions with Melissa Beneche

Melissa Beneche is a Haitian-American writer. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University. She is a runner up for the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar and has received residencies for her fiction from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and Tin House. Her work appears in Bennington Review and SmokeLong Quarterly. She lives, writes, and teaches stories in South Florida.

HFR’s Fiction Editor Christie Louie chats with Melissa about her piece “Hands” from Issue 69. You can preorder the issue here.

“Hands” features an incredible attention to the body—especially to hands and hair. How do you approach writing the physical sensations and details of the body? How do you see the body working in relation to this story’s themes?

Thank you for your questions. Regarding themes (always hard for me to assess), I’m seeing now that a beloved’s absence is one unifying idea; the reality of being “Young, Gifted, and Black” (to use Nina Simone’s great lyric) in Florida is another; and, of course, Black hair is one. In considering a character like Sabra, who desires what she doesn’t have, the “attention to the body” might, in one way, map out Sabra’s void, capture a semblance of the warmth she misses, seeks, conjures (through memory of her mother’s hands, through the math bowl). Plus, for Black girls, a hairstyle can be a political choice as well as an aesthetic one. Our hair can affect our moods, our dreams, our relationships. Our hair speaks its own language. Our hair may generate a violent response from others. 

And more generally, feelings felt so much more visceral in me as a child, like the strange, random object a child might thrust in her mouth. It felt right to get physical with Sabra’s feelings.

Sabra’s mother’s absence is an important thread in “Hands.” While we don’t meet her in-scene, she is present in Sabra’s memory, in Sabra’s wants and imagination, and in the remembered sensations of her hands in Sabra’s hair. Can you speak to the experience of writing Sabra’s mother? How did you make her absence so visceral and dimensional on the page?

I think this question links to the first one. Specific details are a writer’s building blocks. I’m glad to use concrete objects, action, speech, appearance, all those honeyed writerly tools, to build a character. Not to keep preaching, but there is also a difference between presenting details and processing details. With the first draft, I was having a hard time describing Sabra’s mother, so I had to start small, with the specificity and significance of the tangible. I tried to see through Sabra. Sabra is not so much haunted by her mother’s absence as she is choosing to walk with her, still, though her mother is not with her, though her mother, sadly, may stay absent for years more. Our same building blocks hold.

Is there anything you’d like to share about your story “Hands” that we don’t know?

It took me a long time to feel free to do my own thing on the page without fear! I did everything wrong with this story, my mind kept saying. Was too ambiguous. Stuffed it with too many memories. Jumped off my personal experiences of attending math bowls. Included an epigraph, one from a glory of a poem that had saved me from grief. Included a nearly two-page paragraph. But I still wrote it, asked others to read for feedback, revised, and asked others to read again. Only afterwards did I think that doing so might be part of being a writer. I’m still learning this. Thankfully.

Christie Louie is a writer from the Bronx, New York. She is a second-year fiction student in the MFA program at ASU, where she also serves as Fiction Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.