“The thick skin you have to develop as a writer”: Interview with Aggeliki Pelekidis​

Aggeliki Pelekidis holds a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals. She used to work as a public relations executive in New York City.

 

Sam Corradetti: Thanks so much for sharing your work. It was a very interesting read, as a creative writing doctoral student like Mel. I’d love to hear more about your writing process.

 

Aggeliki: I made such a mess of my first novel attempt by “pantsing it,” like just writing and seeing what happened. With Unlucky Mel, I actually outlined. I thought about the progression of the book, how there would be chapters with a lot happening, and then quieter chapters, and then a buildup. I had tried to get an agent for my first novel and received so many comments about, “Oh, we like your writing, but the narrative arc is a problem.” I was like, oh my God, I don’t know how to plot things. So I did a ton of research on plotting and outlining and I was like, okay, this is my process now. I am not a pantser. I am an outliner and a plotter. I need to have that structure and then I can play around with it as I go.

 

Sam: I’m very big on outlines, but I’m also very big on burning an outline to the ground when it no longer serves me and rebuilding it.

 

Aggeliki: Absolutely. If you come up with something that’s not in the outline, go with it and see where it goes, and if there are parts that you wrote that just don’t fit. That was the cool part of working with my acquisitions editor, Jennifer Savran Kelly. They were able to help me figure out parts that weren’t working, that weren’t really in service to the overall plot or were slowing things down, and parts where I needed to have more buildup between interactions with characters to have more of a trajectory along the course of the book.

 

Sam: Going through the process of editing a novel to the point of publication, does that change your writing process, or the way you look at your work?

 

Aggeliki: Yes, it does. It really helps you with taking out the boring parts. Definitely. My editors made Unlucky Mel a leaner, faster-paced book. Initially, it probably had an extra 25,000 words or so. My process is, I start with this bare-bones thing, and then I go off and it becomes too long-winded, and then I have to rein it back in again. That editing process enabled me to be much more brutal with cutting out parts in my first novel that I’m trying to fix. It definitely made me a lot more likely to murder my darlings. How many times have we heard that saying, and then in reality, trying to apply it, it’s a completely different thing. But there can be no darlings. You’ve got to be willing to say, okay, I’m just going to cut it, even though I love it.

 

Sam: Once you’ve done major revisions, it does make killing your darlings easier, but it also makes you better able to see how ugly your darlings are. You realize that you’re not looking at this darling all by itself. You’re looking at this darling in this crowd full of people, and God, it is ugly and it needs to get out of the way.

 

Aggeliki: Exactly. You’re ruining the picture. Get out. Absolutely.

 

Sam: Okay, so in Unlucky Mel, two aspects that stood out were the role of gender and labor, within the personal, professional, and familial spaces. Can you speak more about how these aspects work together for Mel?

 

Aggeliki: Sure. I thought about what Mel’s background was, being from a sort of lower middle class, very small city like Binghamton, and the way she grew up. I think it’s shaped her to be a little bit more conservative, traditional. Then she goes to graduate school, and her sort of point of view is expanded by reading and interacting with people. It was important for me to also look at how when you’re a daughter, the responsibilities for elder care fall on women much more. So that caretaking for her father ends up transitioning to how she interacts with other men in her life, like how she falls into the relationship with her friend, Ben. 

 

And so I wanted to point out both how this can occur, but also how sometimes we fall into these roles and don’t realize the toll they’re taking on us. It’s a kind of awareness of how we are falling into the trap of being caretakers and how it’s something that society seems to want of women quite often. So I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just that everybody’s taking advantage of her, but also that she is allowing some of this to happen because she doesn’t know any better. That’s her life experience. So I sympathize with her in that it’s a tough place to be in. And I think that in her relationship with Ben, she starts realizing that she allowed some of that to occur because she was so flattered by his attention.

 

Sam: It raises a lot of interesting questions about agency.

 

Aggeliki: Exactly. We have agency, but then we also have the pressures that are put on us, and it’s a battle between the two things: the pressures, external pressures and environmental pressures and social pressures, to behave a certain way, versus our sense of the injustice of that and how willing we are to buck those pressures and go against them and do what’s right for ourselves. One of my blurb writers [Lisa Nikolidakis, author of No One Crosses the Wolf] had an interesting perspective, that it was refreshing to witness a female character finally prioritize her own ambition. And I was like, that’s really interesting. I don’t know if I’d thought of it in that way, but it is Mel starting to say, no, I want this life for myself, and I’m tired of all these things making it so that I can’t have it.

 

Sam: While we’re talking about this, one of the moments that struck me was when Mel’s father says that after Mel’s mother died, he gave up his whole life to take care of her, and so now Mel must take care of him. It’s a mutual transaction for him. But Mel’s perspective is that when her mother died, she had to step up at home, and is now having to step up even more as a caretaker. And then with Ben, he doesn’t share much of himself, so he can’t give as much of himself to Mel as she gives to him. Both men prioritize independence in their relationships with Mel. It’s very transactional, but Mel ends up paying a higher bill than they do.

 

Aggeliki: Yes, I think both of the men ask a lot of her.

 

Sam: But they wouldn’t see it that way.

 

Aggeliki: It’s normalized to them. It’s normalized that she would step into this role. I mean, Mel refers to herself as Ben’s chauffeur and his editor and this, that and the other. So she falls into the trap of caretaking for him, and he does reciprocate to a certain extent, but again, it’s not equal. And then with her father, he’s very dramatic. So of course he’s going to make himself sound like he’s a saint. I think he’s fully aware of how much Mel has done for him, but he expects that she’ll continue because that’s been the pattern for so long. And so in a way, she’s stepped into the role that he would perceive a wife to play. There’s a point where she actually wishes she could have a wife, that there was somebody that could play that role for her because she’s pulled in so many directions, she can’t even play it for herself.

 

Sam: And when she starts putting herself forward, she doesn’t necessarily become individualistic. She becomes closer to her colleagues and friends. She becomes an active participant in her community.

 

Aggeliki: Yes, exactly. I think all these literary influences start coming through, and you think of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and that’s kind of where Mel needs to be. She’s been codependent in so many situations in her life from her father and then Ben, and I think it’s really important for her to reach out and create community with other women. This is a character whose mother died when she was a child, so she doesn’t know how to have really close community ties with other women. And so I think that her growing relationship with Cicely, her looking out for Sherry, is key to her becoming more aware of what she can do to help other women and other marginalized communities. That’s one of the things I wanted to make clear in her trajectory, is realizing it’s got to be an intersectional kind of feminism. It can’t just be like, I’m going to watch out for other women. No, there are so many marginalized populations in academia that are not represented. I’m glad that at the end, Mel is starting to become more aware of the unfairness, not just for her, but for other people as well.

 

Sam: She finds communal reciprocity. Instead of being a back and forth, you give this, I give that, it’s more like, we are all actively supporting each other and we’re not keeping tabs.

 

Aggeliki: Exactly. You don’t have to keep tabs when it’s truly reciprocal. When it’s not is when you start resenting it and getting to the point where things seem very unbalanced. Mel is trying to move towards relationships that are fair and equitable, and not based on an unfair power dynamic.

 

Sam: Mel also faces uncertainty in her job prospects, her dissertation, her father’s health. So many things are out of her control, and what control she does have is often tenuous. It goes back to what we were talking about regarding agency and how much control you truly have over the chaos.

 

Aggeliki: Right, exactly. There’s a pile up. She’s unlucky. There are so many things that she can’t do anything about. I think that powerlessness has a negative impact on her state of mind and pushes her to behave in ways where she feels like she’s controlling something, doing something, even if it’s not exactly the best way to go about it. But she’s pushed to the brink by all of these things outside of her control.

 

Sam: That’s an interesting way to put it. Mel has been reacting to everything and she hasn’t really had a chance to take action.

 

Aggeliki: Absolutely. She has had her life dictated to her, until whatever pushes her to decide to go back to graduate school. That’s the first big decision she makes for herself. 

 

Sam: As writers, we spend so much time on the page and in our heads. You do some homesteading-type hobbies, horseback riding and raising chickens and gardening. Do you view these types of hobbies as creative outlets?

 

Aggeliki: They are creating twelve-year-old Aggeliki’s ideal life. Here’s the thing, after I graduated with my PhD, I had that other novel that I was trying to get something to happen with, and nothing happened to it. And I thought to myself, okay, you’re either going to feel like a failure, or you’re going to find other things that you can explore to create this larger identity for yourself. 

 

So I started thinking to myself, what do I enjoy doing? Horseback riding. So I started riding again. Now I have two horses and a loaner pony. What else do I like to do? I like to garden. So now I have this massive garden. I had chickens when I was a kid. I loved chickens. They’re amazing little endearing creatures. I’ve got chickens now and too many cats and two dogs.

 

Basically, it stemmed from me just being who I am, but also realizing that I needed to have an identity. I needed to have a life that was separate from the writing so that the crush of rejection didn’t destroy me. I mean, the thick skin you have to develop as a writer. It’s a lot of noes. And so I needed yeses in other areas of my life.

 

Sam: Do you have any suggestions or advice for creative writing doctoral students and/or debut novelists? 

 

Aggeliki: Keep that thick skin going and just keep learning. Keep growing and developing your craft, and be careful who you trust. Right? Don’t be like Mel. But yeah, I would say just persistence really, and never giving up on your dream to get published.

 

Sam: And until then, find your yeses.

 

Aggeliki: Elsewhere. Exactly. You find your yeses in other things in your life and find joy. Is there something to be said by pouring yourself into writing for a really long time? But is that sustainable? For me, it wasn’t. I really needed to have other things that gave me joy in life, because writing is so demanding. So I would recommend pursuing your other passions as well as being persistent in writing.

 

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Unlucky Mel is published by Three Hills, a Cornell University Press imprint, and is available for purchase everywhere books are sold.

Sam Corradetti’s work has been supported by The Fabulist, Fourteen Hills, the Rin Kelly scholarship for speculative fiction, the BookEnds fellowship, and others. Sam received an MFA from Temple University and is pursuing a PhD in English at Binghamton University.