CCS was honored to showcase 50 individuals and activities during our 50th Anniversary in 2017-2018 to share our rich history. Take a look at the amazing people responsible for making our unconventional College possible!   

CCS: As a Literature '04 alumna, how did CCS impact your life?

 

Melissa Seley: Where to begin? At the beginning, I suppose.

 

I came to CCS from a difficult place, from a tumultuous home, although, thankfully, one not without love or educational encouragement, in suburban Sacramento, where I felt very much an outsider. Literature had always been my secret outlet, an escape into a larger humanity, but my experience of writing and reading consisted largely of isolation. From my very first class at CCS, I felt I had found my people, for the first time in my life. By people, I include peers in my fellow students and mentors in my professors, but also, on the larger scale, the fantastically broad and capacious swath of writers and artists, living and dead, renowned and obscure, whom I encountered across the course of my studies at CCS. Those encounters formed the foundation of the writing life I now inhabit. Chaucer, Jamaica Kincaid, Kenzaburo Oe, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Errol Morris, Junot Diaz, Henry David Thoreau, David Foster Wallace, Mary Carr, Marguerite Duras, John Berger, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Mitchell, Dawn Powell, William Carlos Williams, Susan Sontag, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Anne Carson, JoAnn Beard, Willa Cather, James Baldwin…

 

There are poems I memorized in a class on forms with John Wilson still indelibly etched in my mind. For instance, speaking of seminal encounters, Csezlaw Milosz’s “The Encounter:”

 

We were riding through frozen fields/at dawn/suddenly a hare ran across the road/one of us pointed to it with his hand/that was long ago/today neither of them is alive, not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture/O my love, where are they, where are they going/the flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles/I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder

 

There was a crucially influential Nonfiction Profiles course I took with Caroline Allen during which I spent many days in the small town of Garey, outside of Santa Barbara, population 80. There I talked to residents and collected oral histories, ultimately culminating in a long-form essay that appeared alongside Bob Debris’ photographs in an exhibition at the Santa Barbara County Museum of Art. That profile project marked my first attempt at immersion journalism, a form I’d previously known nothing about. I have not looked back since. The hands-on knowledge I acquired in that single class informs all the profiles I write, whether intellectual explorations of performance artists for my graduate thesis at Sarah Lawrence college, or pop magazine features like the essay I recently wrote for Paper on ingénue singer Kacy Hill and her experience with sexual abuse or a recent essay for Playboy on conceptual artist and tattoo guru Scott Campbell. Every single class I took with Caroline Allen so fundamentally influenced my work that I can no longer imagine my artistic life or trajectory without her. She expanded my sense of literature from one based narrowly in (albeit beloved) books and authors to an almost oceanic absorption of artistic forms. Caroline’s exuberant encouragement and example fostered the ambition and drive that led me to study film and literature at the Paris Center for Critical Studies/La Sorbonne Paris Trois during my fourth and final year of undergraduate work, and later to pursue an M.F.A in Nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College.

 

There was also, it must be said, it cannot be said strongly enough, my husband. Alex Scordelis (CCS Literature ‘04). I met Alex while we were both literature students at CCS. We were neighbors in downtown Santa Barbara, and I will always associate those early days of knowing him with the orange tree branches that swung over my shoddy porch and the espressos we drank there, in the citrus shade, talking about A.J. Liebling or Kurosawa.

 

First art. Then, incredibly, unexpectedly, to my total wonder and profound joy, Alex. So, essentially, at CCS I met the loves of my life.

 

CCS: Why did you choose to come to CCS? How did you find out about the College?

 

MS: I read a blurb about the program in the UC catalog when I was applying to colleges. The moment I read those few lines, I pinned my hopes on my acceptance there and nowhere else. It seemed like a program created expressly for me, and students like me. It still does.

I met Alex [her husband] while we were both literature students at CCS...I will always associate those early days of knowing him with the orange tree branches that swung over my shoddy porch and the espressos we drank there, in the citrus shade, talking about A.J. Liebling or Kurosawa.

 

CCS: What was your favorite aspect of CCS?

 

MS: The ability to pursue subjects and projects with the rigor and depth ordinarily associated with graduate programs.

 

CCS: Where and what did you study as a graduate student?

 

MS: I studied Nonfiction in the M.F.A program at Sarah Lawrence College, working closely with Pulitzer-Prize-Winning poet/essayist Vijay Seshadri and MacArthur genius JoAnn Beard, both of who remain involved with my work.

 

CCS: How did your CCS education help you excel as a graduate student?

 

MS: Both when I studied abroad in Paris and while at Sarah Lawrence I felt that I was often ahead of my peers in terms of the extent and rigor of my reading though certainly not for innate talent. In both cases, I felt that I could really hit the ground running where coursework started to pursue essays and studies well beyond the bounds of the expected, as such establishing direct and often important academic relationships with my professors. Under this guise, I was awarded the graduate program’s Nonfiction Fellowship during both of my years at Sarah Lawrence and I wound up completing two theses—one, under advisor Rachel Cohen, a series of profiles of performance artists; the other, under the direction of JoAnn Beard, a collection of personal essays that I’m currently expanding into a novel, for which I was granted a yearlong Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency as well as a writer’s residence at the Vermont Studio Center.

 

CCS: Describe your job. Does it relate to what you studied at CCS? If so, how?

 

MS: I’m a freelance writer, editorial director, and creative director. For seven years I was an associate creative director at Bloomingdale’s where I oversaw all incarnations of the brand voice across all media, and managed an absurdly talent team of seven writers. From there, I collaborated with creative director Matt Berman (of George magazine) to rebrand Lucky Brand Jeans in Los Angeles. For the past three years, I’ve been consulting on editorial direction for branded projects for magazines including Vice and Paper. For the past five years I’ve been working on my first novel. All that time, I’ve been steadily publishing essays, interviews and profiles in magazines and literary journals including Paper, Vice, Playboy, New York Magazine, Guernica, Bomb, H.O.W. Journal, The Spectrum Anthology and The Los Angeles Review of Books, where I’m a contributing editor. While each of these threads is directly interwoven with the writing life that began at CCS, professionally it’s the multidisciplinary ethos I inherited from CCS that has perhaps most influenced my career. My time at CCS, and in particular, as I’ve mentioned, my time working with Caroline Allen, engendered in me a very rich and vast sense of what it could mean to be a writer. Thus, rather than narrowly considering jobs, for instance, as a journalist, I’ve been able to direct more than 100 mini-documentaries as a creative director for Lucky Brand and to write taxi-toppers and magalogs for Bloomingdale’s while penning critical essays for Los Angeles Review of Books or Guernica with an ingrained fluidity and verve.

 

CCS: What advice would you give to current and future CCS students?

 

MS: You are in a rare and rich program. Rarer and richer than you could possibly yet know. Take too many classes, more than you think you could possibly manage. Read more than anyone else. Find the subjects and thinkers that light you up. Pursue them wildly, voraciously without sacrificing discipline and diligence. What would you study if you were not afraid of failing? Study that. What class would you take, what project would you pursue if you had all the time and resources in the world (you do). Take that. Take another one and another one. Repeat. Do that up until the second you graduate and then find a way to replicate the process in your life beyond college.

 

CCS: Does a memorable moment stand out from your time at CCS?

 

MS: I remember standing in a windswept field out in a rocky sprawl of nowhere in the general vicinity of Garey, California while Caroline Allen painted a landscape at an easel and Bob Debris hunched on his knee to take a photograph. I was wearing the stupidest shoes. Brown patent leather wedge sandals. I felt very wobbly in my shoes and very nervous, very eager as I was about to knock on the door of a tiny white ramshackle house to spend the afternoon with an unknown family I would later profile. I remember that family kept horses in a pasture across the hillside. The mother and daughter both had stick straight strawberry blonde hair and freckles. Throughout our many talks, that day and over the course of many days to come, they often congenially referred to themselves as hicks. We’d sit at their round plastic kitchen table talking, the mother crumbling Triscuits and munching on them. Out the windows near the kitchen table, we could see the hillside’s grassy pasture and I felt, watching the horses graze, the grave concern the mother expressed about how long that pasture would remain, given the encroachment across the region of Costco’s and Outlet Malls.

 

I remember sitting in the classroom inside the Old Little Theater listening to Max Schott and Caroline Allen dissect passages of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. It was cold in the classroom but very sunny and hot outside. The windows had blown wide open. So had my mind. I’ve kept my paperback copy of Troilus and Criseyde from that class, underlined copiously and pencil-strewn with exclamation marks where the prose undid me or scribbled with nearly illegible notes for the final paper I wrote at the end of the class. I return to that paperback copy often. I can’t help but think of the passage we read aloud that day, in which lovestruck Troilus first sees Criseyde, in correlation to the serendipitous quality of having met my husband at CCS.

 

I remember “acting” in a performance show in that same theater. A very bad show, though I say so lovingly and with very true respect for the student I was then, and for my fellow students in the show. I remember I wore all-black and that mostly I held on tight to a wooden cage, a big caged ball, while it rolled around onstage in the darkness, followed by a spotlight. I recall that the ball/cage was supposed to symbolize a womb. I do not remember who or what I was supposed to be. Maybe I don’t want to!

 

CCS: Anything else you would like to share?

 

MS: I would simply like to express my profound gratitude to the program and to everyone I’ve encountered over the years through CCS, and I would like to emphasize my commitment to ensuring that CCS endures long after I do.