98: Melissa Hunter - Author of What She Lost

In this interview with Melissa Hunter, we discuss how this story, a fictional quasi-memoir of her grandmother’s experiences as a teenager in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, was one Melissa felt compelled to write but couldn’t fully embrace until she became a mother herself. Through the years, she wrote it as a series of joined short stories and even a screenplay until finally settling on women’s historical fiction as the ideal structure. We discuss working with a small specialty publisher, using the novel as an educational tool to educate young people about the Holocaust, and how a Facebook group resulted in a filmmaker using the book in an upcoming documentary. Melissa W. Hunter is a writer and blogger from Cincinnati, Ohio, with a passion for telling stories about her family and her own life experiences. Her articles have been published on Kveller.com, LiteraryMama.com, Booksbywomen.org, and her short stories have appeared in the Jewish Literary Journal. She is a contributing blogger to the Today Show parenting community, and her novella Through a Mirror Clear was published as a serial installment on TheSame.blog, an online literary journal written for women by women (now available in its entirety on Amazon.com). Her debut novel What She Lost is inspired by her grandmother’s life as a Holocaust survivor and is the subject of an upcoming episode of the documentary Generation to Generation (Fall, 2021). When not at her computer, Melissa loves spending family time with her husband and two beautiful daughters. To learn more about Melissa, click here.