Alumna finds niche with teen book series

Jackson Reeves Guest Writer

Our youth-centric, glamour-obsessed culture has been documented by fashion-concerned reality-television shows such as America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway. Vassar alumna Melissa Walker ’99 taps into the fashion fad with her debut novel, Violet on the Runway, released by Penguin on Sept. 4.

Walker’s post-feminist bildungsroman details the trials and tribulations of Violet Greenfield, a homespun Southern beauty who is whisked away to Manhattan to become a model. So far, the novel has received positive reviews from fashion magazines such as NYLON.

Rather than gloss over the modeling industry’s day-to-day realities, Walker jumps headfirst into its droll superficiality. Her stint as the features editor at ELLEgirl magazine from 2003 to 2006 gave her firsthand experience interacting with new models, whose lives she described as “glamorous, scary, thrilling and a little dark, all at the same time.”

“My real goal was to attract readers who want the insider look at a glamorous world, and then hit them with a real character with feelings and thoughts like any other girl,” explained Walker. Violet, of course, finds out a little too much about a fashion world and its tabloid fodder.

“I love writing for teenagers,” said Walker about her target demographic. “They’ll tell you if they love a story, and they’ll call you out if something sucks.”

Although her English degree from Vassar did not specifically prepare her to write young adult fiction, Walker credits the Department for honing her analytical skills to better understand the layered rants of real teenage girls. She also re-read the comments in her high school yearbook to develop a realistic tone for the novel’s characters.

Walker added that the English Department’s emphasis on the methodology of “writing, writing, writing and revising” gave her the most important life skill: writing well.

Walker learned more tricks of the writing trade at Vassar by writing for The Miscellany News, where she eventually rose to the editor-in-chief position in her senior year.

After graduating from Vassar, Walker interned at McCall’s magazine, assisting the entertainment editor and the features editor. When Rosie O’Donnell acquired McCall’s, renamed it Rosie, and then folded after a publicized legal battle with the publishers, Walker became a freelance magazine writer, pitching to a few women’s magazines, including ELLEgirl.

The ELLEgirl features editor at the time liked her ideas, and when she decided to move on she encouraged Walker to send in her résumé, which landed Walker a position as an associate editor. After only a year, she was promoted to features editor. When ELLEgirl folded in 2006, she decided to return to freelancing instead of another editing job at a different magazine, which was an especially easy decision since Penguin’s Berkeley JAM had just signed her for the Violet series.

She found success with her first pitch, coincidentally to a fellow Vassar alumna at Penguin. Walker, who found an offer before an agent, said, “I did things backwards. My magazine writing really helped show that I was a serious, professional writer.”

Walker currently lives in Brooklyn and, in addition to writing for women’s magazines including Glamour, is working on the third novel in her quasi-autobiographical Violet series, in which Violet matriculates at, you guessed it, Vassar College. As Walker noted, “Write what you know.”