Getting out of the way of art

Language barriers in Berlin opened writer and ADF Fellow Chase Melton '25 to a new perspective on communication and his own work.

By Chase Melton '25

ADF Guest Blogger

Chase Melton ‘25, a resident of Adams House concentrating in English, was awarded an OFA Artist Development Fellowship to write a collection of Berlin-based short stories within the tradition of literary urban walking and engage in writing workshops at The Reader Berlin. Melton is the editorial chair of The Harvard Wave, a staff writer for The Harvard Crimson, and an executive board member of the Creative Writing Collective. He is also a tutor at Harvard Writing Center, a finalist for The Harvard Advocate’s Begley Prize for Short Fiction and the recipient of an honorable mention for the Harvard Writing Program’s Ecker Short Story Prize.

Thanks to my Artist Development Fellowship, I was able to spend this past summer in Berlin, reading and writing and walking around. My initial proposal was heavily influenced by the history of the relationship between writing and walking, and I meant in my project to explore urban walking both as a literary device to engender narrative motion and, more personally, as an embodied ritual to promote authorial absence and openness. I thought that maybe wandering was the solution to my habit of getting in the way of my own stories, a problem that I encountered frequently last semester in workshop. 

Our grants permitted my roommate (and fellow ADF recipient) and I to live in a really lovely apartment in the relatively posh East Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain. Before arriving, I had just two Duolingo units’ worth of German language experience, so it was easy to feel isolated and out of place. This was a partially pleasant phenomenon; I could walk the streets shrouded with a sort of obscurity, listening in cafés or on the U-Bahn to conversations I could not comprehend in the slightest, gleaning clues instead from gestures or tone of voice. It was nice, at times, to learn about people (and—cumulatively—Berlin) in a sort of primitive, pre-linguistic way. 

At the same time, my ignorance of German and Germany was alienating. I worked against this sense of alienation by trying to pick up common German phrases, shaping my mouth clumsily around the soft ‘ch’ sound and learning how an umlaut can queer a vowel. Luckily Berlin is not the most German of German cities, so I could default in more complicated situations to English, though not without a pang of guilt. 

I found respite in non- (or pre- or post- or epi-) linguistic environments and interactions, most particularly among strangers on dancefloors in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, which, in very specific and fleeting moments, felt entirely utopian. Communication there could be a totally embodied, gestural act. It needed to be; the music was too loud. At the drowsy ends of those weekends there was also Pureet, the cashier at the tiny Indian grocery store around the corner from our apartment, with whom I communicated in broken Denglish and apologetic smiles, and who routinely insisted that my roommate and I take home a free samosa. These exchanges never failed to make me feel real. 

I knew from conversations with a friend and ADF alum that I could expect my final product to differ greatly from what I’d proposed, but somehow that difference didn’t realize itself until I saw it firsthand. I’d proposed a series of interlocking short stories, set in Berlin and centered around the theme of urban walking. Two months later, I am in the revision stage of the longest piece I’ve written to date, both in terms of time spent and page count: a historical novella set on the north side of Hawai’i’s Big Island just before WWII, informed by ancestral research and much speculation. I’d been mulling over the premise for years, but never understood how to begin writing it, until one day, on a walk in Neukölln, when someone shouted the name "Charlie" and all at once, the protagonist had a name. Here was my opportunity to get out of my own way and let Charlie bring himself to life. 

I don’t feign awareness of any extremely relevant links between Berlin and the island of Hawai’i. Maybe it’s the distance that, paradoxically, permitted me a sense of closeness to a vastly different setting. Maybe fiction, like some theorists’ idea of utopia, is best conceived of negatively, in opposition to what’s real and right in front of you.