The Big Idea: Dmitri Lincoln Melhorn

It seems like wherever there are ashes, there’s something new to rise up out of them. Author Dmitri Lincoln Melhorn explores these phoenix-esque phenomena in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Archipelago of Light. When the future is in the new generations hands, what will the kids do with it? DMITRI LINCOLN MELHORN: In April 1942, my dad and his mom emerged from their basement to find their home in ashes from British bombs. My dad was not yet two. He remembers the 1940s in snatches: begging for potatoes, sneaking through forests surrounded by machine-gun fire. At six, he was jealous of his baby sister: to keep her quiet, she got the only honey they had as he pushed her pram through the Black Forest snow. He arrived in the States in 1952. He’d been a homeless war refugee for a decade, and had no money, no father, and no English. At thirteen, he would have been considered “a young male of fighting age” in most places and times. America transformed his life. Other than better food and…