The People in the Shadows

Dr. Mel Anderson overcame a childhood of unimaginable abuse to earn her PhD, transforming her pain into a passion for education and healing.

In her speech at the Idaho State University (ISU) Winter Commencement 2024, graduate Mel Anderson, PhD, opened with a metaphor about the historic Swanson Arch as a powerful symbol of both personal and communal strength. This metaphor beautifully encapsulates the interplay between individual perseverance and collective support, urging graduates to acknowledge their foundations and extend that support to others. 

In her speech, Mel encouraged the audience: “take every opportunity to recognize that our strength comes from both within and around us. Let us acknowledge those friends, family members, and mentors who helped us make this day happen, who stood with us in our times of fear and fatigue, because it is ultimately with the help of our communities that we stand at all. We do not and we cannot exist alone, and no success is independently achieved.”

Just as a pillar needs a stable foundation to support an arch, individuals require both inner resilience and community support to succeed—something Mel has experienced firsthand.

When you consider the fact that Mel entered college with only a third grade education level, having suffered years of extreme emotional, physical, and sexual torture alongside her siblings, it is incredible that she persevered through earning an MFA in Creative Writing, a Master’s in English with a TESOL certificate, a Juris Doctorate, and a PhD in English and the Teaching of English. She now works at ISU as Director of Policy Administration in the President’s Office.

For all of her college experience, Mel was a non-traditional student. Some could say a very non-traditional student. Her father is serving two life sentences for child torture. As the second of 16 children, she was pulled out of public school by her parents in third grade to hide their abuse. 

As she describes it she was “fake homeschooled” and was, in fact, so isolated from the world outside her home, that she wasn’t even allowed to look out the windows. One of her first memories was her father beating her brother until he looked dead and then her parents discussing where to dump his body. 

A light of hope came from her third grade teacher, Mrs. Vogel. Mel recounts a story that changed her life: 

“I liked to write and I wrote this story and my mother found it and she told me to keep my trash writings off her notebook. So I started writing my stories and poems on the back of pieces of trash. I shared a story with Mrs. Vogel. She had a stern face. She wasn’t an effusive person. I showed it to her and she said ‘What did you write this on?’ and I said, ‘I write my trash stories on trash,’ and she said, ‘Follow me.’ 

“She took me back to her classroom and she got into her personal supply cupboard and she handed me a composition notebook and she said (I’ll never forget it), ‘Keep writing Melissa, you have talent.’ I have dug through my memories and I think that was the first time someone ever complimented me. I think had she not given me that notebook, my life would have been incredibly different. I don’t think I would have done or tried anything.

That notebook… I’m in my 40’s, and that notebook from third grade remains everything for me.”

When she turned 18, Mel left home to join the Army and get away from the abuse. She began attending a junior college. “I didn’t have any education, she says. “When I started college it was remedial everything. I was learning long division in college.”

She also got married and had her first baby nine months later. She transferred to the University of Arizona where she studied political science and history and had her fourth and fifth children while in the middle of her bachelors degree and completing ROTC to become an army officer. 

She found out she was pregnant with her sixth child the first week of law school. He was born two months early. “I took my first year of final exams breastfeeding a newborn baby and typing my answers with one hand,” she says.

In her second year of law school her husband was deployed. She had six children under age eight. Then she was commissioned as a JAG officer. 

Despite the degrees she already had, Mel wanted to study English literature and earn a PhD. Through the years, writing and reading were her passion, what she loved from her earliest memories, even though she didn’t have access as a kid.

“When I decided to go back to school again, which made very little sense, I decided it was for me,” she says. “Law school was to help other people, but my PhD was for me. It was what I wanted, what I loved.”

Mel says that it’s always been easier for her to help others and do hard work for others than for herself. 

“I’m really good at working for things for others. I can always find the stamina and fight in me,” she says. “The bar exam was for my kids. When it’s for myself it seems so much less important.”

This woman, who experienced the worst possible things from birth, says “it was difficult to finish” a PhD for herself. Compounding the difficulties of life she had already experienced, she was in the middle of final exams last December when her old military commander, who was like a father to her, died of cancer. Four days before her husband of 23 years asked for a divorce. She’s now a single mom with four children in college and four minor children at home.

This was a turning point for Mel, who says she knew she had to get a job to support the kids but she didn’t want to lose the degree she was working on because it’s what she was doing for herself. Especially right after her husband asked for a divorce, she says, “I questioned quitting at that point because I thought I needed to focus on my children completely.”

But Mel didn’t want to quit. “The PhD in literature was the thing I did for me, that fed me. I had no other reason for this degree but that I love literature. I wanted to quit at that point and then I wanted to quit again over the summer when I was trying to write my dissertation and study for the bar exam at the same time. I had a bedroll in my office because I was so tired so I could take naps under my desk when I needed to.”

What kept her going in this period of darkness? “The faculty made me feel like I mattered too,” she says. “I wanted to quit, and in each of those moments there was somebody to say ‘I believe in you. You can do it. I don’t doubt you.’ 

Mel recounts story after story of faculty members whose kindness helped her continue to pursue her dream. She also says that she couldn’t have done it without the counseling services at ISU. “They’ve been amazing,” she says, and she encourages others: “All the therapy. Get it.”

At this time she worked as a graduate teaching assistant and had an office among the English faculty members. She talks of the kindness and encouragement of Associate Professor of English, Matthew VanWinkle, whose office was right next door to hers. “He’s understanding of the process and how hard I was pushing myself. That was invaluable. Matt always had a kind word but would challenge the hell out me while making it clear I could do it.”

“No matter what obstacle came up in my life, the faculty and staff in the English department saw me through it. How many times can I lock myself out of my own office and Amanda Christensen is happy to hand me a key?”

One day, Mel says, Gibette Encarnacion, Assistant Professor of English came into her office after she had just received a devastating email. “She just hugged me and let me cry.” Mel says this made a huge impact on her.

She tells how Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English, Tom Klein, has never missed a student event. “I don’t think Tom Klein has missed a single student event my entire time here,” she says. “I won the 3 MT in 2022. Tom Klein was in the audience. He didn’t have to be there.”

She also relates how she has severe PTSD that was triggered once during a class she was teaching. Associate Professor of English and Mels’ mentor, Susan Goslee, took her class for her on the spur of the moment. “There was no shame there,” Mel says. “She just took the class.” 

Mel wrote her entire dissertation over the summer, which meant that her committee, led by Professor of English, Amanda Zink, had to read it over and over again. “In order for me to finish, my committee had to be just as dedicated to my work as I was or that wouldn’t have happened.”

Speaking of the faculty, Mel says, “They think what they’re doing is so small because it’s the habit of their daily life to be a good person and a supportive faculty member, but it’s those things that make them invaluable. The people in the shadows who do the heavy lifting shouldn’t be in the shadows.”

Mel Anderson with Professors Zink and Klein

 

With the support of her ISU community and her strong grit and determination, Mel started studying for comp exams in January and took those in April, where she earned all high passes. Over the summer she wrote her entire dissertation and studied for the bar exam. She had an emergency surgery two weeks before passing the bar, and she is now licensed in Idaho and Texas. 

“That’s a lot of stuff to go through and a lot of obstacles to face to reach my educational goals,” she says, “but it doesn’t matter how much of a will and stubborn fight I have in me because I still would not have been able to do it without a supportive community.”

When asked what it feels like to have accomplished something truly for herself, Mel says, “I feel a sense of closure. My parents always told me that I was dumb. My parents made us recite ‘do you want fries with that? They said I was so stupid I’d never have a job outside of fast food. To be able to claim my own identity, to be able to forge my own identity, it feels like closure. And I did that for me. When I got my Juris doctorate I felt ‘my parents are wrong.’ When I got my Phd it felt like they weren’t even part of my life. 

Mel recognizes that she is never the only person who has trauma in the room. “I’ve learned that most, or a good majority of, people feel trauma,” she says. “They are carrying things that are hard to carry. It can feel isolating.”

For her dissertation, Mel used the works of author Toni Morrison to form an entirely new analytical theory of trauma in literature, in which the individual remembers the trauma, but society doesn’t want to. “People with trauma are not silent,” she says. “They are silenced by society. When we don’t hear trauma survivors, it helps create systems of recursive trauma because we’re not fixing it.” For example, Mel says that it’s really hard for society to hear child abuse survivors when talking about how to fix the foster care system, but it’s important for us to discuss.

Mel is passionate about child advocacy, especially in the area of child abuse and neglect. She says she shares her experiences openly in the hope that she can foster an environment where the pain we all carry can be talked about without shame. “Everyone carries something that is deeply painful,” she says, “but we don't get much opportunity to talk about them without shame.”

She is now polishing her dissertation, “Victim Deficiency or System Malignancy Framing Morrissorian Trauma Therapy,” for publication.

In her commencement speech, Mel drew on this work when she encouraged the audience to remember the words of Toni Morrison: “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else.”

What motivated Mel to attend college when she knew she was so far behind and had virtually no educational experience? Mel says firstly, that she’s always had a curiosity, a desire to learn, a thirst for knowledge. Secondly: “Education was robbed from me and I wasn’t ok with that.” And third, it seemed that education was a way out of poverty. 

“There are some forms of hunger that never come out of your bones and I didn’t want to feel that way again, to be in a position again where the trash can looked like a great place to find food,” she says.

“That’s initially why I chose law, because I wanted to do good in the world. I saw flaws from having survived. I understood the victims and I wanted to help. And I wanted to not starve again. There are some forms of hunger that you never stop feeling.”

A major source of motivation for  has been her children. She didn’t want her kids to ever feel that kind of hunger. “Once I started having children they were my driving force behind everything because I wanted my children to never hunger. I didn’t want them to be denied an education. I didn’t want them to feel that kind of suffering that never leaves. I wanted better for them and there’s something healing about seeing your children filled when you’re so empty, seeing your children not in pain.”

“My abuse started so young that I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t hurt. I don’t know what that feels like. And my children don’t know what that kind of pain is.

That’s been the driving force of my life, to be a shield. To use every bit of my pain and make it a shield. My kids are pretty fabulous.”

Mel with her kids at commencement

 

Mel has several hopes for the future. She says, “I want my children to go to school. I need them to go to school. I want them to be educated in whatever way they want.”

She’s also working at ISU and wants to see the university succeed. “I genuinely love ISU. I am in love with the people at ISU. They’re beyond compare.”

Ultimately she wants to write. And feed chickens. She also loves woodworking. “I want a dozen chickens and I want the most boring life known to man,” she says. “I want to write, build rocking horses, and feed chickens all day.”

Regarding her hopes for her children, the educational path that Mel took is coming around full circle: some of them are attending ISU. Jessica Winston, Professor of English, who was Mel’s teacher, has now taught Mel’s daughter, who discovered she loved the process.

“My 20 year old son has autism, and I was able to hand-pick a professor who I knew would help him be successful and enjoy it. He took Dr. VanWinkle’s class and enjoyed an English class for the first time ever.

I don’t trust people, but to trust faculty at ISU with my children, that’s something you can’t replace. That’s invaluable.”

 

Mel welcomes anyone who feels the need to reach out to her, and she can be contacted at melanderson@isu.edu. She also encourages utilizing ISU’s counseling services, available at https://www.isu.edu/counselingcenter/. For urgent assistance, please call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.