The Drum

Melanie Senn has taught writing at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo for the last decade. Though she was born in Camden, New Jersey, she spent many formative years in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980s (and says “bitchin’” too much because of it). She’s was a drummer in a rock duo called The Wedding Industrial Complex with her spouse, Derek Senn, an experience she writes about here in “The Art of Drumming Badly.” Alas, she now writes more than she drums, and is at work on a novel about a Tammany politician in 19th-century New York City, who, when he died, turned out to be a woman.


"The Art of Drumming Badly" appears in the April 2016 issue of The Drum.