Melissa Ballard

“About” pages give me writer’s block, but here goes:

I’ve always lived in northeastern Ohio. I was a nervous, awkward child who wore industrial-strength glasses and loved to read. School was a bit of a roller coaster for me and, while I had no idea what a gap year was, I took a couple of them after high school.

I studied fashion merchandising, worked retail, and was a bank teller and a public school camp counselor before I decided higher education might be a good idea. The first in my family to attend college, I stumbled on a major that made it necessary to go to grad school. After that, I worked as a speech-language pathologist for many years, and then as a college instructor and advisor. Through it all, I’ve retained my love of reading and the feeling of never quite fitting in.

Now I’m retired, and I write essays. Not the five paragraph essay assigned in high school. Not the college application-type essay. These essays wander, even the short ones, as I simultaneously try to figure something out and tell a good story. Often, I end up with more questions than answers, but that’s one of the things I love about the genre.

I’ve studied with some wonderful writing teachers, including: Jacqueline Doyle, Sarah Einstein, Maureen Ryan Griffin, Rebecca McClanahan, Marsha McGregor, Dinty W. Moore, and Liz Rosenberg. I’ve written essays for Appalachian Review, Brevity, Full Grown People,  and other publications.