Meet Mel
“About” pages are tough, aren’t they?
To read, I mean.
Instead of stuffing as many jargon-y words as possible into three neat paragraphs, I’ll just share my story. Y’know, like a real person. Ready? Let’s go.
- Empath
- Curious
- Intuitive
- Friend for Life
- Genuine
- Slightly Hedonistic
I was once described by a client as, “Curious to her core, and the silliest person I’ve ever met — but knows her stuff, a MILLION percent.” Yep, that’s me. If you want to know even more, I’ll take you back to the beginning…
First, I fell in love with... writing.
I thought I wanted to be a teacher when I was a kid. Then I got into a gifted and talented program in third grade, where I got to spend hours each week writing about whatever I wanted. I was constantly opening the encyclopedia set in our house to random pages, which led to me learning about the laughing hyena.
I wondered: what would happen to a hyena that lost its laugh? How would he get it back? I wrote a story about what I thought would happen and shared it with my class. I didn’t take my eyes off my paper, because I couldn’t bear to see the reaction of my classmates. I thought they hated it — until I read a funny part and they all burst out laughing. Laughing, and having a good time — because of my words. I was hooked.
Next, I Fell In Love With Story...and Film.
I wrote and wrote and wrote during my elementary, middle school, and high school years. When I left my small town for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I wanted to do four more years of the same. During my sophomore year, I found myself too late to the party to get into a much-needed English class. Needing to fill my schedule, I decided to take Intro to Film.
I was forever changed. I saw movies I had never heard of before — Citizen Kane, Battleship Potemkin, It Happened One Night, The Best Years of Our Lives, Vertigo, Do the Right Thing — and found another way to tell stories. In film, great writing is only one piece of the story, paired with other elements like mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. While I wasn’t sure that I wanted to make movies for a living, I did know I wanted to find a way to “write visually” — creating vivid moving images in the minds of my reader.
Then I Fell in Love With…Marketing?
I graduated from college and moved back home to my small hometown (well, home county) of Door County, Wisconsin (It’s beautiful, by the way. See that sunset?). Admittedly, even after four years of college, I didn’t know what I really wanted to do for a living. All I knew is I wanted to write.
I found a job as a Marketing Associate for the same nonprofit theater company I had loved watching as a kid. Not only did I get to write, but I was responsible for coming up with the promotions and ideas that would get audiences to come to our shows and donors to give money to our organization. I loved that my job was extracting meaningful stories from what we were doing day-to-day; I loved that no two days were ever the same, and I loved that I was learning new-to-me — and new-to-the-world — digital strategies (if you haven’t HTML coded a monthly e-newsletter, have you really lived?). The Internet, friends. It was gonna be more than a fad.
I Found A Career...Then I Found The Right Company (My Own!).
For the first half of my career, I was firmly in the nonprofit world — theater, historical preservation, and the arts. Four years after starting my marketing career, I “sold” my first freelance project — the coordination of an environmental speaker series and the adjacent marketing work to get people to attend. I got a huge charge out of being responsible for my own set of metrics instead of a company I worked for, and this project was so different than anything I was being exposed to in my current job. I started taking on more projects (that’s my first business card in the photo!).
From that first project, I knew that I wanted to work for myself someday. The need for experience — and let’s be honest, a little bit of fear — kept me in the nonprofit and corporate world for the next decade, while balancing writing and social media projects on the side. By 2018, I was tired of saying “one day.” In November of that year, I lept into full-time self-employment, and it’s been a ball ever since.
Now, I Get To Create Every Day — And It’s The Best Job Ever.
Some days, I’ll be typing away — writing a blog for a cybersecurity client, or putting the finishing touches on a social media calendar for an education technology client, when it hits me — I get to do this for a living. I get to hold up a mirror to clients and people on a daily basis, giving them a clear look into all the amazing bits of themselves they have to share. I get to use my knowledge, skills, and perspectives to make an impact, and help others do the same. It just never gets old.
Why just take my word for it when you can have theirs
Stuff I never get tired of:
- Luxury office candles (why yes, I have a candle “closet”)
- The New York Times Crossword
- Podcasts of all kinds
- White legal pads
- Pilot Precise V5 Pens (black ink, always)
- Plants that I can keep alive
- Big earrings
- Large handmade mugs to hold ALL the coffee
- Sour cream
- The Sopranos
- My cat, Hobbs (named after a Formula 1 driver)
- My record collection