Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend and Carteret Writers President Melissa Kelley. Our fearless leader has done a fantastic job of gathering our crazy ideas and implementing the not so crazy ones all while being supermom to two great kids.

Let’s start with a fun question, what was your favorite book as a child?

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Have you ever gone back and reread them as an adult?

Yes, I did reread it within the last five years and all the other ones from that series. Being originally from Canada the book really resonated. It is also just a really sweet story.

How long have you been in Carteret County?

13 years. My husband and I received military orders for here in 2010, then we retired a few years later and haven’t left.

Which branch of the military and what was your job?

I was in the Marine Corps for 20 years as a naval flight officer, which is like Goose from the first Top Gun. I was in the back seat of an EA6B prowler which is an Electronic Attack Aircraft.

What would you like readers to know about you?

Well, I am new to writing and I really enjoying being in this writing community. I think Carteret Writers is just a wonderful group of people. I am trying to be a better writer and appreciate that we are all here for each other.

What does literary success look like to you?

Baby steps! Writing regularly would be a first success, then having my submissions accepted regularly would be another success. Finishing a longer work would be yet another layer of success and hopefully finding publication for it.

When did you discover your love of writing?

I have always written cathartically in a journal, that is how I would clear my head. In college I was an engineering major and took a class that had a lot of writing. The professor at one point looked up and said, “Wow, you write pretty well for an engineer,” and that was the first little glimmer of “Oh!” At various military schools I did well with writing assignments. I enjoy reading and want to write something that somebody else would enjoy reading too.

When did you start writing for fun?

I am not sure, once when I retired from the Marines, I started to take notes on writing ideas that came into my head. Things I wanted to put some deep thoughts into. Tom Kies’s creative writing class is probably when I first started trying different aspects of storytelling based on prompts. From there I ended up with the first story that I wanted to take to completion, but I’ve kind of waffled back and forth.

How did you get involved in Carteret Writers?  

I took Tom’s class in the fall of 2021 and by the spring he encouraged us to join Carteret Writers. So I joined and by the spring I had made it to a few meetings. Stanley Trice was trying to recruit new board members, because at that point he had been the president for four years and was ready for somebody else to take on the responsibility. Through the writing group that we created from Tom’s class, Emily Carter and her connections with previous writing groups gathered a group that she thought might be interested in keeping Carteret Writers alive. Emily, I, and a few others met and agreed that there are lots of things that we would love to do as a writing group and that Carteret Writers had great potential. It needed more active involvement by more people, and I think Emily was the catalyst for getting us all together. Out of that came a kind of joint resolution to carry on and we fell into our natural roles. I don’t have much writing experience, but I have a good amount of management experience thanks to the Marine Corps and that’s how I ended up as President.

What have you learned the most since joining the Board?

There are some really interesting people in Carteret Writers! We have some fabulous writers and people that are doing interesting things, writing awesome stuff, I’m so amazed by the talent. I am inspired by what everybody else is doing.

How has your writing improved since becoming involved?

Mostly just trying to jump into any writing opportunity like the recent Hooks and Lines workshop series. I am also educating myself on the whole writing world because I don’t know anything about editing and publishing. I also started subscribing to different literary magazines to try and amp up my self-education on the writing community and have mostly learned more about the community than about writing itself, but I still have great take aways.

Congratulations on being recently published in Longleaf Press’s Anthology of Military-Related Poetry!

I have only submitted a few things, but it is the first time I have ever had anything accepted for publication, it was a cool feeling. Hopefully the beginning of many.

What do you see for the future of Carteret Writers?

I hope Carteret Writers doesn’t get to the point where it’s on the brink of disappearing again. I hope we can create a group that is self-sustaining and inspires its members to foster that community. Writing is a solitary thing, but a community is what supports the writer doing that solitary thing.  My hope is to sustain this community with fun things and attract new members that also want to explore how fun writing can be!

Please make sure to say hello to Melissa at the Welcome Back meeting on August 17th!