From the time I could hold a pencil, I wrote, penning poems and stories and then reading them out loud to my younger sister, a not-always-willing-captive audience. When my older sister went to school, I was mad because I couldn’t go, too. To prove my competence, I took a newspaper and copied line after line of individual letters, asking my mother if it mattered which direction the lines on a capital E went.
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Almost sixty years later, I’m still learning, still trying to prove myself. Still reading. Still writing. I’ve never stopped… (Can you keep the ocean from tiding? Can you stall a storm? Can you stifle the inky ideas that pump through your brain without exploding?)  I can’t NOT write.
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No matter what profession I had, from award-winning English professor of the 1980s and 1990s to Entrepreneur-of-the-Year in 2016, I wrote. Scores and scores of marketing newsletters, advertisements, and promotions. Magazine articles. Hundreds of human-interest newspaper columns — precursor to the modern blog. But I always wrote “on-the-side.” Now, after decades in other occupations, I’ve come back to my writing roots, finally able to let my creativity burst out into the universe as I cultivate my full-time writing career.
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My head buzzes with stories, ideas, and observations of this crazy human race, along with the belief that others might benefit from my thoughts. Past the age of sixty, I’m more creative than I’ve ever been, fearless, and optimistic that I can make my literary mark in the next twenty years if I work hard enough.
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I’m Melissa Gouty, Editor and top writer on Medium, teacher, speaker, blogger, and copywriter. I specialize in books, literature, writing, and observations of human nature.