Melissa Petro

Author | Speaker | Writing Coach

I’m a cultural journalist and author of Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, a hybrid memoir that dives deeply into how shame keeps us from achieving our goals and knowing our worth.

I’m also the founder of Becoming Writers, which provides online and in-person courses on craft and publishing to nonfiction writers of all backgrounds and experiences.

Whoever you are and whatever you’ve lived through, you have a story.

I can help you tell it.

UPCOMING COURSES:

“Most writers, like most children, need to tell. The only problem is that much of what they need to tell will provoke the ire of parent-critics, who are determined to tell the writer-children what they can and cannot say. Writing is nothing if not breaking the silence.”

— Betsy Lerner, “The Wicked Child” in Forest for the Trees

You have things you needed to say, regardless or even in spite of how those words may be received.

Since the loss of my elementary school teaching career after writing an article defending sex workers' rights and sharing my own history as a stripper and call girl, I’ve had the privilege of holding other writers’ hands through their own transformative truth-telling processes. Granting ourselves and each other the freedom to tell our stories, raw and unpolished— without concern for pleasing anyone or anything other than the truth of our experience— is a bold and courageous act.

I am here to tell you: your story matters and you have the right to share it.

“Many of us talk around the supper table, tell stories, jokes, repeat what happened as we went through our day, and never know we are creating fictions, dialogue, suspense, climax. Not being able to write is a learned disability. It is almost always the result of scar tissue, of disbelief in your self- accumulated as a result of unhelpful responses to your writing. Those wounds can be healed, those blocks can be removed.”

- Pat Schneider, Writing by Ourselves and with Others