About Melissa J White
Thank you for checking out my site for Dizzy Sushi. Here’s a little bit about me.
I have been writing since I first composed a poem about fairies when I was 14, sitting in the moonlight in the back yard in the Midwestern town where I grew up. That year I won the school story prize for my fable on How the Toucan got his Colors.
At 16, a series of events in my life drove me toward writing in a more visceral way. My father was diagnosed with lung cancer; they said he didn’t have long to live and they were right. In 3 months, my father was dead. It was such a shocking and overwhelming experience, that I couldn’t tell my 2 best friends in the world, but I could write.
I found an unused algebra notebook and began to write every day, sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. Writing kept me focused. Even though I was writing about the nights when my dad was suffering, or when the ambulance came, or his coffin at the funeral, I managed to get through a crazy time in my life with paper and pen in front of me.
The morning my father died, I wrote one last time, then put the notebook away and stopped writing altogether. Who knows why? I went back to high school and managed. 6 months later, I found the notebook, like some secret time capsule hidden away in the bottom drawer of an armoire, and I read the entire thing in one sitting.
As I read the words from such a different tome in my life, I realized how writing had gotten me through an intense part of my life, and I vowed never to stop writing in some form.
I’ve kept that promise, and whether I am composing on a computer, on a blog, or longhand, I continue the practice that writing has always given me solace and spiritual clarity.
Here’s my professional bio:
Melissa J. White is an award-winning writer and designer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her narrative non-fiction essays, interviews, poetry and short fiction have been published in Whole Earth Review, THE Magazine, Indian Artist Magazine, the Santa Fe Reporter, Crosswinds, Fish Drum and Noctiluca—an English language magazine from Japan—among others. Her book DIZZY SUSHI, based on a year teaching English conversation in Japan, won a Recursos de Santa Fe Discovery prize. She is also the recipient of the Henry Austin Prize for Poetry and the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Holiday Writing contest. She is a graduate of the New Mexico Filmmakers Intensive and in 2008, won 1st place for her short screenplay, ID at the Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF). She has studied screenwriting with Kirk Ellis (”John Adams”, HBO) and Tom Musca (”Little Nikita”, “Stand and Deliver.”)
As the owner of Whitespace Creative, LLC in Santa Fe, she develops sustainable marketing and media plans as well as full advertising creative and branding platforms for clients in the arts, and sustainable businesses including Recycle Runway, High Country Gardens, i.e. architecture, Milagro Compost, Spirit of the Garden, Ethnosphere Music Lab and others. She has won Addys® for her design work for Nancy Youngblood, the Santa Fe Opera and Tall Grass Restoration.
In 2010, Melissa began Blogshop Santa Fe.com where she teaches blogging and WordPress skills. She holds weekend Blogshops, an interactive 2-day workshop where participants purchase a domain name, hosting package, install WordPress and learn to post. You can register for the next Blogshop Weekend here.
Melissa also works extensively with entrepreneurs and established businesses custom-designing sites on the WordPress CMS and supporting their social media marketing strategies. Feel free to give her a call at 505-231-8775 to discuss your move onto a content management system that YOU can manage. Visit BlogshopSantaFe.com and view the custom WordPress design Melissa and her production team have accomplished.
