Melissa Morgan

Long ago, I was the child reading adult fiction—with a flashlight beneath a makeshift tent of bedsheet—through the early morning hours on school nights. My first attempt at writing a novel was in middle school: A poorly researched, deeply cringey retelling of a selection of Camelot legend from the perspective of Queen Guinevere.

When I was sixteen, I mistakenly believed I fell in love and spent the next eight years surviving intimate partner/domestic violence. Three years in, while pursuing my Bachelor of Arts in Medieval Studies at Mount Holyoke College, I began work on my second novel—an epic fantasy with mages, orcs, and valiant warriors. It was never intended for an audience: It was a means of survival.

When my emancipation finally arrived, it did so explosively, and the shrapnel wounded my favorite part of myself: My ability to write creatively. In spite of all I had lost, I healed with intention and created a new life for myself in Colorado, where I returned to my childhood passions of skiing and riding horses, and began volunteering with a reproductive justice nonprofit and rose through the ranks to become its Assistant Director. I even fell in love—for real, this time. But despite my best efforts, a skilled therapist, and piles of self-help books, I was still unable to write.

They say time heals all wounds, and perhaps that was part of it, but in the latter half of 2020, when I tentatively began work on a new novel, I knew I had flayed myself open, removed the rotten bits, and sewed myself back together to get there. A Victorian romance novel, "The Earl of My Dreams," is the result.