Melissa J. Corley is a realist and an idealist. She is the “Howard Roark of the Flint Hills”. Melissa wants to do things her way or no way at all, but it’s not because she always has to get exactly what she wants, it’s because she will not sacrifice anything for her art. Even if it means tearing up a script in front of people who want to buy it, but change her vision when they actually produce the movie… Money is not the key to happiness, it just makes life somewhat more stable and comfortable is her way of thinking, and she has always said she doesn’t want or need as much as some people have in order to find some peace of mind.
Born in Topeka, Kansas, Melissa lived in Iowa with her parents, Gary and Bonnie Corley, briefly until it was time for her younger sister, Barbara, who now an accomplished interior designer living in the area of Kansas City, to be born and the family moved back to Topeka and a block away from Melissa’s paternal grandparents. Melissa was sixteen months old when her sister was arrived, but she claims to remember rounding the corner to her grandparent’s house on the drive back to Kansas from Iowa and visiting her mother in the hospital.
School was something Melissa always enjoyed, especially English, though when she first began to learn the “Language Arts”, she believed she would be learning different languages and was a little disappointed when she realized that’s not what the book’s title meant. The first literary accomplishments in Melissa’s young life were winning an Arbor Day poetry contest and having a story she wrote in fourth grade be read out loud to her class by the her teacher, Mrs. Culp. Her father was so impressed with this, she says, that he tried to get the story published as a children’s book.
By age eleven, Melissa’s family had a new addition, her younger brother, Drew, and financial instability pulled the Corley family out of Topeka and into a small town roughly 30 miles southwest of the capital city, the “Gateway to the Flint Hills”, Eskridge, Kansas. Melissa wasn’t in grade school anymore, in Eskridge, sixth graders were in middle school so she went from one classroom to several and she knew it would be difficult for her to fit in right away because she was a city girl at heart and had never consider small town life to be something she wanted.
Writing was never out of her sights, and her teachers continued to be impressed with her writing skills all the way through her adjustment into and through middle school and it was no different in high school. During her senior year she was able to fit in the one and only creative writing class offered at her small school and she says her teacher, Mr. Burns, shook her hand at graduation and said “Publish, or I will hunt you down.” That has always stayed with Melissa and continues to be one of the driving forces behind her confidence.
With high school out of the way, well, Melissa wasn’t sure what to do. She wanted to be a writer and knew she had the talent to do it without putting herself into a pool of student loan debt, but her father urged her to take a few classes while she worked. To Washburn University she went and got a pesky English Comp class out of the way, and for fun, took Intro to Theater and though she did well in both classes, did not go back to Washburn until several years, and several jobs, later. In the fall of 1999, Melissa completed Washburn’s Creative Writing and Renaissance Literature courses with high marks, giving her a standing 3.5 GPA at the University, and the honor having one of her poems published in their 1999-2000 literary magazine.
In January of 2000 tragedy struck, as it always does sooner or later, when Melissa was twenty-one and her father, a Registered Respiratory Therapist, suddenly died of pneumonia. Words cannot appropriately explain the impact this event had on Melissa’s life. She considers it to be the catalyst that would eventually influence all of her decisions. Melissa claims to have been in possession of extreme self-awareness from a young age, but she says that the death of her father gave her the insight she needed and brought her closer to true enlightenment. Accepting that things are the way they are for a reason, and that everything happens for a reason, was what she learned and she eventually this line of thinking began to help her see the story of her life unfold before her eyes.
The next nine years were spent working, and not working, writing bits and pieces of stories here and some poetry there, but still she struggled to find her voice, her style and her true calling in writing. Melissa claims she knew the clues were there, she could see them, but she says she knew the whole time that she needed to live and grow before becoming a real, professional writer and that eventually everything would fall into place.
And it did. A job at a local, “pre-owned” entertainment retail chain, CD Tradepost, put her in the business of movies, music and video games and she loved every minute of it. So did her customers, but eventually she had to leave CD Tradepost due to her “Howard Roark” nature. Several months later, after writing some movie, video game and book reviews freelance for the websites of Love To Know, Melissa’s mother’s long-time boyfriend proposed that she help him open a video store in Lyndon, Kansas, where he owns a lot of property. As a movie fan, he was impressed with Melissa’s ability to bring home “the good stuff” to watch and thought Lyndon needed a video store. Who better to run it than Little Miss Movies? (Nobody called her that).
Melissa threw herself into the video store full force and it was a nice little place too. Her customers loved her, their kids were big fans as well and if not for the stubbornness of both Melissa and the owner, it just might have won the “No Late Fees with Netflix” battle. After a year and some months, he suddenly closed the video store, which ultimately left Melissa without a job, without an apartment, without a car to drive and ended the relationship between the owner and her mother.
Which brings us to the present, Melissa’s “Break into Act Three” and she is beginning the process of dispatching of the “Bad Guys” to save her little corner of the world. Or maybe this really is just the beginning, and maybe the time for debating is over. Perhaps this is the Act Two break and it’s time for the “Fun and Games”. Whatever lies ahead, Melissa knows she is headed for a bright future in the entertainment business and now knows the best way for her to travel the road less taken.
Her goals are to write and sell her two best two movie ideas, then she would like to produce her own web-series. A television show is also on the list of things she wants to write/produce, but eventually, she would like to use whatever money she makes to help save her little corner of the world in a literal sense. Melissa, though she feels she has never truly fit in with the Eskridge, Kansas community, still adores her small town and knows that it is in danger of being snuffed out of existence. She also knows that Eskridge is a nice place to live and a nice place to visit. If you build it they will come and it is her intention preserve her small town the way it is, and the county in which it resides, while making it a properous place for the people who live in it.
She would also like to travel.
FreeStateRevival
