In the beginning. . . .

I was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, generally and rightly known as The Southern Part of Heaven. From 1966 to the present day my Dad, novelist William Hardy, has worked for the Cherokee Historical Association as producer of the symphonic drama Unto These Hills, which chronicles the events leading up to the Trail of Tears or the Removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma.  As a result I spent seven summers on the Qualla Boundary, the reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation in the mountains of western North Carolina. My 1995 short story collection, Constant Fire (Oberon) was set there and draws heavily on the history and mythology of that area.  .

Viking Press published my first novel, A Cry of Bees, in 1970 when I was a mere 17 years old.  Don't ask me how that happened. 

Life is not a rehearsal

In the twenty-five year publishing hiatus which followed, I:

  • took a BA in English with Honours in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • learned French, Latin, Italian, Greek and German
  • earned an MA and All-But-Dissertation for a PhD in post classical history at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies, writing  on that fourth-century, neoclassical powerhouse,  Athanasius of Alexandria.
  • was awarded many scholarships, among them the Dumbarton Oakes Fellowship, Massey College Junior Fellowship, AAUW Fellowship, Connaught Fellowship and a Fullbright to Rome which I didn't take, but, hey, they gave it to me!
  • became a Catholic and lapsed
  • became an Italiophile and never lapsed
  • suffered catastrophic illness in the form of Guillian-Barre Syndrome, which left me paralyzed and in hospital for a very long time
  • learned to walk again
  • raised three kids (Sabrina, Alice and William Miller), and acquired two more (Shanah and Raina Trevenna) not to mention an outstanding Golden Retriever, Buddy. On the Winter Solstice 2002, Jim Hocking took some wonderful family photos for us.
  • worked as a journalist and business communicator, because, as Winnie the Pooh put it, “A bear has got to eat.”

For sixteen years I served as the Director of Communications for the London and St. Thomas Association of REALTORS®, a job that I enjoyed, but which left very little time for writing. I stepped down in June 2008 to write full time.

In 1994 I won the Journey Prize for the most accomplished work to appear in a Canadian literary journal for Long Man the River, an excerpt from Constant Fire, originally published in Exile, then republished in both The Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland & Stewart) and Best Canadian Short Stories (Oberon, 1994). That was a blast. I was also nominated for the finalist for the Western Magazine Awards Program for fiction for The Ice Woman and my work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories of 1999, Best American Short Stories of 2001, Houghton-Mifflin and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, St. Martin's Press.

My most recent collection of short stories, The Uncharted Heart, is set in the Porcupine region of Northern Ontario around the time of the Gold Rush and was published in 2001 by Knopf Canada. It received the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award.

I'm now a Canadian citizen, living in London, Ontario with my husband Ken Trevenna, a professional musician and Director of Operations and Executive Officer at the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology or OIART.  We have been studying ballroom dancing for half a dozen years with a concentration on Latin.

Currently being handled by my agent, Frances Hanna of Acacia House are two novels, The Trader of Qualla and The Vision, and two short story collections, Northern Days and Southern Nights and The Geomancer's Compass. I have just finished The Mummy of Casteldurante, a collection of Italian stories that includes the title novella and two short stories, Alabaster, set in Volterra, and Metallica, set in Lardello.

2008/Melissa Hardy