Melanie A. Jones

ORP: What inspired you to begin writing or creating? Has that source of inspiration changed throughout your life?

Melanie Jones: I didn't see myself in the stories I read. I could fantasize about being middle class in the suburbs, but absolutely could not relate. With age some things have changed. I'm older, I have a spouse and blended family. I'm a woman. My worldview centers around those things and so do the articles and stories I write.

ORP: Do you write or create with an audience in mind? If so, how do you consider the relationship between that audience and your work throughout your creative process?

MJ: If I'm honest, I write for me and pray someone out there in the ether will resonate with my words. I share my thoughts, history, worlds that I build from imagination and living. I want my audience to stand in between the pages with me, fully engulfed.

ORP: What does success as a writer or artist mean to you?

MJ: If I'm honest, I write for me and pray someone out there in the ether will resonate with my words. I share my thoughts, history, worlds that I build from imagination and living. I want my audience to stand in between the pages with me, fully engulfed.

ORP: Does writing or creating energize or exhaust you? What aspects of your artistic process would you consider the most challenging or rewarding?

MJ: I'm an empath. I feel the energies of my characters. I feel the joy and the pain. Writing is healing and therapeutic for me. It can be energizing when that one idea sparks or in can be absolutely exhausting reliving triggers my characters may experience. I get to live many different lives. That's the most rewarding part.

ORP: What would you say is your most interesting writing and/or artistic quirk? Do you have any habits that you believe help or hinder your creativity?

MJ: I become my characters as I process. I speak with different dialects and I act out scenes as they come sometimes. I'll record them and write them down later. I may not think it's quirky, but my family viewing it certainly does.

Melanie A. Jones is a Louisiana writer whose work explores family, memory, class, and the strange beauty of Southern life. Blending humor, tenderness, and unsettling undercurrents, her fiction often centers working-class women navigating grief, resilience, and survival. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University. She writes on Substack and Bluesky as @melanieajones.

Read Melanie’s story “A gift from Greta” in ISSUE 9.1.