We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melissa Petro. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melissa below.
Hi Melissa, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
When it comes to shame, I’m a reluctant expert on the subject. As an undergraduate, I pursued what I felt was a practical degree: I earned a BA in sociology and began a career in social services, working with economically disadvantaged women and children. Coming from such a background myself, I struggled to afford my education, and so I was nineteen years old and living in Mexico as a student abroad when my money ran out and I was confronted with what felt like an easy choice: strip for cash or quit school. I worked as a stripper on and off for six years and, for a brief stint, as a call girl on Craigslist before transitioning out of the industry for good in 2007. Degrees secured, eventually I became a public-school teacher, teaching art and creative writing at an elementary school in the Bronx. It was a job I loved.
Then, at the start of my third year as a teacher, a reporter from the New York Post took an interest in a 900-word essay I’d written for the Huffington Post in which I referred to my experiences as a call girl; a few weeks after my essay ran, the tabloid plastered my picture on its cover under an intentionally shocking headline: BRONX TEACHER ADMITS: I’M AN EX HOOKER. A virtual mob ensued, and instead of turning their torches and pitchforks toward the patriarchal forces that had influenced my decisions and limited my choices some twenty year earlier, reporters from around the world attacked the story with a determination to destroy me, while parents who’d never met me clutched pearls and clucked their tongues. I was immediately yanked from the classroom and put in reassignment, also known as the “rubber room.” What followed were months of relentless negative media coverage, culminating with a press conference at which Gloria Allred announced my resignation to an assembly of journalists and camera crews. “Everyone has a past, and people should be judged for what they do while they are employed, and not for their past sex life,” she rightfully stated. It didn’t matter; the school wouldn’t allow me in their classroom anymore. Headlines about an event meant to redeem me declared I was a “disgrace.”
After my resignation, I dedicated myself to promoting a message opposite of that conveyed by the institutions intent on my silencing: everyone, particularly people who’ve been historically rendered invisible, have a human right to be seen as well as heard, and true social change comes about by listening without judgment or condescension to the communities we purportedly seek to help. My debut book. SHAME ON YOU: How to Be a Woman in the Era of Mortification, is part-memoir, part-deep dive into the ways shame is weaponized against women in particular to keep us from achieving our goals and knowing our worth. The book is a culmination of everything I’ve lived through and all that I know to be true.
Melissa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’ve been a freelance cultural journalist following the pulse of sexuality, trauma, motherhood and feminism for over two decades, and have been an expert on the topic of shame and vulnerability for the past fifteen years. My writing has been featured in national pub- lications such as Allure, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian, InStyle, the Kitchn, Marie Claire, Narratively, New York Magazine, Pacific Standard, The Cut, Real Simple, Salon, Washington Post, Vice, and The Writer. The personal essay telling the story of the loss of my job for coming forward about my sex work past was one of Salon’s top 100 most trafficked stories in 2010.
As a former sex worker and survivor of mass media humiliation, I know personally the devastation that weaponized sexist shame can have on a woman’s life. I have also experienced and seen firsthand that when girls and women develop a greater awareness of how shame functions in our society and manifests their lives, we free up the mental space, emotional energy, and time we need to truly fulfill our purpose. I’ve helped hundreds of girls and women push through fear, write, share and even publish their most vulnerable stories in national publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Salon, Washington Post and elsewhere, and have helped still more individuals re-envision their lives by making meaning of their past and transcending traumatic experiences. For three years I ran a writing and wellness retreat in Sri Lanka and am the founder of Becoming Writers, a transformational language arts program that ran weekend and week-long therapeutic writing workshops for underheard populations at various nonprofits across NYC, including Ali Forney Center (LGBTQ homeless youth); Girls Education and Mentoring Services (underage victims of commercial sexual exploitation); Washington Heights CORNER Project (active and recovering drug users); and Red Umbrella Project (current, former and transitioning sex workers). For myself and my students, the act of writing is a form of social justice, and writing can be a powerful vehicle for self discovery, personal transformation and, ultimately, social change. Creative nonfiction, in particular, can empower individuals and communities to foster enduring meaning for themselves, a stronger sense of identity, courage for growth and change, and vision to seek and restore balance to individual lives and communities.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I don’t regret earning an MFA– mostly because I try to live a life without regret– but I did have to unlearn a lot of what The New School taught me about what kind of writing ought to be considered “good” and what it means to be a writer. In Writing By Ourselves and with Others, Pat Schneider contends that we are all natural storytellers and says that “not being able to write is a learned disability.” I strongly agree with this, even though I’ve gotten a lot of instruction to the contrary.
It took me 20+ years to write and sell my debut book and, in that time, I must’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars to work with at least two dozen different instructors, all of whom gave me conflicting and oftentimes disempowering advice. I sat through a lot of writing workshops and studied with a lot of coaches that had no interest in fostering a safe and supportive space. Their purpose– as those teachers saw it– was to teach craft, and improve the writing on the page. What I didn’t know then was that it takes a nurturing space to accomplish this, particularly when we’re talking about marginalized writers or anyone telling an underheard story. I didn’t really understand this, not completely, until I became a teacher myself. Writers need to be able to take creative risks without feeling personally judged, and receive criticism that is constructive and balanced with notes on what they’re doing right, so that they’re encouraged to keep writing. This is one way I create a safe, supportive environment in my writing workshops and with the individual students that I’m coaching: I ensure that there’s a balance positive and critical feedback. We also treat the work as if it’s fiction, even though it’s memoir (meaning that we talk about the protagonist or narrator, as opposed to you, the writer). It’s all about setting a tone that honors the writer and her intention. I am very serious about offering this to my clients, because it took a long time to learn to do this for myself.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
When I started querying agents back in 2010, SHAME ON YOU was a memoir about my experiences in the sex trades—how I got into it, how I got out, and what I learned as a result of my experiences. I had a couple agents express interest, including some big names that got my hopes up and then broke my heart, but ultimately every agent that I put it in front of passed. Then I was humiliated by the NY Post, and the project morphed into Unbecoming (still a memoir). I still couldn’t get an agent, even after that manuscript was a finalist for a PEN Award. I finally found someone who took a memoir proposal out on submission, and something like two dozen editors passed.I was demoralized, but remained determined to tell my story, so I folded that memoir into a project about mothering (I had, by then, become a mother) and that’s the book I queried my current agent with. It was 2020, and I’d been rejected by at least 50 agents by that point. My current agent, Laura Mazer, helped me to re-conceptualize the project into what it ultimately became. I’m so glad I didn’t give up, and so grateful to my agent for helping me to see past what happened to me, nd see the larger lesson that my experience revealed.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.melissa-petro.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melissa.petro/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melissapetrowriter
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-petro-22ab9a272/
- Twitter: https://x.com/melissapetro
Image Credits
author photo by Roya Zarrehparvar