Melissa Hardy
By Dennis McCloskey
It was Mark Twain who first advised writers to “write what you know,” and judging from Melissa Hardy’s latest novel, Surface Rights, the director of communications for the London and St. Thomas Association of Realtors (LSTAR) has taken his counsel to heart.
Hardy is an accomplished, multi-award winning author of three novels and two collections of short stories. In her latest 294-page fiction novel, readers will find many connections to the real estate industry and at least one zany Realtor. Carmen the Cottage Lady is a Northern Ontario real estate agent in the fictional town of Greater Gommage. She is a cigarette-smoking “mountainous” woman who doesn’t get out of the car – she “decants” herself. Despite her eccentric (freakish?) behaviour and appearance, Carmen is a competent professional Realtor.
“Everyone is a composite,” says Hardy, a former freelance journalist who has been with LSTAR for 23 years. “Carmen is not based on any particular person I’ve known in the business. She may appear to be crazy or weird but the lady is astute!”
Surface Rights was published by Dundurn in December and immediately received good reviews, with the Toronto Star calling it “a thoroughly readable, and enjoyable, modern family saga.” The story is about a middle-aged woman who returns to the family cottage for the first time in 38 years to scatter the ashes of her husband, father and twin sister. She soon discovers a mysterious and menacing prospector who posts a notice on the cottage door, stating his intention to dig for ore. Turns out, her dysfunctional family holds the surface rights for the land but not the mineral rights and trouble ensues. When Hardy is asked if her knowledge and familiarity of topics-of-the-trade comes directly from her experience in the real estate field, she answers, “Absolutely!”
She works part-time for the association from her home overlooking Lake Erie in Port Stanley, 45 minutes south of London, in a house she shares with her professional musician husband, Ken Trevenna and a golden retriever, Nellie. Hardy has three grown children, Sabrina, Alice and William, and acquired two more (Shanah and Raina) when she married Trevenna. All five are grown up and have moved away. Her husband is from Timmins, which provided Hardy with the inspiration and setting for her current book and another, titled The Unchartered Heart. It was described by the Globe and Mail as “a remarkable evocation of events and places in Canadian history.”
A multi-linguist who has an honours BA degree in English in creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Hardy is a self-described history nerd who also received a masters degree in post-classical history at University of Toronto. She describes herself as the “point person” for LSTAR and devotes her time to communicating the association’s services, including government relations, lobbying, community services and writing and producing publications. LSTAR is one of the 10 largest Realtor associations in Canada with a membership of nearly 1,500 real estate brokers and salespersons working out of 134 offices.
A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., Hardy is now a Canadian citizen but also retained her American citizenship. Her parents were professors and her father is novelist William Hardy, who has published seven fiction novels. He gave her the best advice of her professional writing career, which began for her in 1970 at age 17, when Viking Press published her first novel, A Cry of Bees. He told her: “Set your completed manuscript aside for one month. Then go back to it and say: ‘What idiot wrote this and how can I help him?’” Hardy’s dad worked for 30 years in the summer with the Cherokee Historical Association and his daughter got to spend seven summers living on a reservation of the Cherokee Nation in the U.S. Her current book, and others, contains many references and themes of native influences.
Hardy says her real estate colleagues have been very supportive. “By nature, Realtors are giving and committed people and they have been very complimentary and pleased with any success I have achieved in my writing,” she says. “They are great cheerleaders!”
If anyone has a desire and aptitude for writing, the best advice she can give is to write! Write! Write! “When people tell me they’ve had an interesting life and they’d like to write their life story, I encourage them to find their voice by starting with a blog,” she says. Hardy suggests that a novel is “hard to hold in your head” with all its complexities, threads, story lines and characters. She writes a blog on her website and describes it as “the funnest thing ever.”
In 1994, Hardy won the Journey Prize, which is a Canadian literary award presented for the best short story published by an emerging writer in a Canadian literary magazine. Many awards and accomplishments followed and the inveterate writer is not showing any signs of slowing down or reducing her literary input. She hopes to complete a novel this spring that is “a darkly, comical work of speculative fiction set in early 19th century Italy.”
Watch for it. You might be in it. As a composite, of course.
