I hail from Toronto, Canada but have lived more than half of my life abroad – from the US to France and now a sunny corner of the Swiss Alps. My first job as a copywriter was to edit my unwieldy first name into something more like me: short and to the point. So it was that I morphed from Mary Ellen into Mel. My love of language began with English and now extends to French along with a soupçon of German. My writing? From fiction to memoir, it's often irreverent, sometimes funny and occasionally moving. Always character-driven.