Jen Mellen

From JensWiki, the JensNotes encyclopedia

This article is about the author of JensNotes. For the blog itself, see Every Story; for her photography, see JenMellen.com.

Jen Mellen (née Telfer, formerly Flavell; born October 24, 1980) is an American photographer, coin and currency dealer, blogger, and artist based in Palm Bay, Florida.^[1][2] She is the author of JensNotes, a personal blog whose archive spans from December 2007 to the present and numbers in the thousands of posts covering family life, photography, storm chasing, small business, health, and unfiltered social commentary.^[5] Known online as @LightningHunter for her Florida lightning photography and @InstaJen on social media, she owns the storefront Space Coast Coins & Crafts in Melbourne, Florida.^[6]

A self-described lifelong learner who acquired most of her skills “outside of the classroom,” Mellen has moved through careers in photography, numismatics, and art while chronicling two decades of a turbulent, resilient life in public — a body of writing she frames as “the truth and only the truth.”^[5]

Early life and education

Mellen was born Jennifer Telfer on October 24, 1980, and grew up in Southgate, Michigan, in the Downriver communities south of Detroit.^[1][7] She has described a difficult childhood in which she grew up “never receiving,” crediting her grandparents — especially a grandfather whose World War II stories she says taught her the art of storytelling — as the steadying figures of her early years, along with summers spent at Cedar Point.^[8][9]

She attended Southgate Anderson High School, graduating in 1998, and took part in its JROTC program, where classmates knew her as “Telfer”; in 1997 she wrote an article on a JROTC drill competition for the Downriver newspaper The News-Herald.^[10][11] Placed in special-education English classes, she was nonetheless published in newspapers as a student and regards writing as an innate gift: “I write and punctuate how I think, feel, and speak.”^[8] She later studied at Wayne County Community College District (c. 2001–2004), and in 2018 began coursework toward a Graphics Technology program at Eastern Florida State College.^[1][12] She counts mathematician John Nash’s line that “Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity” among her favorite quotes, reflecting her self-taught streak.^[1]

Michigan years and move to Florida

Mellen married and raised her first children in southeastern Michigan, living in the Downriver area and later in Monroe.^[1] She has recalled being in the Detroit area during the region’s severe 2014 floods.^[13] In 2013 she relocated to Florida, a move she has described in stark terms — “entering a new decade of my life in this wretched state where I lost everything” — even as she embraced the state’s daily thunderstorms for her photography.^[14][15] Her Florida residences included Clermont and Port St. Lucie before she settled on the Space Coast in Palm Bay.^[1] The 2013 move was closely followed by her mother’s death in her Florida home (see Family losses), and she has written repeatedly of the isolation of living far from her Michigan support network.^[16]

Careers and ventures

Mellen is a serial creator who has run — or attempted — a series of small businesses spanning photography, numismatics, and art, several under her own LLCs.^[1]

Photography

Photography is Mellen’s signature medium. She began pursuing it seriously around 2010, contemplating a professional camera purchase and working through bodies including a Canon EOS 7D and, later, a Nikon D7500.^[17][18] Her subjects range from portraits and weddings (through JenMellen.com) to wildlife shot at Central Florida locations such as Circle B Bar Reserve in Lakeland, to the storm and lightning photography that earned her the handle @LightningHunter and helped draw her to Florida’s storm season.^[15][19] She has described going to physical extremes for a shot — her husband once said she “was close to death” climbing a wall for a nature photograph in Puerto Rico.^[20] In 2025–2026 she returned to photography in earnest, remastering her back catalogue, assembling a two-part portfolio, and preparing framed prints for sale, and set up a green-screen studio inside her coin shop.^[21] She calls her eyes “the viewfinders for the world.”^[8]

Space Coast Coins & Crafts

In 2024 Mellen founded Space Coast Coins & Crafts, LLC, a coin and currency dealership in Melbourne, Florida, where she is owner and coin dealer.^[1] The business deals in silver, coins, and paper currency “all the way from Ancient Rome to modern day,” and has drawn what she calls “kids of all ages.”^[22] She debuted on the live-shopping platform Whatnot in December 2025 and has exhibited at Renninger’s Melbourne flea and farmers’ market, where she has also posted consumer warnings about vendors overcharging for common modern coins.^[6][23] By late 2025 she reported the store was “doing so well.”^[22]

Art and other ventures

Mellen also works in painting and mixed-media art, at times collaborating with her husband Jason on pieces both of them sign.^[24] Over the years she has registered or promoted several web ventures, including NorthernLightsCreative.art, CoinsAndCrafts.com, and SimplyCandidLLC.com, alongside JensNotes.com.^[1]

Blogging and JensNotes

Mellen’s personal blogging predates modern social media; archived snapshots trace her writing from early Blogger sites through 4littlemonkies.com and flavells.com to the present-day JensNotes.^[5] She has kept the tradition of writing a New Year’s letter to her future self every year since about 2007.^[25] In 2026 she consolidated her entire Facebook history — roughly 6,500 posts dating to December 2007 — into the blog, each prefixed “From Facebook:” and backdated to its original date, producing a continuous public record of nearly twenty years.^[26] Her associated channels include @JensTube on YouTube, where she posts family footage, storm clips, and remastered music videos.^[27]

Personal life

First marriage

Mellen married Matthew Flavell on May 5, 2000 — a Cinco de Mayo wedding held in two parts, with a U.S. ceremony (at which lifelong friend Ron Stach was best man) and a separate U.K. portion.^[4][28] The couple had four children before divorcing in 2015 (below).

Children

Chris

Chris (born June 13, 2002) is Mellen’s eldest, later a member of the United States Marine Corps. Their relationship was strained during the custody conflict of the late 2010s, which Mellen has written about with hope for reconciliation.^[29]

Andrew

Andrew (born February 22, 2005) enlisted in the United States Army, entering as a Private First Class on the strength of his JROTC background.^[30] He completed Basic Combat Training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 2024 — Mellen and Andrew reuniting at his graduation after a seven-year estrangement — and graduated as a combat medic (68W) from Advanced Individual Training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, in February 2025.^[31][32] He got his first tattoo, a Deadpool-themed piece Mellen tied to his combat-medic role, in November 2024, and she has documented greeting him home before a deployment.^[33]

Caitlyn

Caitlyn (born February 12, 2009) is a high-school student in Navy JROTC. Central to the 2022 abuse case (below), she celebrated her Sweet 16 in February 2025 with the Fearless Improv Brigade at Cocoa’s Surfside Playhouse.^[34][35]

Ava

Ava (born October 2010), nicknamed “Ava Mellenballer,” survived a near-loss to SIDS as an infant and back-to-back seizures at 17 months that saw her transported by mobile ICU to Toledo Children’s Hospital.^[8][37] A competitive cheerleader on the Andromeda squad, she competed across Florida (West Palm Beach, Wesley Chapel) in 2024, and as of 2025 attends high school in Navy JROTC alongside her sister.^[38][35]

Divorce and custody battle

Acting entirely pro se, Mellen prepared her own divorce filings and finalized the divorce from Flavell in May 2015 after a hearing she clocked at one minute and fifty-seven seconds, without Flavell present.^[39] The years that followed brought a sustained legal fight. In 2016 she was accused of striking her son Chris — an accusation she maintains was false and that the evidence contradicted^[29] — and the children came to live with their father, who on September 7, 2017 married Roselou Warren.^[40] Mellen has written that her ex-husband “filed court action to strip me of my custody and money” as she rebuilt from illness and financial ruin.^[41]

The Warren-Flavell case

On July 9, 2022, Titusville police responded to the Flavell home after Warren-Flavell attacked thirteen-year-old Caitlyn. According to the shelter petition Mellen published in full, the stepmother was arrested and charged with felony child abuse; home-camera footage captured her striking the child repeatedly, throwing a metal rice-cooker pan, and at one point holding a butcher knife, while the child “did not fight back.”^[40] Following the dependency case, Caitlyn and Ava were removed from their father’s household, and in January 2023 the court involuntarily terminated his parental rights. “My girls are back home with their family, which is myself and their true dad, Jason,” Mellen wrote.^[42] In the criminal case, State of Florida v. Roselou Warren-Flavell, Mellen and her husband publicly opposed a lenient plea; the episode made her a vocal critic of Florida’s child-welfare system.^[43][44]

Second marriage

Mellen married Jason Mellen on May 1, 2018.^[3] The couple own a home in Palm Bay and collaborate closely on art and business; the girls refer to Jason as their “true dad.”^[42] Writing about the marriage in 2022 she titled a post simply: “I am so in love with my husband and children!”^[45]

Family losses

Mellen’s father died in April 2008 after she signed the authorization to remove him from life support, a decision she grieved for years.^[46] Her mother died of cancer on February 2, 2014, at Mellen’s Florida home, months after the family’s move to the state.^[47] She has also written about the May 2025 death of lifelong friend and 1998 classmate Ron Stach, publishing photographs she had taken of him from high school onward.^[48] February carries particular weight in the family calendar: “02-02 is when my mom died. 02-12 is Caitlyn’s birthday, and 02-22 is Andrew’s birthday.”^[47]

Pets

The family’s animals feature prominently on the blog. They include cat Junior; kitten brothers Caius (died 2015) and Aro, nicknamed “Squeaker” — whose death in July 2026 Mellen compared to losing her mother, memorializing him with a garden stepping stone; Walter, a bob-tailed domestic short-haired cat and Hurricane Ian survivor adopted in February 2023 from the Hope4Brevard shelter; and Rosie, a golden retriever.^[49][50][51]

Health

Mellen has written openly about a long and eventful medical history. She underwent gastric bypass surgery in October 2009 and later fought a hospital for her own ICU records after a botched nasogastric-tube procedure.^[52] In early 2016, a misdiagnosis at two Downriver-area hospitals sent her body into sepsis; she spent four days in the ICU, three of them critical, and blogged from her hospital bed about lost memories and facing the ordeal alone.^[53] She manages ADHD (treated with Adderall for over two decades) and anemia (with recurring iron infusions), was treated for facial hyperhidrosis in 2025, and in 2025 began the weight-loss medication Zepbound, documenting her progress from about 200 pounds into the 180s.^[24][54][55] She underwent a surgery in early 2026.^[56]

Advocacy and public voice

Mellen uses the blog as a platform for advocacy and commentary, typically writing in real time and naming names. Recurring themes include:

• Child-welfare reform. Drawing on both sides of her own history — wrongly accused, then watching a videotaped attack on her daughter draw a lighter response than her own case — she has argued that “in Florida, there is evidence of a broken system for child welfare.”^[44]
• Survivor advocacy. Mellen has publicly identified as a sexual-assault survivor and, during a difficult 2026 recovery, channeled the experience into original creative and advocacy work, including a self-produced music video, using hashtags for crime victims and support.^[57]
• Consumer and workplace complaints. After a May 2025 injury at Amazon’s MLB1 warehouse, she published a running series accusing the company of mishandling her workers’-compensation claim; the Florida firm Farah & Farah took her case.^[58] A 2023 “Facebook Jail” saga chronicled being locked out of a 16-year-old account.^[59]
• Politics. Mellen writes from a progressive, frequently anti-Trump perspective, and in April 2025 documented her daughter Caitlyn’s first protest.^[36][60]

Personal traits

Mellen’s public persona is marked by a few consistent signatures. Purple is her signature color, recurring in a 2017 tattoo — a cross with a hurricane-style purple swirl incorporating her children’s names — and in choices such as dyeing her hair purple in 2025.^[61] She describes herself as a self-taught “sponge” for information, a trait she links to her ADHD, and cites her longtime best friend Julie as a constant.^[8][62] An early adopter of technology (she has written about ChatGPT and high-end Apple hardware), she is also a self-described weather enthusiast fascinated by Florida meteorology, including the state’s central “ridge.”^[63]

Life and career timeline

References

1. Facebook profile & archive imported to JensNotes (2007–2026): profile information — hometown Southgate MI; Southgate Anderson HS; Wayne County CC; Space Coast Coins & Crafts; places lived; websites; favorite quotes. JensNotes archive.
2. “Scary Moment @ Southwest Middle School”. JensNotes. May 8, 2025.
3. “7th Anniversary”. JensNotes. May 1, 2025.
4. “Our 7th Anniversary”. JensNotes. May 5, 2007.
5. “A Monster Named Roselou Warren-Flavell” (blog-history passage). JensNotes. 2022.
6. “First Whatnot show” (Space Coast Coins & Crafts). Facebook archive, December 2025.
7. “The Urban Dictionary: Downriver”. JensNotes. December 15, 2014.
8. “To Preface A Book…”. JensNotes. January 30, 2015.
9. “Cedar Point”. JensNotes. July 22, 2013.
10. “It’s Just Who I Am”. JensNotes. July 22, 2014.
11. “1997 News-Herald JROTC drill article” (retrospective). Facebook archive, July 2025.
12. “Holidays 2018”. JensNotes. November 22, 2018.
13. “2014 Detroit-area floods” (retrospective). Facebook archive, August 2024.
14. “Entering a new decade in Florida.” Facebook archive, December 2013.
15. “Nobody even knows I’m gone…”. JensNotes. September 19, 2013.
16. “No family here, no support network.” Facebook archive, 2020.
17. “Trying out the Canon EOS 7D.” Facebook archive, November 2012.
18. “The Nikon D7500 – My Camera!”. JensNotes. March 7, 2023.
19. “Circle B Bar Reserve” wildlife references. Facebook archive, 2026.
20. “Puerto Rico nature shot — ‘close to death.'” Facebook archive, July 2025.
21. “Portfolio / remastered photography for prints; green-screen studio.” Facebook archive, 2025–2026.
22. “Silver, coins & currency; store doing well.” Facebook archive, October 2025.
23. “Renninger’s market; penny-roll pricing PSA.” Facebook archive, 2026.
24. “Mixed-media painting with Jason; 23 years on Adderall.” Facebook archive, March 2024.
25. “6th year writing New Year’s letters to my future self.” Facebook archive, December 2012.
26. “From Facebook” import — the blog’s monthly archives, 2007–2026.
27. @JensTube on YouTube.
28. “RIP Ron Stach – Lifelong Friend & Classmate”. JensNotes. May 30, 2025.
29. “08-23-2019 Blog Post”. JensNotes. August 23, 2019.
30. “Poems Written For Andrew – Whilst at Boot Camp”. JensNotes. August 7, 2024.
31. “Andrew & Mamma reunite at graduation after 7 years.” Facebook archive, September 2024.
32. “Andrew graduates official combat medic (Fort Sam Houston).” Facebook archive, February 2025.
33. “Andrew’s first tattoo.” Facebook archive, November 2024.
34. “Caitlyn’s Sweet 16 with Fearless Improv Brigade, Surfside Playhouse.” Facebook archive, February 2025.
35. “First day of High School — Caitlyn 11th, Ava 9th, both in Navy JROTC.” Facebook archive, August 2025.
36. “Caitlyn’s First Protest”. JensNotes. April 5, 2025.
37. “I’m praying for my baby Ava”. JensNotes. March 26, 2012.
38. “Ava’s cheer (Andromeda) — West Palm Beach, Wesley Chapel.” Facebook archive, early 2024.
39. “Slam Dunking a Divorce w/ No Help”. JensNotes. March 5, 2015.
40. “State Petition – Why Children Were Removed From Father”. JensNotes. November 1, 2022.
41. “I’m living to 102…”. JensNotes. July 31, 2018.
42. “The best new year ever!”. JensNotes. January 24, 2023.
43. “Letter to Judge: State of Florida v. Warren-Flavell”. JensNotes. April 3, 2023.
44. “Child Abuse Reform is a MUST in Florida!”. JensNotes. April 4, 2023.
45. “I am so in love with my husband and children!” JensNotes. November 29, 2022.
46. “Grieving”. JensNotes. April 26, 2008.
47. “Happy Post: Where to move!?”. JensNotes. January 29, 2015.
48. “RIP Ron Stach — photos from high school to 30.” Facebook archive, May 2025.
49. “Rest In Peace My Son – Aro/Squeaker”. JensNotes. July 9, 2026.
50. “Jason & Walter”. JensNotes. April 12, 2023.
51. “Welcome Rosie (golden retriever).” Facebook archive, 2023.
52. “Sucked It Up”. JensNotes. August 31, 2011.
53. “Step by Step, Heart to Heart, We All Fall Down…”. JensNotes. March 14, 2016.
54. “Back to Iron Infusions! Ugh”. JensNotes. May 2, 2025.
55. “From Facebook: Started Zepbound”. JensNotes. June 5, 2025.
56. “Four weeks out of surgery.” Facebook archive, March 2026.
57. “Survivor advocacy — self-produced music video; #crimevictims.” Facebook archive, June 2026.
58. “Never Work For Amazon”. JensNotes. May 3, 2025.
59. “Facebook Jail”. JensNotes. March 8, 2023.
60. Political commentary. Facebook archive, 2025–2026.
61. “Tattoo — cross with purple hurricane swirl & kids’ names (Atomic Tattoos, Lakeland); purple hair.” Facebook archive, 2017 / 2025.
62. References to “my BFF Julie.” Facebook archive, 2012–2025.
63. “Florida’s ridge & why weather behaves as it does.” Facebook archive, 2025.