Matt Headley

I’ve lived in Calhoun County most of my life. In Jacksonville, mostly. Some years in Anniston. Four years in Muncie, Indiana, doing urban youth ministry, before I came back.

My formation was in music. Four years at Jacksonville State studying voice — opera, oratorio, stage productions. I played the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance. I played the title role in Sweeney Todd. I learned that music training teaches you to hear what’s wrong before you can name it, and I’ve been using that skill in various forms ever since.

After JSU I earned an M.Div. from Northern Seminary — Lombard and Lawndale, Illinois, just outside Chicago — in theology and urban ministry. Then churches: Muncie first, then back to Alabama. Nineteen years in pastoral ministry, congregations in Indiana and Alabama. I preached, counseled, organized, showed up. I officiated weddings and funerals — hundreds of them.

My wife Heather and I built a flower farm. We started small, learned permaculture, turned clay into growing beds, ran a cut-flower CSA, vended at the Downtown Anniston Market for four years. Our kids grew up underfoot in the rows. It was one of the best things I’ve ever been part of.

We had to close it.

The closing, and everything that came around the same time — leaving ministry, a mental health crisis, a bipolar diagnosis, the move to Pleasant Valley — that’s the material I’m still writing from. Some of it has appeared in personal essays at Southern Legends. Some of it is still in drafts.

I built my first website for my own church in 2014. Then the flower farm, in 2022. Then local businesses, starting in 2026. That became Plainspoken Blueprint: websites and brand strategy for local businesses. Somewhere in there I started building software — tools I wished had existed when I was running the farm, managing the market, planning sermons, coordinating theater productions. That’s Gather: a suite of software for community organizers. Florists, market managers, pastors, event planners, theater directors.

I’ve also been a farmers market manager for the City of Anniston. I use the software I built, live, in the job. That’s not a marketing claim. It’s just what happened.

The writing project is Southern Legends — profiles of small businesses and community figures in Northeast Alabama. The question underneath every story: what kept them going? I also write personal essays in the journal section.

Two books are in progress. One is a public history project built around the Chief Ladiga Trail and the 2032 bicentennial of the Treaty of Cusseta — a reckoning, not a celebration. The other is a memoir about the farm, the closing, and the rebuild. Neither is finished. Both are in the source material of almost everything else I do.