by Melissa | Feb 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
Are a fire of blue, a pulse of power, a beat In energy, the sea dissolves,And I too melt, am timeless, a pulse of light. from ‘Achiltibuie’, Nan Shepherd The Sir Duncan Rice Library appears as an intrusion in the landscape, or at least as an intrusion on my imagining...
by Melissa | Nov 22, 2018 | Uncategorized
‘The longest road out is the shortest road home.’ The message came to me in a fortune cookie last July, and though I did not really grasp its meaning, I pinned it to the wall next to my front door, at eye height. I glance at it often, lingering on the hearth as...
by Melissa | Nov 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
In early 2016 I went to Bali for a friend’s 40th birthday. I was to meet a group of friends from all over the world for a week of sun, sea, seafood and Bintang. I went over early, renting an Airbnb villa on the outskirts of Ubud for a few days – some...
by Melissa | Oct 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
Part elegy, part bildungsroman, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2010, recounts the formative years in the lives of Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe, lovers and friends, muses and makers. In 1966, while studying teaching at a...
by Melissa | Sep 16, 2015 | Uncategorized
In May 1990, after graduating from Emory University, 22-year-old Chris McCandless told his parents he was taking a road trip. ‘I think I’m going to disappear for a while,’ he said. Over the next few months he abandoned his car in a riverbed, gave what was left of his...
