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...
by Melissa | May 16, 2015 | Uncategorized
I want to talk about Mad Men and its Didionesque gaze. The gaze has always been there, most obviously in the series’ sidelong glances at California, where the warm golden light and desert haze renders everything hyperreal. And critics have, at times, alluded to this,...
by Melissa | Apr 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker’s 2010 memoir of her mother-in-law Jessie, explores the devastating impact the First and Second World Wars had on the soldiers themselves, as well as the women left at home. She does so with deftness and subtlety, in a...
by Melissa | Aug 11, 2014 | Uncategorized
When I was seven or eight years old, sometime between reading Little Women and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I began writing little books, culminating in the seven-chapter opus Amabel Strikes Back, which received rave reviews...
by Melissa | Jul 24, 2014 | Uncategorized
Children are always episodes in someone else’s narrative, not their own people, but brought forth into being for particular purposes. So wrote historian Carolyn Steedman in her 1986 memoir Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives,which contrasts two working...
