Kathleen Melin
Nonfiction
Saint Croix Falls, WI
Kathleen Melin is the author of By Heart: A mother’s story of children and learning at home, a memoir of progressive education (Clover Valley Press 2008). Her creative and journalistic work has appeared in national and international publications including The Baltimore Review; EssayDaily; Feminist Parenting; A Woman’s Place; Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities; Eric Utne’s Cosmo DooGoods Urban Almanac; and others. She holds a MFA from the University of Minnesota. Melin has worked in education as a teacher, presenter, and passionate advocate for people of all kinds and ages whose choices have been limited by class, gender, and geography. She has taught at the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, Summit School for the Arts, Wisconsin Indianhead Technical Institute, conferences, festivals, libraries, and farms. At present, she offers classes and seminars in her rural area and is proprietor of a rustic retreat dedicated to creativity and contemplation.
At Ragdale, she will be working on Beautiful Brain, creative non-fiction based on the brain hemorrhage she experienced in 2016. Part essay, part memoir, it is structured in seven sections: three discrete essays punctuate a four-part story line. The essays examine disability, beliefs, ageing, and cognition. In the four narrative sections, the prose mirrors aspects of consciousness as it abruptly enters ethereal existence and gradually returns to earthly awareness and cognition. Stylistically, the book in progress relies on narrative, expository, and poetic writing. She is grateful to Ragdale for the residency and the concentration and focus it supports.
I fade in and out of consciousness, wakefulness, and she returns again and again.
“Why are you here?”
The question comes at me hour after hour. There is no getting around it this time. There are no distractions – no busy life of any kind, no delights I might pursue. There is no active body engaged in joyful doing and sensory pleasures. My mind, too, is stillness. I live in dark and light and dark and light. I answer all her questions but one.
Why are you here?
It lives inside me like a pearl, a soft luminescent irritation layered by years.
Melin/excerpt Beautiful Brain