Contact: Sammy McDavid
A Canadian architect and educator whose compelling examination of a largely barren Newfoundland island became an award-winning book will be visiting the state as a special guest of Mississippi State University.
Robert Mellin will discuss "Tilting" during separate public programs Wednesday [Sept. 29] and Thursday [the 30th] in Starkville and Jackson. The presentations by the associate professor of architecture at Montreal's McGill University are sponsored by the MSU College of Architecture.
The 4 p.m. Wednesday event will take place in the Bettersworth Auditorium of Giles Hall, the college's home on the Starkville campus. At 5:30 p.m. in Jackson, he will speak at the college's Stuart C. Irby Jr. Studios, 509 East Capitol St.
"Tilting" [Princeton Architectural Press, 2003], whose subtitle is "House Launching, Slide Hauling, Potato Trenching, and Other Tales from a Newfoundland Fishing Village," describes the people, their homes and other structures that make up a proud seafaring community originally known as Tilton Harbour and, in jest, "Tilt Town."
Populated today by 300 hardy descendants of the Irish settlers who arrived in the late 1700s, Tilting is among 11 settlements on Fogo Island, a remote, nine-by-15-mile spit of land eight miles off the Eastern Canadian coast.
While the island itself might not have seemed to many as worthy of in-depth consideration, Mellin's non-fiction work apparently begs to differ. Earlier this year, his descriptive images and compelling photographs of the place were rewarded by the Winterset Award, a prestigious Canadian literary honor.
Judges for the competition selected it over more than 40 other publications. One even wrote that "Visually, in its writing, in its subject, it is a very important book."
One Canadian literary reviewer agreed, describing "Tilting" as a "part architectural text, part sociological time-travel" that provides "a quick escape to a far-off land of wholesomely honest and genuinely good-natured people leading simple, though often difficult, lives."
Mellin, who holds one degree from McGill and four--including a doctorate in architecture--from Pennsylvania State University, is the brother of Norman Mellin of Starkville, a music teacher with the Starkville Public Schools.
For more information on Robert Mellin's Mississippi presentations, telephone the School of Architecture at (662) 325-2202.