A L U M N I M A G A Z I N E - Colby-Sawyer College

more curious about what was happening behind
the camera.
“In high school and at Colby-Sawyer I had done
a lot of technical work, building of sets, so one summer
in New York I did a crash course in how to use a
camera and edit video. Then I started getting a lot of
jobs—assistant director of a soap opera, crowd control
on film,” Melville explains. “When I worked on
‘As the World Turns,’ I was amazed because it took
approximately 75 people who had to do their jobs
well, every day. Even though it was a soap opera, I
was very proud of the experience.”
After eight years in the city, Melville decided she
had had enough. “It was great, and I miss all the
theater and the great restaurants,” she says, “but I
didn’t want to become a city person.”
She began sending out her résumé and was hired
by New Hampshire Public
Television (NHPTV) in the
mid-1980s as assistant producer
for its “New Hampshire
Crossroads” and “First in the
Nation” programs. She wrote
scripts, set up shoots and
coordinated crews—all that
goes into telling stories for
television. For the tenth anniversary
of “New Hampshire
Crossroads,” she and a crew
traveled to Old Hampshire
County in England to explore
the region where New
Hampshire’s founders lived.
They traveled the countryside,
filming the reconstruction
of a thatched roof and
the beguiling game of cricket, and their discovery of
the grave sites of some of New Hampshire’s founding
fathers.
While at NHPTV, Melville won two Emmy
Awards from the National Academy of Television
Arts and Science’s Boston/New England Chapter for
two documentaries she produced. One was about
the New Hampshire Festival Orchestra’s production
of Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” and the
other was based on Superman’s death in the comics
and allure in contemporary culture, performed by
the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra.
“All the producers on “New Hampshire
Crossroads” had personal interests—mine were
theater, dance and music—and hiking,” she says,
laughing. “It was great because we could tailor a lot
of our stories to our interests.”
Melville also met her husband, Bill Marcinkowski,
at NHPTV, and they married in 1993. They eventually
moved to their current home in Northfield,
Vt., and Melville was hired by Vermont Public
Television as the producer for two programs, “In the
Public Interest,” and “Rural Free Delivery,” a 30-part
series that attracted some of the station’s highest
ratings. She continued at VPT after the birth of their
son Adam, but after a second child, Dylan, she cut
back to a part-time fund-raising job. In 2006, while
she and her family were visiting friends on the
New Hampshire seacoast, she experienced a quiet
epiphany that took her in a direction for which her
life had been preparing her.
Island Magic
From their friends’ home in Rye, N.H., Melville
looked out over the ocean one morning to the Isles
of the Shoals, a place she had often visited on high
school trips and had always wanted to take her family.
Finally, it was the right time to go.
“It was a perfect June
day, not too windy, not too
hot; the ocean was like a
mirror going out,” she said.
“We had such a blast walking
around on the rocks.
This feeling came over me
that this would be a great
documentary—all the history
and the funky stories
and the beautiful location—but
I figured someone
had probably already
done it.”
While waiting for the
White Island, where poet, writer and painter Celia Thaxter lived as a child while her ferry, Melville stopped at
father was a lighthouse keeper, is one of the Isles of Shoals.
the gift shop to inquire
about a documentary of the
Isles of Shoals. The woman told her no, they didn’t
have one, but they probably should because people
ask for it all the time. Melville later contacted the
executive director of the Star Island Corporation,
which owns the largest islands in the Shoals, about
her idea and received an enthusiastic response. She
wrote a treatment outlining the film and applied
for and received grants from the New Hampshire
Humanities Council and Arts Council.
“I said, ‘Okay, this is it, I gotta do it,’ and I quit
my job, and my husband’s freakin’ out!” Melville
recalls says, laughing. “I had raised some money,
certainly not all I needed, but I always knew I could
do it.”
Over the next two years, Melville researched the
Shoals’ history and visited as often as she could the
next spring, summer and fall, filming about 30 days
on nearly all of the nine islands with a borrowed
video camera and tripod. “I would drive down (from
Vermont) the night before and crash at my father’s
house and jump on the boat the next morning,”
she says.
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