Michele Marr

Michele Marr

Michèle has been intrigued by and engaged with art and writing since childhood. One of her early second-grade works in egg tempera and string titled “The Chicken Who Robbed the Bank,” was selected to be exhibited in the vitrine cases in the administration offices of her school in Quantico, Virginia, where, from her family’s Marine Corps-base home, she also published a neighborhood newsletter called the Foster Drive Gazette. Set with rubber letters from a child’s typesetting kit, it looked rather like a long ransom note.

She went on to excel in art and writing in high school, and was encouraged to by her teachers to enter university as an art major. Later, though, her parents and counselors urged her to take a degree in something “more practical.” So she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a degree in Social Ecology, which served primarily to evoke jokes at job interviews, such as, “What were you trained to do, recycle people?”

Eventually, she practiced graphic design, and wrote for many years, a number of them as a feature writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times Community News Group. Then she reached a point where she felt she no longer had much to say – at least not with words.

So she retired. And her husband bought her a camera, through which she tries to share with others the astonishing beauty and detail of our universe as she sees it.