As I explained in an earlier post, I’m in the process of making my way through the house and separating the wheat from the chaff, determining which items will remain in our family archive, and which will be jettisoned into the ever-churning gyre of garbage that surrounds us. What follows is my justification for keeping […]
Since turning 50, I’ve been making a concerted effort to get my shit in order. I’ve started working more deliberately on this nearly 175 year old house of ours. I’ve pretty much cut bread, beer and refined sugar from my diet. And I’ve been attempting to rid myself of the possessions that I no longer […]
The response to yesterday’s post about my familial connection to the Swedish expatriate community of Galesburg was so overwhelmingly positive that I thought I’d spend a little more time in the archives this evening and share a few more facts about my immigrant family’s past in Illinois. First, I should correct something that I said […]
Earlier this evening, I was thinking about my grandmother who passed away this last May, and I decided to scroll back through the photos I’d taken the last time I was with her. Well, there among all of the photos I’d taken of her and Clementine, was this one of the telegram that she’d sent […]
When I first started my “History of Zines” oral history project back in 2013, one of the first people I reached out to was Sean Tejaratchi, the man behind the incredibly ambitious clip art zine Crap Hound. [As someone with OCD, the obsessiveness of Crap Hound really resonated with me, and I wanted to find […]
