Page 27 - Demo

While this fifth house was under construction, we produced a 13-part video series, which featured the two of us building our latest healthy house, for which I wrote all the first drafts for the scripts and, together, we planned out each of the shots. And, eventually, we updated some of our older healthy-house books and wrote new ones. For an income, we were primarily selling books and videos, at retail to individuals, and wholesale to mail-order catalogs and bookstores. After we moved into our newest house, I was able to write my last book, Creating a Healthy Household. It was quite a bit more comprehensive than my first, and required a great deal of research, including many phone calls to manufacturers%u2014as well as scouring catalogs, product literature, and magazine articles, which I was able to do inside my reading box.While I%u2019ve always enjoyed writing (a number of my poems were published in a college poetry magazine), what I enjoyed most about our publishing business was the design process of selecting fonts, laying out pages, and creating covers. I also got a great deal of enjoyment out of designing letterheads, advertising brochures, business cards, and the boxes for our video series. By most definitions, we were a success%u2014by reputation, by what we%u2019d created, and even financially, but we were both starting to get tired of the healthy-house field. We felt we%u2019d made real and positive changes in the lives of many people%u2014as well as in the construction industry. But we also realized there was not much else to learn from this particular venture. And we were ready, once again, to grow in creative new ways. Our new direction opened up when John decided to take a course at our local art center dealing with black-and-white photography and darkroom film-andprint developing. Almost right away, he found he had an unexpected talent, and his interest and enjoyment in this new endeavor kept growing. We had both taken many color photos over the years, of all sorts of subjects%u2014some we were quite pleased with%u2014but John%u2019s newfound enthusiasm for black-and-white was much more serious. It didn%u2019t take him long before deciding to remodel a room in our house into his own traditional wet darkroom. And he began focusing his camera more and more on Indiana%u2019s fading, forlorn, and forgotten places. This lead to his first photography book%u2014Lingering Spirit, which we thoroughly enjoyed publishing ourselves.John and I both enjoyed exploring Indiana%u2019s backroads, looking for things and places to photograph so much, that we decided to let our inventory of healthyhouse books run out completely, and changed our focus to publishing Indiana photography books. And this is what we did. In our travels, we eventually covered over 130,000 miles, all on day trips, exploring and capturing Indiana%u2019s past on film. We put together, a series of attractive books%u2014each focused on one particular facet of Indiana%u2019s vanishing history. While all the photography work was John%u2019s, I designed the covers and page layouts, and wrote many of the books%u2019 essays.As John worked in his darkroom, I was creating metal sculpture using copper, brass, or aluminum. It was so much fun. For the panels in the doors of our Distinguished Hoosier Certificate. 2011Publicity photo. 1995