Preface

The work in this collection River Box Press has its beginnings in a collection of hand-drawn plat maps. Drawn by my grandfather in 1954, the maps record land ownership of the central Minnesota alfalfa fields and wetlands where he worked as a county clerk.

My mother gave me those maps on a winter day when she was sorting items in preparation for a move. I didn’t know that grandfather, but I came to know a piece of him by studying the cursive handwriting and colored lines of his maps.

I set the stack of maps at my desk while I worked. It was Covid times, the pre-vaccine period of lockdown and isolation at home.

After months of idly studying the maps, I began a series of digital publishing projects to explore the interplay of grids and the fluid contours of change and motion. I drew from decades of work in software technology, publishing and writing, and systems for classifying information. I chose the simplest building blocks of the web — HTML and CSS — as my tools.

The result was the Wadena County series, a series of abstract digital maps that grapples with the beauty of grids and the horror of their misuse.

The In the Meetinghouse series followed. It visually documents the experience of Quaker worship. Similar to the Wadena County series, this series grapples with boxes and the forces they cannot contain: in this case, the rectangular architecture of a Quaker meetinghouse and the unruly nature of unbounded spirit within it.

Work from the projects will appear in a 2026 collaboration with artist Kathy McTavish. The show, mounted in Duluth, Minnesota, celebrates the humble first languages of the web, used as potent and accessible tools for mapping power and mysticism.