Mel Wilson and Nathan Linsk, founders of the Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association(OPALGA) being interviewed in 2001.
Publication Limbo
It has been some time since I formally submitted the first Oak Park Story CD to a publisher. The editors are most interested and would go ahead with the publication but in order for them to successfully present the project to their board, they must get a report from their marketing department stating that they believe the CD will at least not lose money for them. While the actual cost of publishing a CD is much less than a book, it is also a relatively new idea. Only a handful of academic presses have tried. So I will have to wait to see what happens. Frustrating. There are other places I could submit this work to but none as good as the one I have selected. Hopefully by the next quarterly report I will know. My final fall back position is to self-distribute.
Progress on the family portrait of Rebekah and Sophie
I am spending the summer again in Oak Park. Just being here gives me a strong motivation to work hard. Being able to see the people involved with the study is also great. I can discuss ideas with them and get their reaction face to face. We were able to house sit again for Roberta Raymond Larson, one of the architects of Oak Park's integration policies and her husband, U of Illinois, Chicago mathematician, Richard Larson. It is a huge house, centrally located. I have spread my computer/video editing equipment over the dining room table. I have almost complete drafts of all of the written portions of the CD and have started to take some video clips from the interviews. It seems very likely that I will have an advanced draft of the entire CD by August and in time to show it to Rebekah and Sophie and others. I plan to to a final interview with them after they have seen the assembled video. It looks highly probable that I will complete this family portrait by early fall. I am already beginning to transcribe the interview tapes for the next family portrait - Helena's Story. As I have officially retired on July 1, I can devote more time to this work.
Learning to Think in a New Way
One of my interests in undertaking this project was to break away from the traditional forms of scholarly publishing - books and films. I believe I did just that in the Taylor Family Portrait that contains text, still images and videos into one publication. As I work on the second portrait I realize that the texts are mainly in a traditional scholarly form with some non-linear text links and the videos are simply a series of films. It is a blending of old forms is a slightly different form - not so different afterall. So I plan to try something a bit different this time. The videos will be broken up into short topical sections like "growing up" or "becoming a parent" and the longer written pieces will also be divided in a similar fashion. Hopefully it will make reading the texts on screen easier and make the readers/viewers more likely to find their own paths through the portrait. I hope that with each CD portrait - there will be four in all - that new ideas will occur to me.
As always I welcome your comments, criticisms and suggestions. Email me at ruby@temple.edu.