love Dad – postcards and self-publishing

As I mentioned in my May roundup, I’ve been taking a five week course on self publishing. Today was the final class where we shared our final products. The course was rewarding in so many ways, from the technical side of learning how to use Indesign and how to prepare a file for publishing, to the creative side of bouncing ideas off other artistic and more knowledagable minds.

The indie bookstore/cafe that hosted the class is a sort of clubhouse for like-minded creatives in the neighborhood who like to read, write, draw, create, and best of all, support each others’ creative endeavors. I do not live the area, in fact I’m an hour away by subway, but I didn’t mind making the journey every week for class, and would actually come back home more energized and pumped to make more things! It’s called Make an Emergency Landing on Earth.

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For my project, I chose to compile the postcards my dad sent to me when I was young, from 1993 to 2003. For a while now I had been thinking I wanted to share my dad’s postcards, possibly on a website, for a number of reasons. I love postcards, and as I learned this year, there’s a whole bunch of other people who do too! I love my dad and am very proud of him, and I wanted to share with the world what an thoughtful and caring person he is. I hoped my dad’s postcards would inspire people to send more postcards and snail mail, because it’s really a nice feeling to get a personal note in your mailbox.

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Anyway, as those thoughts of a blog of postcards were percolating in the back of my brain, I found out about this class, and decided to make a postcard book. It was personally really meaningful to read through these postcards, most over 20 years old, trying to imagine what I was doing at that age and imagining my dad writing them from all over the world.

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The timing of the class was also perfect as it finished the week before Father’s Day, so I plan to give it to him as a Father’s Day gift. I included a few father-daughter photos from the time period in between the postcards for the aww nostalgia effect. I hope he likes it. And while today’s class was learning about how to contact bookstores to inquire about selling your self-published book, I had actually decided early on I wouldn’t publish my book. I think there’s the issue of copyrights on postcards, and it quite a personal book for a very private person like me to share. So I only printed one final copy to show in class and then give to my dad.

But I’m still very proud of this little book, it has been my baby for the past month. And the reasons I had for wanting to share my dad’s postcards still stand, so I wanted to put up a few snippets here in my little corner of the Internet. This book gives me the warm and fuzzies, I hope you can feel some of that too.