Things I've followed,
and made.

What I Wanted to Ask My Grandfather

I began this essay for myself, and for the family who will come after me. Back in our old Shenyang apartment, I opened my maternal grandfather’s annotated photo album and returned to the letters he wrote when I was struggling at school. I had new questions for a man I could no longer ask.

The most absorbing part was discovering how those old pages still spoke to my present: leaving McKinsey, learning to work on my own, and helping my daughter study. His advice had acquired another reader, and another meaning. Writing let me think with him again.

The House I Drew for You

Bob brought me plans, slides, photographs and papers from his architectural career. I began making a special issue for him, then kept returning to the house he designed for his family: the trees he saved, the two Dalmatians on the landing, and his final walk through every room before handing over the keys.

I loved moving between the drawings and his recollections until architecture and fatherhood began to illuminate each other. That discovery gave the issue its song. Working through plans, spaces, photographs and music let me follow an idea into forms I had never tried before.

Finding Celia

A granddaughter wanted a photograph of her grandmother, Celia Turk Gromet. A handwritten name became the beginning of a search through marriage records, directories, dental-school archives and a 1918 yearbook. I made Finding Celia so she could follow that search and meet the young woman who existed before the grandmother she remembered.

I loved the moment when a document changed the relationship: Celia became younger, and she could become her granddaughter again. That led me from archival detective work into an imagined conversation and a bright pop finale, with the historical evidence and the invention kept visibly distinct.

Wang Xiuping

Pulling the Bends Straight

I made this special issue for my family, bringing together our accounts of my paternal grandfather, Wang Xiuping. His life runs through a difficult childhood, electrical work, painting, and the things he made and repaired at home. It begins with the circuit diagram he helped me understand: “Pull the bends straight.”

I loved seeing relatives’ different memories restore the same place. A visit to the old Hongyibian courtyard became photographs, a pencil plan, my aunt’s painting, and then scenes we could revisit together. The handmade sofa, the grape arbor and the little acts of care gave me more to work with than a list of milestones ever could.

Edna’s World

Bob remembered that his mother, the interior designer Edna Alcorn, had had her work published, but thought he no longer had the magazine. I made this special issue for him by following that recollection back to her credited interiors in the October 1959 issue of Interior Design, and outward into the rooms, work and family that shaped her world.

The pleasure was in turning research into a discovery Bob could enter: his voice, the magazine, the original black-and-white rooms, then an imagined return of their color. His memory of making little paper furniture also gave me the cover’s impossible chair, with a whole room inside it.

One More Idea

Mary is a teacher, a reader and a writer who still meets a friend in the library to write. I wanted this first illustrated telling to follow the movement of her curiosity: a remembered classroom, a joke, one thought prompting another.

What I enjoyed most was following her curiosity rather than imposing a finished life story. Research, illustration and a song gave me different ways to follow those thoughts, and something to bring back to our next conversation.