The call coming from inside the house

Welcome to the Akenside Project, a newsletter about the extraordinary house that shaped my childhood.

For years, my childhood house occupied a place in my mind. Somewhere deep inside those walls was a story worth telling.

The Akenside house just before my parents bought it in 1984. The “for sale” sign is still in the front yard.

I’d sometimes say to friends, “If I ever write a book, it’ll be about that house.” The 100+ year dilapidated Victorian was a never-ending construction zone the entire time we lived there. My parents were trying to restore it themselves.

Leading up to 2020, the pull to write began to feel more urgent. Yet I still hadn’t put pen to paper. I didn’t know where to start.

I think the house was tired of waiting. So it gave me a little (okay, a big) nudge.

I received a phone call from the current owner. We’d been in touch over the years. She’d found my father’s notebook in a drawer and offered it to me. Notebook? What notebook? I hadn’t known it existed.

The opening pages of Dad’s restoration notebook. The center quote is by Chicago architect and city planner Daniel Burnham. “Make no little plans,” he famously said. “They have no magic to stir men's blood.”

The notebook contained one hundred pages of Dad’s loopy, frenetic, all-caps left-handed script. He documented my parents’ restoration projects in meticulous detail. Occasionally, he’d write about what he was feeling during those times. It was pure gold.

That was fall 2019. It was the push I needed. In January 2020 — before we had any inkling of a pandemic — I made a single new year’s resolution to write about the house. I opened my computer the morning of January 1 and wrote 1,000 gibberish words.

Flash forward three years later. It’s been touch-and-go. A few life events made writing impossible sometimes. But I always came back to it when I could. After many more thousands of words, a book is finally taking shape.

I feel like one of those crime show detectives with a bulletin board crammed full of clues. Some are real leads and others are dead ends. The mystery I need to solve is how to write a compelling story.

All my Akenside house research. This shelf contains historical documents, letters, journals, photos, and articles about the house.

I’m getting closer to cracking the case. Ultimately, I’ll need to leave a lot out of the book-length project. Every interesting tidbit I’ve uncovered doesn’t serve the overall story. This newsletter, the Akenside Project, will be where I house those side stories.

I’m not entirely sure where the Akenside Project will go. But the writer in me knows there’s only one way to figure it out. Step 1: Put butt in chair. Step 2: Start writing.

So, thanks for your patience while I meander a bit. And thanks for joining me on this journey!