Museums

Two of my short stories that have recently appeared online are set primarily in museums. This should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who knew me as a child. As a kid, I volunteered at a museum—as does the main character in one of the stories—and I also had my own museum in a little storage building behind our house. I took my museum very seriously. It was filled with displays of minerals and fossils, as well as other natural objects like bird’s nests and insects. I also had a certain number of ethnological artifacts including prehistoric arrowheads and traditional pottery from Mexico, and “Old West” objects like antique bottles and buttons. Other kids in the neighborhood would also donate interesting specimens, and visitors to our house always got a tour of the museum. Whenever I visited another city, the first thing that I wanted to do was see the museums. I actually didn’t visit the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago until I was an adult, though. One of the stories is set in the Field Museum. At one point in my life, I really wanted to work in a museum when I grew up. But other interests intervened. However, the years I spent running a fair trade store were in many ways like managing a continually changing folk art museum. And I certainly still love visiting museums.