Kinder Inquiries: The 50th Anniversary of the Death of an Ornate Box Turtle (2024–1974). Variable Edition of 30. Letterpress printed on handmade and commercial papers.
I letterpress printed Kinder Inquiries at the University of Iowa while I was an MFA student at the Center for the Book. I aimed to create printed pages that offered readers a range of compelling visual and emotional experiences. Each page will strike a different emotional chord in the reader, and each reader will have a different experience as they traverse the pages of this book.
Kinder Inquiries, “50th Anniversary 1974-2024”
This project encompasses five decades of my lived experiences in Iowa City, Iowa. The two main goals of this book were to commemorate of the 50th anniversary of the year I started kindergarten (1974) and to reflect on early literacy pedagogy in schools. Conceptually, I wanted to complicate the familiar genre of an abecedarium. As readers turn the pages, the terrain becomes increasingly complex and difficult to navigate. Layers of text and images reveal narrative threads, present decontextualized facts, raise questions, and provoke sensory memories.
Kinder Inquiries, “R is for resident”
Most print runs in this book were composed while I was standing at the press, allowing me to simultaneously construct and deconstruct ideas related to literacy and environmental harms. Notions about literacy and ecology were dredged from my subconscious mind and translated into pages that I consider to be ‘difficult landscapes.’
Press lock-up for a “circle story” in Kinder Inquiries
What makes a landscape difficult? A familiar terrain would be linear text read from left to right. A more challenging terrain contains circular texts, which disorient and require a slower approach if a reader wants to glean meaning. The most jarring landscapes in my book are the pages with up to ten layers of ink. These were attempts to obliviate language with opaque inks, but some of the words are still legible. Taking a complicated approach to setting type and printing layers of text was essential to my artistic vision. I wanted to use printed language to convey my own feelings of solastalgia (a sense of homesickness a person feels while they are still living at home).
It took more than one year to print the pages of this book. The process was not efficient; it was a long, slow slog through the solastalgic bogs of my soul. I called upon cultural artifacts laden with memory, including ornaments, flourishes, roman letters, and cuts/images that have been long separated from their original institutional publications. All these items were found in the University of Iowa’s Type Kitchen, part of the Center of the Book studios in North Hall. Interestingly, North Hall was built in 1925 and served as the University Lab School until the 1970s. Entering this building, I often felt like I was stepping back in time and experiencing the history of education in the United States. Printing with institutional relics that were specific to printed history in Iowa City resonated with me as I attempted to express the idea of solistalgia.
Kinder Inquiries, “F is for facts”
Though I had a preconceived plan, I invited spontaneity into the creative process. I would estimate that 90% of the book was improvised. I followed my intuition and attempted to express a range of emotions on the pages, while gradually revealing a true story about the death of an ornate box turtle that took place in 1974 in my kindergarten classroom. When the narrative became too dark, I remembered to include a feeling of joy. The endangered species act was not enacted in Iowa until 1975, so people were just beginning to recognize our harmful impacts on the environment. At the same time, 1974 was a time of play, like jumping rope at recess.
Kinder Inquiries, “J is for jumping rope; K is for kindergarten”
This book was a labor of love. Love for literacy, love for the natural environment, love for letterpress printing, and love for my home here in Iowa City, Iowa. Every new page spread is an invitation to readers to experience the complex narrative as it unfolds and to discover their own unique textual connections. Read alone or read aloud as a dialogic performance, this epic alphabet book fully embraces heteroglossia and never allows the experience of reading to become flattened by a singular voice of authority.
Jennifer Miller (she/her) is an artist and an English language educator currently living in Iowa City, Iowa. Her creative projects are inspired by history, archives, mapping, linguistics, phenology, and ecology. She holds an MFA in Ceramics (2000) and an MFA in Book Arts (2025), both from the University of Iowa.
