The Father Box

A collaboration between writer John Lane and photographer Rob McDonald.

Award-winning writer John Lane kept a box for many years of what was left from his father’s life up until he committed suicide in 1959 when John was five years old. In the box are letters, photos, objects, and papers comprising nearly everything John knows about his father. The pieces suggest a man’s origins in rural North Carolina; they also document his service in a World War on another continent and trace his return home.

In 2018, John loaned the box to Rob McDonald and asked him to take it home and contemplate its contents through the lens of his camera. These are the photographs that Rob made and the poems and short essays John wrote. 

This is a project about what remains of lives that came before us, lives which set the path for our own. A testament to remembering, touching, feeling,thinking, and the resonant power of artifacts and memory, the intimate book also reminds us of the everlasting effects of war.

This signed and numbered limited edition book of 298 copies features covers hand-printed on the letterpress, a hand-sewn binding, and heavyweight text paper. The photographs were made using a 4x5 Pacemaker Crown Graphic press camera, circa 1950. The book sells for $35.

John Lane is Professor Emeritus at Wofford College where he was the director of the college’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Dead Father Poems, an earlier collaboration with Horse & Buggy Press and printmaker Douglas Whittle. He has won numerous awards, including Poetry Book of the Year by Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance SIBA in 2012 for his selected poems, Abandoned Quarry. In 2014 he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. He, along with his spouse Betsy Teter, is one of the co-founders of the Hub City Writers Project. 

Rob McDonald is a photographer who has been living a double life as an English professor and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Virginia Military Institute for a number of years. He was a nominee for the Vienna PhotoBook Prize and won a fellowship in the visual arts from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work, held in many private and museum collections, has appeared in several monographs, including Cy’s Rollei (with Sally Mann, Nazraeli Press), and Carolina Writers at Home (Hub City Press). Rob has published two other books with Horse & Buggy Press. Birdhouses was published in 2007 and just two copies remain. Poplar Forest was published in 2010 and a few copies of this remain. Both titles feature letterpress printing throughout the book and hand-sewn bindings. Rob’s photographic work is carried in both of the H&B and Friends galleries and we also collaborated on a fine art Birdhouses broadside in 2017 which integrates a giclee print on watercoloresque printmaking paper of one of Rob’s photographs with a letterpress printed poem by Cynthia Rylant.