As a teen I worked at a restaurant-resort named Huck Finn's in the little riverside, unincorporated town of Orihula, WI. During my time there, ownership switched hands from two family-owners to a single family owner from Chicago. It wasn't until after I graduated high school and was a few years into my undergraduate degree program that I had this idea to write a few whimsical poems about Huck's and give them to the owner as something they could potentially use to advertise their business.

I don't usually write poems with rhyme, but I felt this project called for it given the location of the business and its namesake.

The pieces appearing here are in their original format including my signed name and date. Written on the Smith Corona word processor my mom bought me to use in college, the pieces survived several years on a 3.25" floppy disk in the company's ".pwp" file format, then converted around 2005 to an ASCII format (".asc") so I could use them elsewhere. There's a nice video showing a similar word processor, complete with monochrome monitor here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIBxsrmfpNw. I don't recall the model number I had, but this one appears to be about right. I know there's a video somewhere in my archives that shows me walking out of my undergraduate school's dorms with the word processor when my sister and step dad picked me up for what was likely a winter break. I'll try to find that and post a clip here.

Herein are the pieces that originally had no collective title.