Since first getting this printed on lulu.com I’ve met some incredible people interested in this research. One such person is Dr. Kinji Tanaka of the Japan Research Center of Greater Cincinnati. Dr. Tanaka has long been interested in Lafcadio Hearn and by extension, Henry Watkin, Lafcadio Hearn’s mentor (and founder of Bond Hill). I am thrilled that Dr. Tanaka will be taking copies of my book to Japan for the upcoming Conference in memory of the 100th Anniversary of Lafcadio Hearn’s death in September 1904.

The latest version of this book has more material relating to Henry Watkin and Watkin’s family, Laura Ann Fry Watkin, daughter of the master woodcarver Henry L. Fry, and their daughter, Effie Watkin. With Dr. Tanaka’s help I was able to discover new material on Henry Watkin at Iowa State Univeristy’s Archives including a beautiful photo of Watkin, their home in Pleasant Ridge, Ohio, and an interior photo of one of the rooms in their home showing what appear to be Henry and Laura’s wedding portraits. This should be very exciting new information for fans of Lafcadio Hearn.

Over the next few weeks I will be on the East Coast interviewing and networking for jobs. Wish me luck.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Conference” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.