Courtesy of "Informal History"
After a turbulent pandemic start with Volume 1 publishing in Winter 2022, the local St. Louis magazine Informal History is due out this fall with its second volume. Volume 2 is due to be released shortly after a party hosted by the Griot Museum of Black History (2505 St. Louis Avenue) on October 8.
Informal History is a magazine and podcast promoting the study of history through collective discovery and individual creative expression. It’s a group effort by Mark Loehrer and Michael Brickey, with contributing editors Stefene Russell, Liz Wolfson, and more.
As an urban historian and archivist, Loehrer said he wanted to start IH because he felt like he couldn't write about what he wanted to and was limited to covering museum objects and the people behind them. Academia was similarly limiting. “Everything has to be so purposeful,” Loehrer says. “I was inspired by Charles Klotzer’s FOCUS/Midwest,” a magazine that ran from 1962–1984, and “centered on timely issues of the day, long-form, from a left-leaning perspective. Like IH, FOCUS/Midwest also centered essays/editorials as well as poetry of the day.”
Loehrer reached out to Brickey as he was assembling an editorial team. Both are academically trained historians, but IH is not a stuffy journal. “While we do strive to approach St. Louis history with a critical lens, we also want to produce content that is both critical and accessible, that is free of jargon and prose that emphasizes an argument at the expense of a narrative, and that highlights history as both something people experience and something people do,” Brickey says. The goal of Informal History is to simplify and open up access. Research doesn’t have to come with pedigrees and high academic language. It’s “history for the hell of it,” according to Loehrer. “We all kind of agreed there’s not a platform that exists in between a magazine, an academic journal, and a blog.” IH aims to fix that.
Volume 1 was designed and laid out by Nick Findley and features an interview with Amanda Clark of the Missouri Historical Society (which you can listen to here), an artist profile on the painter Ambrose Wesley, an article on Kinloch Missouri by Umar Lee, poems from Jason Vasser-Elong, and coverage of the Homer G. Phillips Hospital controversy from Dr. Ezelle Sanford III. It features illustrations by Noah Jodice, plus more.
Volume 2 has an urban environmental theme, and IH is always looking for more cave divers, archive browsers, urban explorers, poets, and St. Louis history buffs who want a place to see their work in print. Students are encouraged to contribute.
Roughly, the magazine is interested in St. Louis history from the fall of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in 1972 to today, and so far, the Informal History podcast—hosted by Lee—has recorded with St. Louis legends like the civil rights activist Percy Green and the author of The Broken Heart of America, Walter Johnson. Those episodes and more are available on Patreon starting at $3.14 per month.
“History is both a noun and a verb,” Brickey says, “so we are really interested in speaking with people who practice ‘public history’ broadly defined. In many ways IH is like a public history zine for St. Louis nerds. And we are also very interested in the many forms of creative practice from artists who have been influenced by their experiences with this place. We hope that IH is giving artists—visual artists, audio engineers, poets, authors—a platform to display their work and an audience that they otherwise may not have had access to.”
“Early on, I was anti-nostalgia,” Loehrer says, expressing boredom for the much-tweeted McDonald’s riverboat. “We want to produce something that captures the diversity of the local historical research scene, everything from the archives to community storytellers to museum curators. At the same time, we want to remind folks that you don’t need a degree in history to be a student of it. We’ve reached out to photographers, amateur historians, and even scientists to share their content with the community.”
For Michael Brickey, IH is about gathering up the passion for St. Louis that’s already there, and giving it a home in a publication: “I get to meet and chat with people who love what they're doing, and I see firsthand how much they care about this place. That gives me hope.”
“We’re historians, either because it’s our job or our hobby,” Loehrer says, encouraging readers to attend the October 8 party anticipating the launch of Volume 2. “We might occupy different roles, but the thing that brings us together is our mutual interest in the preservation of historical resources and the promotion of historical research and education. Everyone working on this Informal History is doing it because we think that history is damn important. Regardless of day jobs or hustles this is 100 percent a project of passion.”
To pitch a story or idea for publication, contributors can email informalhistorystl@gmail.com. For questions, media inquiries, distribution, sponsorship, or you wish to volunteer to assist in the publication’s operations, email informalhistorystl@gmail.com.
