Hawthorn Mineart

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Hawthorn Mineart
Hawthorn Mineart

If you need to contact me, that information is here.
I’m a UI designer at a media/publishing company in Indianapolis, Indiana where I’ve worked since 1994. We publish textbooks and computers science and business books, and I mainly work on instructor tools for education.

I’m married to a wonderful woman named Stephanie, and we own a 130-year-old Victorian home in The Old Northside, an historic neighborhood in downtown Indianapolis.

Stephanie at CN Tower
Stephanie

Since 1994, I’ve been writing, designing, and creating this website / blog /journal / art project. I enjoy taking pictures of “big things” and advertising art and have been on the local news because of it. I’ve always wanted to write novels, and from the many blog posts on the subject, you can probably see I’ve been trying to complete one for at least 15 years. Eventually I will.

Childhood and Growing Up

I was born in West Des Moines, Iowa, a couple of hours after Robert Kennedy died. That was great, because for the first couple decades of my life, the news had nice retrospectives of the event with lovely titles like “The nation mourns as it recalls June 6, 1968.” Never mind that it was my birthday.

I grew up in suburban Iowa, and my grandparents lived on a farm that we got to visit quite a bit when I was a kid. I have four brothers and a sister. I’m the second child and did a lot of care-taking of my younger siblings. I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but at least I learned how to change a diaper and babysit, which is handy now that my friends are having babies.

Me stealing cookies from grandma's jar, 1970
Me sneaking cookies from Grandma’s cookie jar.

We lived in Ohio for a few years when I was in middle school and then in Noblesville, Indiana, where I went to high school. I went to Ball State University because they gave me more scholarship money than anyone else, and I studied journalism/magazine design, philosophy and English. I graduated in 1991. I’ve lived in Indianapolis since 1992, and with the exception of cold winters and absence of good public transit, Indy is a great city. I love it, despite its conservative politics.

Soldier's & Sailor's Monument

I moved to downtown Indianapolis in 1993, and have been there ever since. Stephanie and I bought our house together in Old Northside historic neighborhood in 2008.

More?

If you must know every little thing about me – I believe I’ve answered every question I’ve ever been asked about myself here.

“Who am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I’ve gone that would not have happened if I had not come…. to understand me you must swallow a world.” Salman Rushdie, From Midnight’s Children