August 31, 2006


Meet the Flockers: Sheila Ryan

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Cooper Renner, without whom I would not be here within the Flock.

Cooper Renner is my father.


That was merely the latest in a series of gratuitous lies I find myself telling with increasing frequency. As a similarly inclined archivist and friend once observed of our shared proclivities, “We live to embellish.”

What do I like to think about? Oh, the poetics of historical narrative and the records that inspire the narratives. What do I do? Oh, you might say I chronicle (though my business card says I’m an archival consultant and historian). Back last spring Deron Bauman invited Flockers to list creations they’d be pleased to have contributed to their own fields. My response reflected the inclinations of a chronicler drawn to the fanciful, the biographical, and the quite possibly mendacious.

My Three Graces: Fancy, Biography, and Mendacity.

Before I took up the glamorous and profitable racket of archival consultancy and chronicling, I worked (sometimes for pay, sometimes not) as radio host/programmer, narrator of recorded books (for the Library of Congress), Curator of Manuscripts (Brit: Keeper of Manuscripts), industrial spy, lawn-mower, huckster of donations to PBS, production editor for a social science research institute, and amanuensis to an elderly authoress. There was more.

My first job? No lie: child model for Dallas department stores. And no, I didn’t do ‘junior’ beauty pageants.

posted by Sheila Ryan in Meet the Flockers, satire, self-help 

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One Response to “Meet the Flockers: Sheila Ryan”

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