Robert alerted me to this Fargo site created by James Lileks, a Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist born in Fargo. The way he weaves his written reflections together with historic postcards is an excellent example of online place-based writing, and I think I’ll show it to my students next semester as they’re writing their essay on where they are from.

Here’s a snippet from his site introduction:

This site is not intended as a historical account of Fargo or downtown – just a recollection of Fargo through the medium of postcards. I should note that the city has grown bigger than I could ever have imagined; that I am proud to have been born and raised there; and that I’ve spent more of my life in Minneapolis than Fargo, but Fargo is home in a way Minneapolis can never be. I remember it when it was smaller, when it seemed alone, and when it was my entire world. Never so big that I felt afraid, and never so small that there wasn’t something new to discover.

As a teenager, I thought Fargo was a prison sentence. Consider this my apology.