How did Morbid Curiosity get started? Is there a particular story behind its conception you would like to share?

When I first moved to San Francisco in 1988, my husband Mason Jones and I attended a slide show put on by Vale and AJ of RE/Search. Afterward, they asked for volunteers to help with their new book. Mason volunteered us. This was just before the book Modern Primitives came out. We went out to dinner in Chinatown to discuss how we could help them. At their typography office on the way back to their apartment, AJ showed us some photos she was laying out for the book: genitals with jewelry, a bisected penis. I was pretty much straight off the farm and had never seen anything like that before. Morbid Curiosity was conceived at that point. It took a couple of small nonfiction books (Lend The Eye A Terrible Aspect and Death’s Garden: Relationships With Cemeteries) before I worked up to doing a yearly magazine.