Some stories begin with a five year plan. Ours began with a county fire department deciding a union was more dangerous than a fire.

In 2009, Cedric Ford lost his job for talking about organizing. That was it. No theft. No scandal. No spectacular act of rebellion. Just workers quietly asking what it might look like if they had a voice in their own lives. The county chief answered the question the way departments often do. Cedric was a firefighter in Texas then; an Army veteran, paramedic, safety professional, the kind of man who had spent his whole adult life running toward disasters while everyone else ran the other direction. They fired him anyway. Turns out, getting thrown out of polite society is sometimes the best thing that can happen to a person.

We had his leather tools. We had each other. We had children to raise and bills to pay and absolutely no interest in begging permission from people who thought workers were disposable. So we asked ourselves a question that became the foundation of everything that followed: what would happen if we built something they could never take away again? Not just a business, but something stranger. Something owned by the people who built it. Something where every worker had a vote, every voice mattered, and the people doing the labor shared in the survival of the thing itself.

So we built it. Airship Isabella was born out of union busting, mutual aid, stubbornness, and the radical belief that human beings become extraordinary when they are treated like human beings. We made leather goods for film and television productions, props, armor, costumes, convention work, commission pieces, beautiful strange things for beautiful strange people, and we were good at it. But the leather was never the real experiment. The real experiment was asking what happens to people when survival is no longer the only thing they are allowed to care about.

We watched the answer unfold for fifteen years. What happened was not laziness or complacency. What happened was an explosion of creativity, ingenuity, skill, and pride. People worked harder than they ever had in corporate jobs because for the first time the work actually belonged to them. We watched people become larger versions of themselves once fear stopped sitting at the table beside them. That changes you.

In 2012, the work carried us from Texas to New Orleans. We rebuilt a warehouse first in the Marigny then in Uptown into a combined workshop, storefront, and communal home. Anywhere from two to six core collective members lived there over the years. We worked together, built together, fought together, survived together. Our daughters grew up inside that experiment, watching adults create a life where care for each other was treated as infrastructure instead of charity.

Two of our four girls came to the swamp with us. One stayed until 2015. The youngest stayed through everything — hurricanes, pandemics, impossible years, cross-country U-Haul rides, and rebuilding from scratch more than once. Last summer she moved to Chicago to start her own life.    We are unbearably proud of them all. We are at long last only two. 

Airship Isabella finally closed in 2018, not because the experiment failed, but because experiments change shape. Cedric and I became tour guides in New Orleans, walking the streets of one of the strangest cities in America telling stories about ghosts, disasters, criminals, saints, drunks, revolutionaries, musicians, and monsters. Somewhere along the way we realized every single thing we had ever built had actually been about storytelling. Leatherwork was storytelling. Ghost tours were storytelling. Mutual aid is storytelling. Art is storytelling. Human beings stay alive by telling each other the night is survivable.

Then March 2020 arrived and the city went silent.

Cedric does not tolerate helplessness particularly well. The tours shut down, the streets emptied, and people were frightened and isolated and dying. So naturally he did what he has always done when things fall apart: he showed up anyway. He sat in our backyard and started telling stories online because people needed company. That backyard eventually became Fright Night NOLA – a gloriously semi-legal pandemic fever dream where Cedric and two friends wandered through an empty midnight New Orleans filming ghost tours they technically were not supposed to be giving. The city was deserted. The stories were not.

What started as a temporary act of defiance became something much bigger. The conversations kept going. The community kept growing. Eventually The Demon’s Tea Room emerged from that strange little backyard ecosystem like something brewed instead of built. It came from a simple belief: a warm drink, strange company, and a place to be seen honestly have always been forms of community.

Around the same time, my own body decided to mutiny. I contracted COVID in March 2020, and long COVID followed. At its worst I could barely stand. My hands stopped cooperating. Some days my nervous system felt like a badly haunted house. So I started drawing because I needed a way back into my own hands.

Cedric had given me a drawing tablet just a few months earlier, insisting I should try art despite the fact that someone somewhere in my past had informed me I was not any good at it. That sort of thing has never stopped either of us before. I never put the pen back down. Digital art became watercolor. Watercolor became oil painting. Eventually Pretty Little Omens emerged from the wreckage — intimate, uncanny work painted by hands that were apparently told they could not do this and chose not to listen.

Then came Hurricane Ida.

August 2021. Category 4. New Orleans took the hit hard. No power. No clean water. Heat thick enough to drown in. Mold crawling into everything. Our youngest daughter, who is disabled, experienced several serious medical emergencies during the aftermath while I was still trying to navigate long COVID in a city that suddenly felt actively hostile to survival. By then our daughters were scattered across the country – from San Francisco to Austin to St. Louis – building lives of their own. Two are trans. Two are mixed race. All four are proof that if you raise children believing human dignity matters, they become adults worth knowing.

Two weeks before Ida hit, we had visited Gettysburg, Pa. We walked the streets and felt something familiar there – a town that knew how to survive being haunted, a town carrying history heavy enough to crush it and continuing forward anyway. We looked at each other and said maybe someday we could retire here. Ida turned someday into immediately. We loaded a U-Haul with whatever we could carry, pointed it north, and left. No house waiting. No safety net. One part time job. A dangerous amount of optimism. Enough experience surviving impossible situations to believe we would figure the rest out eventually. It took years. Every one of them mattered. Now we are here in Gettysburg building the next version of the experiment, working alongside mutual aid organizations in Adams County, creating systems of care, and trying in whatever ways we can manage to leave places more human than we found them.

Not Real People Studios exists inside that philosophy. A place for artists, storytellers, makers, weirdos, survivors, and beautiful disasters. A place built on the old mutual aid principle of take what you need and give what you can. Because we have spent our whole adult lives watching people survive impossible things together and we no longer believe survival is an individual act.

The name itself came from the leather shop years ago. A new full time crew member had just heard another completely absurd story about our lives and finally slammed his hands on the desk and blurted out, “This does not happen to real people.” I answered, “Then we’re not real people.” Apparently that settled it. We have been not real people ever since. We’ve never been particularly interested in becoming ordinary anyway.

So welcome to the far shore. We have been building strange things here for a very long time. You are welcome to come see what survived.