Find the original blog of Mark O'Brien, poet and polio survivor

April 7, 2023 7:21 AM

I'm trying to locate a blog I read years ago written by Mark O'Brien. He wrote a famous essay on seeing a sex surrogate as a disabled man who used an iron lung. His essay later got turned into a movie, which dominates the search results so I'm struggling to find his original site.

I'm sure when I first read his essay it was on his personal blog, not The Sun website. There was a note added at the end, where he followed up on what happened in the years after his experience. I remember going on from that essay to read other blog posts, and now I'm curious to find it again.

My google searches are coming up blank, however, and are mostly dominated by bloggers reviewing the movie, or obituaries and essays written by other people. I'd like to find his writing about his own life again.

Can anyone help me find it?

posted by EllaEm to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

Best answer: I'm not coming up with any references to a blog anywhere. It looks like his work was published in Coevolution Quarterly, part of the Whole Earth Catalog and WELL.com world. If the Sun article came out in 1990, his blog would have pre-dated Blogger/Blogspot, Wordpress, and Livejournal by nearly a decade.

The Well seems likeliest to me, but the internet archives for it don't seem to go back any further than 1996. Note that Google seems to have stopped indexing stuff more than 10 years old; DuckDuckGo and Bing are a little better about older content.

It looks like there was a website maintained for him here, but its history stops at 1996 . The email address also seems to confirm he was a well user.
posted by jquinby at 8:25 AM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: this is so helpful, thank you! I will try to follow up these leads.
posted by EllaEm at 8:41 AM on April 7, 2023

Response by poster: You know what, I think that website you found is the one I remember! It wasn't a blog then, just a personal webpage. Thanks jquinby!
posted by EllaEm at 8:44 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]