For the Mining Gazette

Joe Kirkish, Houghton resident and retired professor from Michigan Tech’s Department of Humanity, will be celebrating a final autographing session from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 29, at Calumet Mercantile & General Store.

The book, “Long Exposure,” began as a writing assignment while studying at the University of Iowa’s writer’s workshop – finished back in Houghton during his period of retirement.

It covers his 98-year span of life that began as the son of a Lebanese immigrant who settled in Houghton in the early 1900s and who introduced his son to a grocer’s life – and it continues through a widely varied life that meandered from life growing up as a native of the Copper Country to world travels and an education that lead to a professorship from the University of Michigan in Communication Skills, winding a series of paths led by a never completed curiosity – from the life of a seeker of knowledge in New York to world traveler, camera in hand – looking, living sometimes in peril, sometimes on a shoestring, always moving into areas where angels fear to tread – and enjoying every minute of it.

According to professional criticism, the book has been favorably reviewed as one man’s journey into a varied and interesting life, never boring, called a real page turner. It is profusely filled with a representation of photographs taken with a Baby Brownie in his early teens to becoming a serious art photographer of renown.

Proceeds benefit Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly.

Kirkish is retired, living currently at The Bluffs in Houghton, where he continues to write and where he entertains with a vast collection of films and slide shows from his teaching years and where he still enjoys visitors from his past.