About Housedeer

The Housedeer Press is a publisher of interviews, poetry, and essays,
in both small zine and book format.

Each issue of the Housedeer zine is an interview conducted by Romy Ashby with a particularly interesting individual or pair. Its name comes from a story in Romy’s family from 1940s Montana, of a lady rancher called Margaret who adopted two orphaned fawns who grew into big deer in her cabin, sharing her home and even her bed.

As a solitary rancher, Margaret herself was an iconoclast even in the wild west, and likewise, so were her two housedeer among other Montana deer. But to all of them, life was just life, the way it had been dished out, and they lived it fully and without question.

The photos below was taken with a Kodak box camera in 1947, by Kenneth Chapman, of his daughter and one of Margaret’s little deer. Below is the only known photograph of Margaret on the left, along with Kenneth’s wife Loyse, taken in 1941.