Collecting is something anyone can do. Everyone’s bound to have collected something at one time or another. Many of us still do.

And the act of collecting is limitless. While some are more reckless than others (as shows about hoarders reveal), some are very particular and wise about the things they collect.

Stephanie Madewell is a writer and designer based in New York. She runs even*cleveland, a pleasant space that overflows with the things, ideas, words, images and all the anything-goes that Stephanie curates. It is here where she shares with her readers a hollow room that she fills, a magpie of obsessions that reflect her always-changing state of mind.

Why did you choose the name “even*cleveland”?

When I started the blog, I was living in Cleveland, and it wasn’t an easy place for me to be – that’s not a rap on the city. Me and Cleveland just couldn’t make things work, but at the time, I was thinking that we might be stuck with each other forever. So the name was a little challenge to myself – that no matter where I was, I had to build the life I wanted. Even if that life was in Cleveland.

Did you grow up in Cleveland? And how does your current bearing on the map influence you as a person?

I grew up in Ohio and lived somewhere in the state most of my life. I spent one year living in Dublin, Ireland. Now I live in New York City. I really love where I live these days, and I am grateful for that. It feels like a gift I never thought I’d get.

What inspires you when you curate things for your site? And how do these things reflect your life?

I’d say my main inspiration is making pieces fit. I have an obsession for order, and get great satisfaction from putting things together in a way that amplifies their meaning to me. Sometimes the order is literal and obvious, other times less so. It’s like playing a game that only I know the rules to. My life is the same way. I have all these chaotic ideas and interests that I am constantly trying to arrange in a rational manner.

You go through momentary obsessions, where you’ll post about the same subject matter again and again as if it’s this internal necessity to get it all out of your system. How do you account for this?

I have a completest streak. I like to be thorough. That being said, I have to make peace with the fact that my blog is made up of fragments, not wholes. It’s a shorthanded space. I’m always negotiating that.

I almost never exhaust a topic – it never gets out of my system. I have my own set of arbitrary rules for blogging, and one of them is that I can’t do more than seven days at a time on any one given thing. So there is a pressure to fit things in under the constraints. Certain themes turn up again and again, but I try to spread them out over time.

Staying on the same subject, what are you current obsessions?

Reading Paul Bowles and swimming every day.

How about your strongest obsessions, things you’ve always been into since childhood?

Imagining and telling tall tales. Figuring out how to make things. Doing stuff by myself. Water, trees and clouds. Reading, drawing, listening to music, swimming, dogs, libraries, lists, traveling. Prep style. Moccasins. Playing tennis. Transcendentalists. Hugh Everett and the many-worlds interpretation, and other theories in quantum physics.

What other activities do you enjoy?

Walking. I like the idea of the flâneur, and New York is the perfect place to be one.

You mentioned once on a post how you enjoy pretending to be something else when you swim, how would describe yourself when you curate things for your site?

Fixated.

- Stephanie Madewell, even*cleveland
Photos taken from: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Read A Song & A Memory: Stephanie Madewell