About Turnbuckle Zine

My name is Paul.  I take photos and play music in a band and by myself

I began watching professional wrestling sometime in the summer/fall of 1997.  It was a good time to start.  After watching for a few years (circa 2000/2001), I convinced myself I should “grow up,” and stopped watching for a while. 

Throughout college I would check in periodically and watch an hour of Raw here and there.  In the summer/fall of 2008, I was back full time.  But I wanted to talk about it more. 

I had a few friends in my college town of DeKalb, IL who also enjoyed talking wrestling, so I thought about starting a print ‘zine.  No one else really followed through with the initial excitement, however, so here I am, on Tumblr with the rest of the passionate TWC.

My wife Mary and I recently decided to do two big things: move to Prague, Czech Republic to teach English (and probably never return to the U.S. for a variety of reasons), and get married before we go.  We did both and it is working out pretty swell!

She and I both enjoy professional wrestling together and I love her for that and for other more dopey romantic reasons of course.

That is a very unflattering picture of her and there are better ones

I enjoy writing longer pieces about the art that is professional wrestling, which can be found in the “Thoughts” tab at the top of the page. I also enjoy sharing the occasional video or still image.  I try to avoid being a “reblog everything” type blog.

I have been a featured guest on the Aggressive Art (formerly Footnotes of Wrestling) podcast in the past.  Points of discussion for the shows I participated in include racism in the wrestling world, embracing wrestling fandom, and other more general topics.  The episodes can be found here: 1 and 2

Gender and race issues are something I find interesting in professional wrestling in particular, and are topics I occasionally write about.  I am fully aware, however, that wrestling is a show and never meant to be taken completely seriously, these things are more just interests of mine that I choose to a shine light on.