About Us

If you happened into a convenience store, gas station, or local sports bar in North East Florida or South East Georgia in from the mid-90’s to the mid 2010’s, chances are that among the crusty beer bottle rings, cigarillo packages, and Spanish Flies, you might have seen a cartoon turnip guy with an attitude, tongue defiantly jutting from his mouth, staring up at you from the magazine rack with mild contempt. This little guy was the logo for a Jacksonville-based comedy newspaper (dubbed a “Ragazine”) that my mom created and ran for the better part of 20 years. It was irreverent and silly, often very stupid, chock full of jokes that she’d heard or stole over the years, sometimes with just enough of an alteration to the punchline to make it local-friendly (many old, dumb “Polok” jokes were reworked at the expense of people from Palatka, a small town near Jacksonville), but also humorous stories and anecdotes that my mom wrote herself, blending a love of the absurd with often insightfully fully articles about life as a single mother.  

The history of The Turnip Green is hazy—I was a kid when she started it, and she ran it almost entirely by herself (she had an artist friend who made the original art, but she did everything else by herself), and she didn’t keep any kind of records. When she unexpectedly died in 2014, my brother, my wife, and my dad had a deadline for going through her apartment and clearing it out before her lease ended, but we did our best to keep an eye out for any material that could be historically important or interesting. We came up with very little, outside of some old back issues of the paper, and surprisingly few of those. 

My mom was a journalist before starting the ragazine (it grows on you), working for a local newspaper in NE Florida, when she filed a lawsuit against the paper for some sort of misconduct that was mostly shrouded in mystery. I have suspicions about the details (her immediate boss was very much a creep from what I remember, though I was very young), but I won’t go into them. Suffice it to say that she either won, or they settled, and she made a little money with which to start up her own publication. I remember her physically creating her first issue on the floor of our living room, physically cutting and pasting jokes, articles, and art onto a large grid for the printing company. 

I never thought about it until recently, but I don’t know why she took her money and invested in into a weird little comedy newspaper. While she was funny and a gifted humor writer, she hated jokes more than anybody I ever knew. I know that she loved writing, and dreamed of doing more with her writing than journalism for a local rural newspaper. She dreamed of moving to New York and writing novels and short stories.  

I suspect that the reasons were two-fold. The first reason being the same reason that most people start a business: to regain some control over her life. The second reason was likely that she’d hoped that this paper could be her stepping stone. That if she could grow it, it would provide her with an outlet for her writing, and eventually she would become known as a writer. Perhaps she could take it national, or sell it and write her novel once it got big enough to sell. 

She lived off it and provided for me and my brother for around 2 decades, which is impressive, so on that front one must consider The Turnip Green a success. Sadly, as an outlet for her creativity, it must be deemed a failure. While she did occasionally write articles in it, very few of her regular readers seemed to care, and she let other her trials and struggles get in the way. She wrote for it less and less over the years, as it became increasingly made up of repurposed jokes and non-sequiturs that the thought were amusing. 

Just over 10 years after her death, my brother and I are taking the idea that our mom had when we were children and flipping it—without hope that this will bring us any money, we want to use it as a creative outlet for ourselves. I think Mom would like that. We’re going to take her biggest hopes for her creation, and make it our own. We’ve even got a newly designed logo (created by a wonderful artist and my friend, Logan, who you can follow on Instagram @LivingDeadLogan). What the final shape of this will be, I don’t know. Primarily, right now, I expect it to be a place to put various writings about the things in the world that we find interesting—from books and movies to video games and music–as a way to think about the world through art. Eventually, we may publish more creative pieces of our own in the form of short and long fiction, or whatever else we may get into. But honestly, I can’t say for sure what the scope will be just yet.  

With all that being said, we would be honored if you would consider checking us out from time to time to see what’s up. Maybe subscribe to our page so that you’ll receive updates when we publish things (which won’t be too frequent, I promise). This project is going to be for fun, and primarily for ourselves. If nobody reads a thing that we put here, we’ll still consider it a success simply by doing it. But I know that I’ll be grateful for anybody who checks out our little corner of the internet, to anybody who gives us just a little bit of their time. I hope that you find something of value here. 

–Dustin

You can find my other byline at https://25yearslatersite.com/author/dustin-roberts/