A publishing house for Retrieval.
Kati Shaw is the founder of Follow My Feet and the creator of Retrieval Decks.
She has spent decades noticing ordinary life with editorial devotion: family interviews, local publishing, photographs of real houses, porch rituals, therapy language, ugly hospitality, and the ordinary evidence that people are loved.
She picked her tits up and did it scared. Retrieval Decks are the result.
Follow My Feet did not appear from nowhere. The archive begins with older evidence: family interviews, local storytelling, sketches, magazine layouts, ordinary houses, porch life, photography, and years of paying attention to what most media skips.
Near Us Digest was an early publishing project centered on nearby life, ordinary stories, interviews, local texture, and editorial preservation.
It is part of the Retrieval lineage — founding evidence that noticing ordinary life has always been the work.
Mike Johnson, Kati’s uncle, appeared in Near Us Digest and later became the subject of a 60th birthday invitation. An ordinary life documented first as magazine, then as family celebration, then as Retrieval deck.
Full circle.
Every ordinary life is an archive waiting for an editor.
Real lives happen in real spaces. The kitchen has a cat on the floor and blankets on the chairs. The porch has a fire table and a coffee mug. The bookshelf has old books and brass owls. None of it is staged. All of it is evidence.
Retrieval Decks are the next volume of a practice Kati has been doing for decades: noticing what other people walk past, preserving it beautifully, and handing it back.