Two memoir projects, running on Substack, are built from the same raw material Lobb embeds into all his writing: the experience of being slightly out of sync with the world around you:
Photogenic Memory: Growing Up Gen-X traces the interior life of a hypersensitive kid coping with the intensities of a feral childhood in small-town Ontario in the 1970s. The stories are funny because they have to be. Published under the handle @thelabcoatguy — which has its own origin story — new stories appear whenever one is actually finished, which takes time, I’m afraid…
Auslanders: Our German Year is a collection of comical short stories covering the year (2006–2007) Lobb, his wife, and their two small children relocated to Germany while he piloted what was, at the time, a very early experiment in remote work over the internet. Even though he was one of his school board’s earliest proponents of distance education, his international efforts took place against a challenging backdrop. But in Germany, he and his family weren’t just educators piloting bold new methods for online instruction, they were literal Auslanders – aliens in German – thrown into a country, and a culture, that maybe wasn’t quite ready to receive them.