I’m an instructional designer, writer, and photographer who, like many people, spends entirely too much time staring at screens.

This site serves as an outlet for my mish-mash of interests, which range from literature and the performance arts to photography and digital storytelling to hiking and cycling.

Origin of the Site Name

DeStewart is my middle name, and it’s one that I share with my father and great-grandfather. During the Civil War, my great-great grandfather C.D. McClure, a Union seargent, befriended and served with DeStewart McIntyre, a secret service spy who was captured by Confederate soldiers and sent to the infamous Andersonville prison. McIntyre and three others managed to escape from Andersonville, but they were quickly tracked down by guards with hounds, returned to the prison, and confined in the stockade.

Of his experience in the Andersonville stockade, McIntyre wrote the following:

“To stand for 12 minutes in one position is irksome, but to stand for 12 hours with feet fast in the stocks and the head held firmly by a 16-inch board, and exposed to the rays of a Georgia sun, is agony. This is but the merest glimpse of Andersonville. Its full history can never be written. It seemed to be a place over which the cloud of rebel hate hung so dense as to shut out the blessings of Heaven itself.”

My grandfather honored McIntyre by naming his son Arthur DeStewart McClure. The name eventually made its way down to me, and I’m proud to have it.

— Matthew DeStewart McClure