College fourth-year Oona Shain is a Comparative American Studies major with a minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and an Education Studies integrative concentration. She currently helms a 26-member ExCo that has revived the Hi-O-Hi, the Oberlin yearbook that had been discontinued since 2006. This year’s Hi-O-Hi is available for purchase through the official Instagram page: @hiohi.oberlin.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you interested in reviving the Hi-O-Hi?

I came across Hi-O-Hi yearbooks out in the wild, which is really awesome. You can find them on eBay or in old bookstores. I’m from upstate New York, and there had been some up there, which was just so awesome and amazing to find. And as soon as I had my hands on one, I could tell that it was something special. And then I went up to the Oberlin College Archives and explored more. I have a friend who works at Ben Franklin & MindFair Books, and he had collected a bunch there, so I just began to look at them. And that’s when I realized that it hadn’t been done since 2006, and I was saddened knowing we weren’t going to get a yearbook. So I thought maybe it would be possible to, and that’s when I decided that I was going to try. I thought a lot about how I could do it, because I knew that I could make a really good and beautiful yearbook of just my friends, but I was trying to think about how I could make it wider, community-based, and include more of the College — and that’s why I decided to run it as an ExCo.

You mentioned that when you first picked up a Hi-O-Hi, it felt special. What parts of it stood out to you?

Hi-O-Hi yearbooks are so imperfect, and they’re all so different. One year will be very polished, and it’s clear that they spent the entire year on it,  with campus photographers and all these captions. And the other ones, clearly, it was like seven friends who were high out of their minds and just took photos of only themselves. But I just love that they’re all in there and it’s kind of this feeling of Oberlin. And I really feel that Oberlin is so special. I think that everyone can feel it when we’re here. It’s special for so many reasons: it’s special because of the town, it’s special because of the College, it’s special because it’s in Ohio. And I think that it is sometimes easy to forget that Oberlin is special. I was really interested in preserving that specialness and having something to be able to remember our time here by.

How was the experience trying to revive the yearbook after so much time? 

In the past, it was run as a club, so they had more resources. And I do hope that it’s run as a club in the future, for funding and accessibility reasons. But for this year, basically, we opened up a photo collection. We tried to have as many people submit photos as possible, and then we collected senior photos. I believe that the College used to finance it when it was a club, but since it was an ExCo, there was very little funding. And I tried to get outside funding from the Bonner Center as well as other avenues and places, but because it’s not the town and it’s only the College, there were limitations. So people had to buy their own materials which is often what happens with yearbooks; it was very much DIY. This semester, well, the books are finished. They have arrived and all of the seniors who bought one will receive theirs. I do think that it’s a big learning experience. I’m trying to reckon with my perfectionism, and when I get the finished book there are going to be imperfections obviously, but I’m trying to remind myself that hopefully this encourages other people to take it on in the future and that it comes back as a tradition. Because I really do feel, institutional-memory wise, it is so deeply sad that we lost the Hi-O-Hi. And I really hope that it’s back to stay.

What’s this year’s edition focusing on?

Because it was all done in one semester, I basically decided that this was going to function as my capstone. But I thought, ‘This is hopefully going to capture my experience here, and I’m gonna try to put all my energy into this.’ I would say that my focus was including all seniors that wanted to be included. Secondly, I really wanted to try to include different types of people. And although I didn’t want it to be focused on organizations and specifics, there is a WOBC page since that is the biggest student organization and obviously, I have bias since I’m interested in them. But it was less organization — or group — based  because I really wanted it to be Oberlin-based and have it be a collective memory. So I would say that the majority of the pages are just people hanging out with their friends in places that they love, being Oberlin students. There’s a lot of pages of people in basement parties where I’m sure that their nights were kind of weird and funky, but I think that’s the part that people want to remember — I’m more about capturing the Oberlin spirit. I’ve used that phrase a few times when promoting the yearbook, but that is really what the focus was.